When people ask why I chose to write vampire novels, they often assume it was because I’ve always loved Dracula. That’s certainly true, but it isn’t the whole story. The real reason was that I wanted to recapture something I felt had quietly slipped away from the genre.

As a youngster I grew up on Hammer Horror films. Christopher Lee’s Dracula wasn’t a misunderstood anti-hero or a tortured romantic figure searching for redemption. He was a predator. Every appearance on screen carried a genuine sense of menace because you knew that if he found you, there would be no happy ending. The heroes didn’t fall in love with vampires; they armed themselves with crucifixes, stakes and courage, hoping simply to survive the encounter.

That feeling stayed with me long after I’d grown up.

Years later, while browsing a writing competition website, I noticed an anthology looking for stories about “Creatures of the Night”. Almost instantly I found myself asking a simple question: could traditional Gothic monsters still frighten a modern audience?

It wasn’t a question of rejecting other interpretations of vampires. Fiction is wonderfully flexible, and every generation reinvents its monsters to reflect its own tastes. But I realised that the vampires I wanted to write were closer to the creatures that had terrified me as a teenager. I wanted readers to feel the same sense of unease that I remembered from those late-night Hammer films, where darkness concealed ancient predators and every journey after sunset carried real danger.

That decision shaped almost every aspect of Blood Riders.

My vampires are powerful, intelligent and sometimes even capable of inspiring sympathy, but they are never harmless. They are apex predators living by a different moral code from humanity. They plot, manipulate and wage wars that ordinary people scarcely realise are taking place around them. They can be cultured and charismatic one moment, unimaginably ruthless the next.

Just as importantly, I wanted the world itself to take them seriously. If vampires truly existed, people would not treat them as glamorous curiosities. They would build fortresses against them. They would organise hunters. They would invent weapons, develop tactics and pass fearful stories from one generation to the next. Entire communities would shape their lives around surviving the night.

For me, that’s where Gothic horror becomes most effective. The monsters aren’t frightening simply because of sharp teeth or supernatural powers. They’re frightening because the world reacts to them as genuine threats.

Blood Riders was born from that idea. Not to turn the clock back, but to remind readers why vampires captured our imagination in the first place. Before they became objects of fascination, they were creatures that made us glance nervously towards the dark edge of the forest and hope that dawn wasn’t too far away.