Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal. You are a very special breed, for you are the only animal, who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm. This is Michael Silverblatt, and today I'm excited to have in the studio, Deldee Bellamy.

I'm excited because her first major, big book, The Letters of Mina Harker, published by Hard Press, I think is a major event in the

prose world. It takes the form of letters from Mina Harker who is possessing the author, Doty Bellamy.

Meena Harker is a character from Dracula. She assembles the various notes and commentaries in the Dracula book,

the classic Dracula book by Bram Stoker. And she's conceived here as being a kind of vampire

woman possessing the mind-body bridge of Doty Bellamy, the author here today.

Now, I wondered, I wanted to begin with a very general question.

Vampire writing seems particularly fascinating to women and feminists.

Why do you suppose that is?

I think the sexuality of the vampire is appealing to women.

You know, it's a way to have this like really crazy sexuality that you're not really responsible for, so you can let loose.

Because this book is so full of references to all kinds of horror movies,

and it seems a kind of radical reinterpretation of the themes of letting go, of co-creation,

of the mingling of bloods and spirit. It seems to me to be that vampirism

is the basis for a kind of feminist reading of the world in this book. I just wrote an essay

about my writing, and it was called A Poetics of Boundary Problems.

And it's about boundary problems.

And for me, like one of the exciting things about horror, that it's always about

transgressing of boundaries and this confusion about inside and outside.

And so that's the way I look at the culture, too.

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