The Mellification

Tentative release date is December 1, 2020! I couldn’t be more excited.

I wrote this novella in the summer of 2019, over one pandemic ago. At the time I had a lot of ideas and images percolating for a new project. Honeybees and bats, sprawling green cemeteries, a pearl-handled knife. Vampires had been on my mind ever since I read the amazing Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist, although The Mellification doesn’t resemble Lingqvist’s book at all.

One interesting thing about the book is it takes place in Green Hill Cemetery in Brooklyn, but when I first started writing it I was somehow unaware that Green-Wood Cemetery exists. I was primarily inspired by visiting Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris in 2018, and I imagined a similar place in Brooklyn. Turns out, reality beat me to it! I did take a tour of Green-Wood pretty much as soon as I learned about it, and the similarities to what I’d written blew me away. Certain small details did actually require me seeing the place in person.