I’m getting a lot of questions about the title of my second novel, Undead All Over. Some readers are unnerved by it—is this a book about vampires and zombies, they ask. (Answer: Zombies: no. Vampires: sort of.) Other readers want a story about “real” vampires—supernaturally seductive blood-suckers who prowl the night—rather than mortals who self-identify as vampires.

So, without giving too much away, allow me to clarify some of the reasons why I chose this title. First of all, the story is centered around a theatrical production of Dracula at an exclusive private school called Sussex Academy. There’s been a murder, and the victim has marks on her neck suggestive of vampire fangs. Is the murderer a vampire, the alarmed public asks. Are we facing an attack of the undead? Are our children at risk?

The murder, of course, is the incident that sets the story in motion, but there are many more unanswered questions lurking within the ivy-covered walls of Sussex Academy. Are Count Dracula and his ilk the only undead creatures haunting the school and surrounding community? Why do ideas and belief systems long presumed dead return to life, pitting past, present and future against each other? And what about the vampire’s propensity to drain the life from its victim? Is this a metaphor for forces at work at Sussex Academy and in our larger culture? And how do we explain our culture’s ongoing fascination with vampires? Why do these creatures keep refusing to die?

As we consider these questions, it’s worth noting that the vampire is an archetype of Satan, and more specifically of the Antichrist. Like Satan, Dracula mocks the Christian sacrament of communion by feeding on human blood. He inverts the idea of eternal life by offering his victims an immortal existence–not in heaven, but in the shadowy world of the undead. He twists the Christian concept of being “in the world but not of the world” by condemning his followers to an existence of eternal estrangement from the world of mortals. And ultimately, his bite foreshadows the “mark of the Beast” described in Revelation. Whoever bears the mark of the vampire is forever cut off from salvation.

A final note before wrapping this up–“Sussex Academy” is named for a Sherlock Holmes mystery entitled “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire.” Kudos to you if you figured that out! And double kudos if you can figure out how the two stories—mine and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s—are thematically related.