Autumnal Chillers | Wings in the Night

Original cover

It's autumn, and therefore time for thrillers and chillers. Obviously the first series I want to talk about as Fall rolls in, is Wings in the Night, one of the first vampire romance series ever published. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro was writing The St. Germain series (25 titles) and Anne Rice her Vampire Chronicles (14 titles) at the time, but those were outside the romance genre. Lori Herter released the first book of her Obsession series (4 titles) while I was working on my first. So she had the first true vampire romance series that I know of. And I had the second, Wings in the Night (24 titles so far.) So today I'm answering frequently asked questions about the series first book, TWILIGHT PHANTASIES, and giving some insider info that fans old and new might enjoy

Why spell Fantasies with a Ph?

When I first started Wings in the Night, I didn't know it would be a series, it was just a novel. I called it Twilight Phantasies after the poem Adonais, about the death of John Keats by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Here are the 12th and 13th stanzas from which the phrase came.

Another Splendour on his mouth alit,

       That mouth, whence it was wont to draw the breath

       Which gave it strength to pierce the guarded wit,

       And pass into the panting heart beneath

       With lightning and with music: the damp death

       Quench'd its caress upon his icy lips;

       And, as a dying meteor stains a wreath

       Of moonlight vapour, which the cold night clips,

It flush'd through his pale limbs, and pass'd to its eclipse.

And others came . . . Desires and Adorations,

       Winged Persuasions and veil'd Destinies,

       Splendours, and Glooms, and glimmering Incarnations

       Of hopes and fears, and twilight Phantasies;

       And Sorrow, with her family of Sighs,

       And Pleasure, blind with tears, led by the gleam

       Of her own dying smile instead of eyes,

       Came in slow pomp; the moving pomp might seem