Chelsea Quinn Yarbro has been writing professionally since 1968 and has more than eighty published books to her credit. Her work extends across multiple genres, including science-fiction, westerns, and young adult adventure. In 2003, Yarbro was named Grand Master of the World Horror Convention, and in 2006 the International Horror Guild named her a Living Legend. She has been nominated for the Edgar, World Fantasy and Bram Stoker awards, and served as the first female president of the Horror Writers Association. Her diverse skills sets include extensive musical training and a long study of the occult. She worked as a Tarot card reader and palmist during the 1970s.
Yarbro is best known for her meticulously researched works of historical horror fiction, especially the novels and collections featuring her character Count Ragoczy Saint-Germain. One of the first completely sympathetic and moral vampire protagonists to appear in literature, Saint-Germain broke popular vampire fiction away from the Dracula model and established the foundation for the modern vampire romance. Since his debut in Hotel Transylvania in 1978, Saint-Germain has appeared in more than twenty books, with Number Twenty-two, Dangerous Climate, scheduled to be released by Tor in September, 2008.
Saint-Germain’s story stretches across 4,100 years of human history and spans the globe, from the Carpathian Mountains in Etruscan times, to ancient Egypt, classical Greece, Asia Minor, imperial Rome, dynastic China, Medieval Europe, Russia, colonial America and the modern world. The Saint-Germain novels carry the reader through war, catastrophe, tragedy and loss, but consistently affirm the courage and hope that strengthens the human spirit.
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro has been interviewed many times, and most of “the basic questions” are answered on her website. Having recently reviewed Lost Prince and The Saint-Germain Memoirs for Blogcritics, I decided to bypass the basics and ask Yarbro some deeper questions about writing, publishing, Lost Prince and her immortal (in every sense) character, Saint-Germain.
Your 1983 novel, The Godforsaken, was reissued by Borderlands Press twenty-five years after its first publication, as Lost Prince. Why did you decide to reissue Lost Prince? Why was the title changed, and did you do any revisions to the book itself?
I'm trying to get as much of my backlist as possible back into some form of print, and used book dealers have been raising prices on The Godforsaken. As to why the title was changed, the original title of the book was Infante Perdido, but Warner didn't want that, and The Godforsaken was a compromise title, not one I was fond of. Tom and Elizabeth liked Infante Perdido, but in English, hence Lost Prince. I didn't make any revisions in the work.
Article comments
1 - Mayra Calvani
Great interview! Thanks for sharing!