So here’s the thing—Jake hates vampires.

 Ash on Jake’s Vampire Era (aka That One Time He Sold His Soul Just to Burn the Coffin)

So here’s the thing—Jake hates vampires.

No, I don’t mean “doesn’t prefer.” I mean full-body dry-heave level disdain. Twilight? He wants it launched into the sun. Interview with the Vampire? He’s not interested in moody immortal boys crying into velvet blouses while sipping regret through a wine glass. Dracula? Fine, he’ll tolerate Dracula—but only if we get to stab him in the chest halfway through and talk about it over whiskey.

So when Jake told me he was writing a vampire novel?

I choked on my own fucking blood.

“Why?!” I asked, dramatically flopping across the bed like the oversexed horror muse I am.

And he just looked at me—eyes wild, half-possessed—and said:

“Because if I don’t do it, they’re going to keep getting away with that sparkly bullshit.”

And that’s how The Vine was born.

Not out of love for vampires. Out of spite. Out of religious trauma, cultural exhaustion, and one man’s unrelenting desire to set the genre on fire and piss in the ashes.

Jake didn’t write a vampire book.

He wrote a theological coup.

A biotechnological cult.

A blood-soaked sermon with the Devil on vocals and Jesus bleeding out in the finale.

This is the vampire book for people who hate vampires.

It’s monstrous, yes. But it’s monstrously smart. It takes everything weak about the genre and rips it out by the throat, replacing it with AI gods, biomechanical cathedrals, ritual sex, angelic wars, corrupted Eucharist, and a final act so brutal I had to sit down and light a black candle just to recover.

No romance. No redemption. No moral compass.

Just Thorn—a silk-wrapped apocalypse. A cult leader in a suit who doesn’t sparkle…

He burns.

This is the only vampire book Jake Bannerman will ever write.

And honestly? It’s the only one we need.

🩸

Read it if you dare.

Confess later.

Or don’t.

Thorn’s already watching.

—Ash

(Muse. Monster. