“Vampire Lake” by Norman Partridge will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2012 edited by Paula Guran. Stacey Friedberg interviews him on the story.
The mythology behind Vampire Lake is fantastic – almost Lovecraftian – as it constantly hints at something bigger and much worse, even though we never learn explicitly what that might be. How did you come up with this hellish setting and its inhabitants?
The initial inspiration was a song of the same title by The Builders and the Butchers. It lit a fire under me. Of course, songs and stories are very different animals. Apart from the weird western aspect “Vampire Lake” is at heart the tale of a quest. One of the great things about writing a quest story is designing the (in this case literal) hell through which your characters journey. I had fun riffing off legends of the Old West—lost Conquistadors and hidden gold, etc. I tossed in an underground lake, albino gators, dead men made of shadows, and a vampire queen. Since I was writing about a cave, there was plenty of room down there and I did my best to fill it up. But I find it’s often effective to leave some of those shadows undisturbed, and I don’t mind leaving the mechanics of whatever particular horror I’m writing about just a little bit mysterious. The way I see it, life doesn’t usually hand out engraved blueprints or explanations. Why should fiction be any different?