Interview: LA Banks

Paranormal author LA Banks recently wrapped up her twelve book epic, the Vampire Huntress Legend, with the release of The Thirteenth. The release was met with a celebration that was just as epic: the Twelve Tribes Summit in Philadelphia, a weekend-long celebration of literature, vampire lore, and the arts.

I had the opportunity to talk with Ms. Banks just before the Twelve Tribes Summit and found her to be very inspirational, not just as a writer, but also as a person.

LF: Did you intend for the Vampire Huntress Legend series to be twelve books when you started writing it?

LA Banks: No. I really didn’t. I thought maybe one or two books and then that would be the end. I had no idea that it was going to catch fire like this or that it was going to catch me. I was just fortunate to be able to keep going with it.

LF: Strong women are a staple in paranormal mysteries. What is it about Damali that seems to resonate with readers?

LAB: There had not been a multicultural character like this before who really embodies the urban scene. There’s never been the kind of hip-hop attitude, kind of around the way girl in this role. Damali is different in that way; she brings in another cultural perspective that hadn’t been seen before in this genre.

LF: How much of yourself did you put into Damali?

LAB: A lot. There’s a lot of my family and myself in all these characters. I used to act just like Damali when I was her age. I was quick with a tongue lash, I’d get in your face if you got in mine. I’ve mellowed so much! I smile when I look back at some of that hot relationship stuff – I had my own Carlos back in the day!

You can’t help but incorporate your experience into what you write. All the Guardian brothers are like my big cousins who used to terrorize the neighborhood on our behalf as young women, and I mean that in a good way! I’m six feet tall as a woman, and I’m the baby, so you can imagine what these guys look like! They were tree trunks and they’d clear off blocks coming around the corner! The mother seer is like all my aunts and my mom. I swore they could see around corners and had psychic powers because they always knew what we were gonna say and they didn’t play. They weren’t by any means old ladies who had to be saved. They would go out on the porch and stand in a drug dealer’s face and say, “Not here.” And the dealer would be like, “Oh, I’m sorry ma’am.” It made me wonder what kind of power they had back in the day. There’s a lot of nostalgia in there. A lot of nostalgia.

LF: What is it about vampires and werewolves and such that draws you in as a person and as a writer?

LAB: To me, the vampire represents a lot of what we see in society. They’re scarier because of that; because the vampire can be anybody. He just blends in and looks perfectly normal. Like your serial killers often look like normal people. Some of the most heinous ones in history were just the quiet man who lived next store who turned out to have a hundred and thirty bodies in his house. The fear factor is that they’re among us.

With werewolves, when you look at the news and some of the crimes that are being committed today, you can see that the level of violence has increased, and so there is also the fear factor of knowing there could be somebody who really just snaps. The difference is that the vampire is a cool, calculated predator whereas the werewolf represents that berserker, that person who just snaps and runs amok. That’s what makes them both repulsive

If you then go to the other side, what makes these attractive? As a vampire, you look young forever, you live forever, you have these powers that go beyond. You’re so intelligent that you’re sitting outside of the human cattle and you read minds and sway judgment. That’s what I think is the attraction to the vampire lore. When you look at the werewolf, it’s having this ability to be so totally primal and being able to act on your instincts. I think that’s a large part of why people gravitate to the werewolf. It’s an interesting look at our own psyches.

LF: Regarding the urban setting in which the Vampire Huntress series takes place, why do you think that environment suits the kind of story you’re telling so well?

LAB: By and large because in the big urban environment there is a sense of anonymity. You don’t know your neighbors the way you would in a small town or smaller community. You don’t know who is living in your apartment building. There are places to get lost. If a body shows up in a small town, it’s gonna be a big sensation. People click channels in the big city.

There’s a sense of it being so large and gritty and having so many places where the police don’t even have a chance to look for days and days. There are sewer systems that are huge. In a small town, you might have a septic tank under your house, but the thought of something running through an entire sewer system that follows the grid of the city, that doesn’t exist there.  The landscape and the environment itself creates a sort of Gotham City for anyone working in this area.

LF: How did the Vampire Huntress graphic novels and manga come about?

LAB: We’re coming out with a young adult Vampire Huntress Legend series, about the children of the Guardians, because the battle wages on. There are still pieces of story left that readers are very interested in. I had enough to do scenes, but not whole novels between where The Thirteenth ends and where the young adult series begins in 2010. So, we’re going to do a lot of post-apocalyptic adventures in the graphic novels.

The manga is going to start before Minion, the first book in the VHL series, when Damali is about fifteen years old, before she even knows she is a Neteru. There is a story about how she and Carlos get together and what happens that summer.  There is another about how she gets together with Marlene and comes into her powers.

LF: Are you writing those scripts?

LAB: I am.

LF: Had you written graphic novels before?

LAB: Never did it in my life and I had a learn as you go course! The people at Dabel Brothers talked me through it. It was like suddenly finding myself landing a plane! I came in bumpy, but I landed! It was an interesting experience.

LF: You are a prolific writer. When did you get hit with the writing bug?

LAB: That was back around 1992 and it really happened as the result of a tragedy. My daughter was six months old and was severely burned in an accident to where she lost three fingers and had to have seventeen surgeries. I was also going through a divorce at the time. Everything that could have been going on, went on. I was broke at home and trying to figure out a way to keep the lights on without leaving the house because I wasn’t going to leave my daughter.

Essence Magazine was having a short story contest with a prize of $2500 for ten pages of prose. I thought I’d try for it and started writing this wild tale of a black James Bond with superheroes and past lives intertwined and all that. I didn’t want to write anything realistic because my reality was not so good at that time. I got into it and three days later I had seventy-five pages. It was way too long, so I gave it to my girlfriends to help me cut it down and they all wanted to know what happened next. I wound up skipping the idea of the contest and kept writing it for them. After about six weeks, I had about six hundred pages, then I threw it in the closet and my girlfriends didn’t. They started sending it out to publishers.

I moved on and got a job as an at-home grant writer for non-profits and would run out and teach a class here and there for a couple of hours, just enough to scrape by and I got a hit from Kensington Publishing. They got that first book and offered me a two book deal. I never looked back.

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Lisa Fary’s early exposure to classic Battlestar Galactica in 1979 is largely responsible for her lifelong interest in science fiction and her childhood ambition of being an intergalactic space cowgirl. She thinks diagramming sentences is a fun alternative to Sudoku.

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