Raymond A. Villareal's Blog
March 11, 2019
San Antonio Book Festival
I will be one of the festival authors at the San Antonio Book Festival on April 6, 2019.
December 21, 2018
November 20, 2018
July 31, 2018
Weekend picks for book lovers, including 'A People's History of the Vampire Uprising'
What should you read this weekend? USA TODAY’s picks for book lovers include Raymond Villareal's very modern novel about vampires and a biography of iconic New York photographer Weegee.
“A People’s History of the Vampire Uprising” by Raymond A. Villareal; Mulholland Books, 432 pp.; fiction
Having vampires and humans living and working together in society is just asking for a whole lot of bad blood.
Conflict, conspiracy, curiosity and chaos all arise in Villareal’s debut novel.
In a nod to what “World War Z” did for zombies, “A People’s History of the Vampire Uprising” chronicles roughly 3½ years after the discovery of a virus that gives its hosts extraordinary abilities and a penchant for plasma.
It follows a cast of characters through various accounts, documents and articles that detail the Gloamings (they’d rather not be called “vampires,” please and thank you) and their gradual infection into all walks of life.
It begins with Liza Sole, a presumed-dead woman who walks right out of an Arizona morgue. CDC researcher Lauren Scott crosses the country to investigate, and she’s the first to make headway into figuring out the mysterious NOBI virus that starts spreading across America.
Celebrities and power players want to be “re-created” as Gloamings — they even get their name courtesy of a Taylor Swift social-media post — and the vamps start fighting for their civil rights as they play a bigger role in the everyday world.
USA TODAY says ★★★ out of four. “Well worth a bite… a beguiling entry into the thoughts of Dracula and his ilk living among us.”
A Vampire Book That Does Not Suck
Screenshot from "Internet Archive" of the trailer for Dracula (1931) COURTESY/WIKIMEDIA
In the border town of Nogales, Arizona, the body of a 28-year-old woman with unusual bruising has gone missing. The coroner’s office staff thinks it might be a prank until another similarly afflicted body walks off. No one knows what to think, but the bite marks along the neck might be a clue.
A People’s History of the Vampire Uprising, by San Antonio attorney and debut author Raymond A. Villareal, depicts vampirism as a kind of sexy plague, an Ebola-like virus that results in a new class of nocturnal people. The novel is presented as a multi-voiced dossier of primary sources detailing the global spread of the NOBI (Nogales Organic Blood Illness) virus and the new species it’s created: a hemoglobin-hungry, acrobatic creature who lives for centuries, cannot be captured on video and will perish in sunlight — a stock vampire. But in the age of BuzzFeed and Instagram, these vampires are very aware of their social media status and prefer to go by the bougie moniker “Gloamings.”
A People’s History of the Vampire Uprising
By Raymond A. Villareal
Mulholland
$27; 418 pages
Organized as a set of interrogations, medical reports, legal documents and TMZ-style gossip, the novel does not have a plot so much as an unveiling of events. These concern the plight of a morally driven virologist, some FBI agents at their wits’ end and a priest who wrestles with an ancient prophecy.
Despite having a near 50-percent mortality rate, the virus is a malady many would like to acquire. Survivors of the infection are reborn as superhero-strong supermodels capable of messing with minds and camera equipment alike. News of the benefits spreads quickly, aided by YouTube videos of Gloamings breaking track records and benching 780 lbs. Doctor-assisted “re-creations,” in which people pay to be turned into bloodsuckers, gain popularity. When Taylor Swift is re-created, the desire to get the virus goes viral. “Every hedge fund manager and tech billionaire wanted to become re-created and join that status and secret society where you could live for over two hundred to three hundred years,” explains one character.
The Gloamings steal art from the Blanton Museum and get high on mind-expanding cough syrup, among other hijinks. What looks at first blush like heady narcissism is shown to be much worse when secret plans emerge involving eugenics, human farming, nuclear devices and an end-game option that embraces the abolition of individuality itself. Aside from a sense of supernatural entitlement, the Gloamings make no bones about manipulating the living world to meet their needs, including advocating for night classes for Gloaming students and qualification under the Americans With Disabilities Act.
The Gloamings can soon boast upper-echelon members in the Vatican, as well as successful artists and aspiring right-wing politicians. By their very nature they are snobs, and a description of their antics makes them sound like the pejoratives a conservative pop philosopher like Jordan Peterson might throw at celebrities. “Anecdotally, it quickly became clear that the Gloamings, both men and women, shared certain traits: high IQ, contempt of others, cruelty to others, amoral, secretive, grandiose and authoritarian,” explains Reilly, cautioning that: “Unlike humans with similar traits, Gloamings did not have significant feelings of inferiority.”
