Author Lucille Moncrief, a well-educated writer and a long-time fan of the steampunk genre, has a wonderful vampire out.
Nefarious is a steampunk series, but it’s not your typical story. It’s a True Blood meets Fifty Shades kinda series. It’s filled with fantasy, vampires, half-breeds, and nefarious, and sometimes sexy, events. I find the entire storyline extremely fascinating, and as a reader, I love how Moncrief’s brain works.
Moncrief’s characters are each unique. Not a single one is like the other. Their personalities are large and vast, and sometimes mousy and quiet. The world she’s created is mind-blowing as well. The way it reads made me feel as though I’m right there in the scene, standing next to rusted metals, inhaling the smoke of the factories, and my skin felt the fleeting warmth of a single gaslight flame.
As an added bonus, the Nefarious series has PICTURES. Yes, perfectly hand drawn pictures made specifically for each book.
Start with the boxset!
FISCHER: What makes your series different from other steampunk or vampire novels?
MONCRIEF: The Nefarious series incorporates a lot of classic vampire mythology that’s gotten a bit lost in the contemporary, “sparkly” noise. Parts of the series are also told in retrospect and those bits make use of a lot of historical accuracies. For example, the second and the fifth titles in the series are told during WWI and the French Revolution, respectively. I spent months researching those eras, hoping to transport readers back to those time periods – how people behaved, what they ate, what they wore, how the places would have sounded and smelled, etc. Nefarious is the thinking woman’s, man’s and non-binary reader’s vampire series.
FISCHER: Using one line from the series, what describes Nefarious best?
MONCRIEF: “The scent of such pungent, lingering sorrow coursing throughout her veins had my talons stinging like hornets, and I painfully itched to suck her dry until she came-to on the other side of death in my cold arms, where nothing ever hurt but the insatiable bloodlust.”
FISCHER: Tell us something that isn’t well-known about your series.
MONCRIEF: The vampires and vampirism in the series is a metaphor for the loss of empathy and innocence. It’s about the first, second, third, or umpteenth time you’ve been betrayed or hurt, and you finally see the world and the people in it for what they truly are. For some, a loss of innocence causes them to choose cynicism, treachery, and rudeness. In the series, a vampire cannot turn the unwilling. Readers can take a bite out of the series with my free title, Hannibal Steele and the Bone Elixir.
D. Fischer 