It’s Friday, October the thirteenth today! (Pro tip: not the day to schedule your secret society meeting. 😉) That makes this the perfect day to blog about vampires.

Why vampires? For one thing, they’re at the core of the novel I’m writing, House Ibsen. There are lots of other classic monsters, too, like werewolves and witches and trolls (oh my! 😉), though the focus is on vampires.

But the real reason is that vampires are my monsters.

You see, every Fall I’d dread October’s arrival. The horror genre took over the airwaves. You couldn’t turn on the TV without seeing some sort of monster. I have always been prone to night terrors, the kind of nightmares where you thrash about and scream in your sleep. One time I backhanded my babysitter in the face mid-nightmare, but that’s another story.

Every October for years I’d have a nightmare that I was trapped in a treehouse and vampires were coming to get me. Every year like clockwork. It scared the bejeezus out of me. I can’t remember if it started before the The Simpsons’ “Treehouse of Horror” episode or not.

It finally stopped recurring sometime in junior high when I realized why I was particularly terrified of vampires; vampires are real and I was surrounded by them in my daily life.

I don’t mean that I was literally surrounded by the bloodsucking undead. I mean that many of the people in my life were like vampires. These people drained their victims of energy, money, and power. In psychology terms, they were toxic people high on the malignant narcissism scale. I believe that vampires function as a metaphor for humans who abuse power and prey on others.

I’ve read a lot of scholarly twaffle about vampires representing fears of blood borne disease and promiscuity. I don’t buy it. It makes much more sense to me that werewolves represent fears of infection (and being preyed upon by animals). The promiscuity angle comes from vampires and toxic people both using seduction to lure prey.

I have come to have a greater appreciation for vampires and worked on desensitizing myself. My best friend Matt helped. We’d rent vampire films and mock them mercilessly.

But I’m still afraid of vampires. They’re my monster because they continue to pop up in real life. They also continue to be the number one boogie man in my dreams. In fact, I was inspired to start writing HouseIbsen by a terrible nightmare involving vampires.

Which monster is your monster?

Bonus tidbit: one of my grandfathers believed Friday the 13th was his lucky day because good things always happened to him on that date. Specifically, he disembarked safely in Europe in World War II, returned home from the war, and died having a great day on the golf course, all on Friday the 13th.