Although comparisons to the zombie novel World War Z would seem apt, due to the similar employment of a Studs Terkel-like pastiche of an oral history, Villareal’s technique is directly in line with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which sought its authenticity in the form of letters and journal entries of the characters contending with the Count.
Organized as a set of interrogations, medical reports, legal documents and TMZ-style gossip, the novel does not have a plot so much as an unveiling of events.
As a summer read, this page-turner is just shy of being too smart for its own good, with characters who banter about the merits of Lautréamont versus Naked Lunch and nods to Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Most will not be stymied by these allusions. For Villareal has written a vampire novel that quaffs greedily from the arteries of its literary antecedents, particularly in how he describes the vampire’s ancient erotic allure.
“I’d only viewed drawings and read descriptions before, and now here he was — a captivating, angelic face that seemed to radiate and reflect light at the same time,” says an FBI agent caught in the spell of a Gloaming he’s trying to catch. “The famous yellowish-gold eyes appeared to look through and inside me. I found myself leaning in toward him.”
Despite winking in comfortable homage to sources as disparate as the sparkling bloodsuckers of the Twilight series and the nightclub nosferatus of Blade, Villareal makes one very interesting departure from all vampire books: there is no Lestat to love or loathe. Or, for that matter, no Omega Man to pity. We get sketches of Roger Stone-like political operatives, shady documentary filmmakers, earnest medics and renegade priests, but no one to really hate or worry over. Instead, readers — and perhaps soon moviegoers, since Fox has already snatched up the the film rights — get a panoramic view of a world that for the most part embraces the perks of vampirism.
Playing off the trope that all vampires, however medically based, still require an invitation before entering anywhere, Villareal has posited that a clickbait-happy world would have very little problem trading away its humanity to let the demon in.
Roberto Ontiveros is an artist, critic and fiction writer; his work has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Threepenny Review, the Dallas Morning News, and others.
San Antonio Express News Article
San Antonian Raymond A.Villareal is a lawyer by profession, but he also has devoted a lot of time to writing.
Villareal, 50, started a number of novels over the years, most of which he abandoned without completing them: “I’m sort of the king of starting something and not finishing it.”
That streak ended with “A People’s History of the Vampire Uprising,” a sprawling look at what might happen in the United States should a virus take hold that transforms the infected into creatures of the night. The book was published by Mulholland Books, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company. Even before it was published, it had grabbed the attention of Hollywood: A film is in the works from 20th Century Fox and Shawn Levy’s 21 Laps, the latter known for the big-screen hit “Arrival” and Netflix’s buzzy series “Stranger Things.”
“They finished the script and send it to me a month ago, and I really enjoyed it,” Villareal said.
He finished writing before the 2016 presidential election — there are several references to an unnamed female president — but he thinks that current events, especially around race and immigration, helped make the book more appealing to publishers and to movie studios.
It deals with “how we view people that are different from us, whether we want to learn from them or learn about them, do we feel threatened by them,” he said. “You can see that in things that are happening today. That was something that interested me.”
Much of the book takes place in the Southwest, where the virus is first detected, but it also stretches well beyond that, with scenes in the nation’s capital and the Vatican. Though a short review in Publishers Weekly noted that genre fans will pick up on the influence of “True Blood” creator Charlaine Harris and the films of Guillermo del Toro, Villareal steers clear of a lot of the expected vampire tropes. Instead, much of the focus is on how the Gloamings, as the infected prefer to be called, push for civil rights, including political representation.
Soon the rich and powerful — seeing the advantages of enhanced physical strength and an abnormally long life span — intentionally “re-create.”
Most of the book unfolds as an oral history that’s laced with faux primary sources, including memos, magazine articles, blog posts and transcripts of congressional testimony and interviews.
Each chapter is told from a different character’s perspective, which, Villareal said, is part of the reason that he was able to finish the book: “Since each chapter is from the point of view of one character, it was like writing five different little books. I think that helped me not getting bored.”
He also started yoga and meditating, which helped, too.
“It really focused me a lot on finishing stuff — starting and finishing and staying on it,” he said.
It took him about 11 months to write the book, chipping away at the project after work and, sometimes, during the work day.
“Being in court, there’s a lot of time spent waiting, and so that’s always a good time to catch some writing time if I’m not doing work,” he said.
Villareal grew up in San Antonio — he’s a Churchill High School grad — and moved back about 10 years ago after stints in Dallas and Austin.
