Hope and Love: A Guest Post from Jacqueline Holland
From Dracula to Carmilla and What We Do in the Shadows, we’ve always loved a good vampire story. Take a bite out of this Monthly Pick and enjoy every minute of of this fresh take on one of our favorite kinds of monsters. In her exclusive essay below, Jacqueline Holland writes all about the inspiration for her remarkable debut and the process of its creation.
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The God of Endings
The God of Endings
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The God of Endings is a powerful and inventive take on the vampire story unlike anything you’ve read before.
The God of Endings is a powerful and inventive take on the vampire story unlike anything you’ve read before.
In my debut novel, The God of Endings, the main character, Collette LeSange, encounters a number of children over her unnaturally long life. These children —holocaust orphans in France, a street urchin in Egypt, a neglected preschooler in upstate New York—are largely guardian-less, vulnerable, and desperately in need of protection and care, and Collette is drawn to them. She’s a formidable protectress by nature, and her instinct is to care for these little ones, defend them, mother them, but she’s scared. She knows what’s inside of her, bundled in alongside her powerful maternal instincts: darkness, brokenness, chaos, rage. Which will be stronger, the good in her, or the destructive? Does she dare to move toward the people who need her, or will fear of her own destructive potential keep her from engaging with life and love?
Anyone relate?
The God of Endings is, I hope, many things: A gothic monster tale, a sweeping multi-continent, dual timeline epic, an unsettling domestic suspense, but at its core, it’s a story for anyone whose origins are tied up in pain, in horror, anyone—like me— who has looked at their formative beginnings with grief and shame and struggled to believe that the future could hold something different, something better.
If statistics are any indicator, I should be dead. My early years were spent fatherless and in poverty. I had early experiences no kid should have. My single mother, however, was phenomenal. Dedicated and insanely hard working, she completed a degree in elementary education, making sure at the same time that my childhood was more books and imagination and love and learning, than hardship. I did well. Despite the crap, I learned, and dreamed, and believed in myself to the same ridiculous degree that she did.
But unfortunately, the dark stuff doesn’t just magically go away. I had to reckon with it all, the good and the bad, the light and the dark; it was all in there, inside me. In my twenties, free and unencumbered, that complicated mélange was low stakes. Who cared if I made the occasional destructive choice, if I pushed people away, or nursed depression like a modern day, insufferable Hamlet? Who cared if I had a tendency to self-sabotage, to burn myself to cinders like the phoenix just to feel alive in the dying? I was an artist. Artists are supposed to be wrecks. Then I found myself married. I found myself a mother.
In unsurprising fashion, I had made a destructive choice in marriage. I was in constant pain. I battled, moment by moment, with crippling depression and seething anger, and I did all of this with a beautiful, fuzzy-headed baby strapped into the carrier on my chest, looking up into my face, watching my expressions to learn how to be human. I felt not only inadequate, I felt dangerous. I knew that you give your children your self, that you have nothing else you can give, and that if my child (then when my second came along, children) got me, it was an alarmingly mixed bag they were receiving. I wanted to give them joy, emotional stability, peace, hope. I wanted those to be the materials of their formation, but I had little of those things to give.
It was from out of that agonizing rock and hard place, that The God of Endings sprang. A woman began speaking to me, a woman who knew what I was afraid of because she was afraid of it too. She, in fact, (being an actual vampire) had it far worse than I did. She became my friend, my confident. Together we struggled to face ourselves and our fears of ourselves, our grief over the past, and our power over the future, a power we were terribly afraid to own. We sifted through our seemingly bottomless fears, and found, buried deep beneath them, two even more frightening things: hope and love.
Fear, it turns out, is actually quite nice because it requires little courage or strength to live in. Hope and love, on the other hand, are heavy things; courage and strength are required to pick them up, wield them. My friend, Collette, and I, slowly, over six long years of writing a book, became stronger. We became braver. We took up those heavy things together. We hoped. We loved.