Posted in: Audio Dramas, TV | Tagged: christopher Buehlman, horror, podcast, The Lesser Dead, vampires

The Lesser Dead Author Talks Audio Drama, Top Vampire Films & More

The Lesser Dead author Christopher Buehlman discusses how the audio drama adaptation came to life, favorite vampire movies, and more.

The Lesser Dead is a perfect podcast for Halloween, one of the few audio drama podcasts featuring vampires right now. You'd think with vampires being so popular, there would be more of them, but we looked and haven't found any. Echoverse Studios' adaptation of Christopher Buehlman's 2014 novel about vampires in 1978 New York City with a cast that includes Jack Kilmer, Minnie Driver, Saul Rubinek, and Danny Huston. It's about class, privilege, guilt, and redemption that's worth a listen, unsparing in its depiction of horror. These are not nice, cuddly vampires but once-broken people turned into predators living in the underbelly of New York City during its most glamourous and dystopian era.

To celebrate Halloween, we had the opportunity to interview Christopher Buehlman, the writer of the original novel The Lesser Dead, about how he wrote the book, its transition to audio drama, vampire stories, and his favourite vampire movies.

Hi Christopher, congratulations on "The Lesser Dead" getting a new lease on life as an audio drama podcast. I'd like to start with an obvious question. "The Lesser Dead" sticks to vampires as a metaphor for class division, class conflict, and stories of people seeking redemption for past moral failures and personal loss. What inspired you to write the novel? 

I've always loved vampires in books and on screen, and I've always wanted to tell a vampire story. Of course, I wasn't going to do that until I had a fresh take on it and some new lore to add to vampire mythology. Inspiration came to me in the form of one image – a little girl with makeup on riding the subway in the 1970's. I played around with different explanations of who she was, exactly *what* kind of vampire, and who it was that was seeing her until I came up with the story's basic premise.

How did turning the book into an audio drama come about? 

I was approached about this by Mark Stern of Echoverse, who had been a fan of and believer in this story for many years. When he was in television, he shopped "The Lesser Dead" for television, but the market was pretty saturated. His thought was that letting me write the actual scripts I wanted to write and having them voiced by excellent talent might give the story an audience and a possible inroad to the small screen.

How do you feel about the transition to a live format just short of live visual action? 

It was beyond exciting to hear these roles voiced by such great actors. Minnie Driver, perhaps unsurprisingly, was a pitch-perfect Margaret. Jack Kilmer brought a vulnerability and warmth to Joey that I hadn't imagined for him. Saul Rubinek as Cvetko and Danny Huston as the Hessian were, of course, on point. But maybe my biggest delight was discovering Toni Ann DeNoble as Joey's sometime girlfriend, Neva. Ms. DeNoble is brilliant. I mean, I wrote some funny stuff for Neva, but a gifted comedic actor like her can make funny lines hysterical, and so it is in this performance.

What do you suppose is the appeal of vampires for them to be repeatedly brought back as foils?

There's a lot to unpack with vampirism – the taboo of cannibalism expressed as drinking blood, a profanation of Christian funeral rites and the drinking of Christ's blood at mass, class structures, sexuality, the desire for immortality, etc. Here is a monster that often looks and acts more like us than most any other, which makes it a kind of mirror, if you will, and thus both timeless and timely. Anne Rice's pleasure-seeking 1970s vampires were about immortality, endless power, and sex. 1980s vampire stories like Near Dark approached vampirism as a bloodborne disease or a curse, which makes sense given the strong societal fear of AIDS. Stoker's seminal Victorian masterpiece, "Dracula," is talking about a lord on a hill holding peasants in thrall and also about repressed sexuality.

Vampires are in again during the 2020s. Why do you think they're having a moment again? 

I honestly don't know if I agree with your premise, and the 2020s are perhaps too young for a through-line to be obvious. To the extent that vampires are 'in' again, I'm mostly seeing remakes and parodies. I'm thinking, of course, of "Interview with the Vampire" and "What We Do in the Shadows." Full disclosure, I'm normally highly suspicious of remakes, but I loved the new take on "Interview," with its reunion of the still-young Louis and his now-aged interviewer, brilliantly played by Eric Bogosian. Bogosian radiated bitterness, envy, fascination, and that peculiar fearfulness of old men, with so much less to lose than they had in their youth.

Since it's Halloween, what are your favourite vampire books and movies? 

I first saw "Let the Right One" in at a matinee performance in New York City in 2008. My friend and I were just walking around the city, and we passed this art cinema, and the poster looked bewitching. I'll tell you, I knew while watching it that I was seeing something life-changingly good, and I have yet to see its equal in the genre. The aforementioned "Near Dark" is another favorite film, as well as the 1970s TV movie adaptation of "Salem's Lot." That transitions nicely into books because King's novel of the same name stands the test of time and probably remains my favorite book on the subject. One literary gem that gets too little attention is Suzy McKee Charnas' "The Vampire Tapestry," a series of intertwined short stories or long chapters which approaches the vampire tying them together not as a supernatural monster but as one of a parasitic species with the ability to mimic humanity enough to seduce its prey and to elude pursuit by 'hibernating' underground long enough for a human generation to die off.

The Lesser Dead is now available as a podcast.

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