The idea for the book came to him on a trip to Salt Lake City. He doesn’t fly — he suffers from panic attacks — so he drove from San Antonio to Utah, a long trek that gave him lots of time to work through potential novel ideas. Among other things, he started pondering how he might approach a vampire story.
“At the time, I was thinking I would try to avoid the mythology and try to keep it more grounded in reality and that kind of thing,” he said.
Part of that reality comes in the form of name checks. A character talks about reading a New York Times series by Maggie Haberman about “the Gloaming presence in America and beyond”; news of Taylor Swift re-creating is in there; and Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan writes the opinion on a Supreme Court case in which a Gloaming lawyer sued after being fired from his practice, which refused to allow him to work at night.
He has outlined a sequel, but he’s taking a break from vampires for his second book, which he described as a mystery. He’s taking a sabbatical from his law practice to work on it.
He’s always written, he said, but he sees the process a little differently now.
“I need to find another hobby,” he said. “This doesn’t feel like a hobby. It feels like work.”
dlmartin@express-news.net | Twitter: @DeborahMartinEN
Deborah Martin is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of her stories here. | dlmartin@express-news.net | @DeborahMartinEN
June 16, 2018
June 7, 2018
Kirkus Interview
Author of A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE VAMPIRE UPRISING
Interviewed by Richard Z. Santos on June 1, 2018
In the first 100 pages or so of Raymond Villareal’s debut novel, A People’s History of the Vampire Uprising, a Centers for Disease Control investigator discovers an outbreak of a virus that turns people into vampires, or, as they prefer to be called, “Gloamings.”
Also, people start to disappear along the border, gold and priceless works of art are stolen in seemingly unsolvable robberies, an FBI agent engages in a shootout with Gloamings, more and more people (possibly the Pope?) are willfully transforming, Gloamings start to lobby Congress for a new Civil Rights Act, and a group of renegade priests begin Special Forces-grade operations against Gloamings who have snuck into the highest echelons of The Vatican and the U.S. Congress.
In other words, a lot happens really quickly.
Villareal is a practicing lawyer in San Antonio and People’s History is the first novel he’s completed. “I’m really good at starting and not finishing books,” Villareal says. “A couple of those had the main character as a lawyer, that kind of thing.”
But when the idea for a vampire novel came to Villareal, he knew it had to be different. “I wanted to do something that wasn’t so supernatural or romantic. So I thought I’d stick with what could have been the reality,” Villareal says. “It had to be real, medical-based, and, since I’m a lawyer, I needed to put legal elements in as well.”
As Villareal explored how a vampire outbreak would be treated in the 21st century, the narrative almost started to build itself. “The first character was Lauren Scott, who works for the CDC. If there was going to be an actual virus that turned people into vampires, the CDC would be the first ones to investigate.” Once Villareal had that realistic foothold, the rest of the narrative fell into place. “I knew I’d want a political character, then a priest would work out good, then one character came from another character and it kept going.”
People’s History pushes the boundaries of the vampire book in innovative, surprising ways. Villareal throws out any concept of a traditional narrative in order to compile a collection of “documents” that tell the story from different angles. A foreword by the compiler explains that, even though events are still changing quickly, “now is the perfect time to compile the beginning, middle, and...if not the end, then that place that occupied the in medias res of our current conflicts.”
The novel defies easy categorization. A chapter told from the point of view of an FBI agent might be followed up by an article from the American Bar Association Law Journal documenting the struggle for Gloaming rights, or a first-person chapter told by the CDC investigator who discovered the virus, or a transcript of an interview with a priest arrested by a shadowy, perhaps governmental, agency. Along the way are plenty of pop culture surprises. Taylor Swift, for example, plays an important off-stage role.
Underlying the novel are subtle notes of social and political commentary. “I always had an interest in how we approach people who are different from ourselves and how government and others approach them,” Villareal says. “[The Gloamings] may scare people or people may dislike them for whatever reason. That was always my interest. How would people react to a class of vampires? Do you want to understand them or hate them?”
People’s History pulls off something truly unique. Not only is the book compulsively readable and satisfying, but it also retains some ambivalence about the uprising and the Gloamings. “Honestly, I would hope the readers would be kind of unsure about how they’d feel. They should support and hate the Gloamings. They should have mixed feelings about what they’d bring to society,” Villareal says.
So are the Gloamings an oppressed minority with a misunderstood culture, or are they frightening monsters? Villareal says he hopes readers pick a side, but he admits with a laugh, “I don’t think I have. I wrote the book and I still haven’t picked a side.”
Richard Z. Santos is a writer and teacher living in Austin. He recently completed his first novel.
