There are many horror and fantasy influences on Mr Darcy, Vampyre, but it's about Lizzy and Darcy and so at it's heart it's a love story. It picks up where Jane Austen left off, with Lizzy and Darcy getting married, on a rapturously romantic wedding day.
Elizabeth Bennet’s wedding morning was one of soft mists and mellow sunshine. She drew back her bedroom curtains to see the dreaming English landscape lying serene and beautiful beneath a soft white quilt. The mist was at its thickest by the river, lying voluptuously over the water, then thinning out as it spread over the fields and pastures before disappearing, wisp-like, into the trees.
The birds were silent, but there was a sense of expectancy in the air. It was as though the world were waiting for the sun to rise and burn away the gauzy veil, revealing the true colours of the countryside, not muted white and grey, but green and blue and gold.
Elizabeth sank onto the window seat and pulled her knees up in front of her. She wrapped her arms around them and her thoughts drifted to the ceremony that was to come. Images floated through her mind: she and her father walking down the aisle, Darcy waiting for her, the ring slipping onto her finger . . .
She was not the only one to have risen early. Her mother was already awake, complaining to anyone who would listen to her about her nerves, and Mary was playing the piano. Kitty was calling out, ‘Has anyone seen my ribbon?’ and Mr Bennet was adding a full stop to his dry reply by closing the library door.
Beside her, Jane was still sleeping.
As she watched the world waking outside the window, Elizabeth thought of the past year and of how lucky she and her sister had been. They had both met men they loved and now, after many trials and difficulties, they were to marry them.The trials and difficulties of Pride and Prejudice are over, but new ones are just beginning, and this in the end is why I chose to write a paranormal sequel to Pride and Prejudice, because a sequel, like the original, needs problems.
Most sequels make those problems the real life problems of a move to Pemberley, but I wanted something bigger. I knew that Darcy and Lizzy were deeply in love and so I wanted something that could really challenge this, something that could put the outcome in real doubt, just as it is in real doubt in the original. And so I made Mr Darcy a vampyre. Even Lizzy and Darcy's love would be challenged by something like that!
Their love for each other is at the heart of the novel, and the test of that love will take them to hell and back.
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