How do you reflect on that aspect of the genre as it has changed over time? Are you impressed by any of your literary descendants?Ĭhelsea Quinn Yarbro: The thing is, I don’t think of him as a romantic hero, I think of him as a way to look at the lives of women in other periods and cultures-the ultimate outsider by virtue of his nature and his longevity, who can see women’s lives the way their contemporaries, and sometimes the women themselves, cannot. Vanessa Rose Phin: With the character of Saint-Germain, who first appears in Hotel Transylvania (1978) and in over twenty volumes since, you’ve been credited as having originated the vampire as romantic hero. This interview was conducted by email in August 2015, after an unexpected acquaintance at a conference bar.
Her novel Hotel Transylvania was among six nominated for the Horror Writers Association onetime Stoker award for the Most Significant Vampire Novel of the Twentieth Century.
She has sold over ninety books and more than ninety works of short fiction, essays, and reviews in a variety of genres. A skeptical occultist for forty years, Yarbro has studied everything from alchemy to zoomancy, and in the late 1970s worked occasionally as a professional tarot card reader and palmist at the Magic Cellar in San Francisco.This interview is part of our 2015 fund drive bonus issue! Read more about Strange Horizons' funding model, or donate, here.Ĭhelsea Quinn Yarbro has been a professional writer for forty-seven years. A professional writer since 1968, Yarbro has worked in a wide variety of genres, from science fiction to Westerns, from young adult adventure to historical horror. She fully meshed the vampire with romance and accurately detailed historical fiction, and filtered it through a feminist perspective that made both the giving of sustenance and its taking of equal erotic potency. With her creation of Saint-Germain, she delved into history and vampiric literature and subverted the standard myth to invent the first vampire who was more honorable, humane, and heroic than most of the humans around him. Yarbro is best known as the creator of the heroic vampire the Count Saint-Germain. In 1995, Yarbro was the only novelist guest of the Romanian government for the First World Dracula Congress, sponsored by the Transylvanian Society of Dracula, the Romanian Bureau of Tourism, and the Romanian Ministry of Culture. Yarbro is the first woman to be named a Living Legend by the International Horror Guild and is one of only two women ever to be named as Grand Master of the World Horror Convention (2003).
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