When microfiction writer Joseph Young (Easter Rabbit, 2009) realized he wouldn’t be making September’s rent, he did what hundreds of people have joked about doing, he wrote a vampire novel. NAME (with cover art by John Dermot Woods) was begun by Young on July 7, 2010 and was finished a month later, 20 chapters and 125 pages long. Says Young, “It was the best fun I’ve had writing in my life.”

Union Street Press (Baltimore, MD) will officially announce the book’s presale on August 10. At that time, the book will be available for preorder at a minimum $10 donation, the proceeds of which will go to pay Young’s rent.

 An excerpt:

He stood for just a moment, contemplating the thing that was coming. He didn’t have to do it, didn’t have to come to the girl in the red bikini and call to her. He didn’t have to listen to her inner voice, sounding so much like the slosh of the sea, like the spitting of blood in her throat, the inside voice that would tell him her name.

 As he approached, her pink toes curled into the wet sand, he trained his mind to hers, narrowing his attention to dive below the surface of her dampened hair, into the twirled sea of her thought. He slipped into her mind like a man dropping into a nighttime wave, soundless and effortless, looking for a pearl tumbled in dark water. He swam there for only a moment, grasping the dark and lustrous word, Genevieve, before coming to the surface with it: Genevieve.

 As he came near, her arms settled loosely across her bikini top, he called that name. “Genevieve,” he said, waving, “Hello.”

The girl, her red bikini flashing in the darkness, her hair tumbled in a curl of waves above her eyes, turned to him. Her own name in the throat of a strange man did not startle her, as he knew it wouldn’t. She opened, arms falling away from her chest, the now unprotected skin of her belly, her throat.

“I don’t know a lot about vampire novels, but I know a lot about novels, and this is a good one. It’s a sad page-turner.”

 —Adam Robinson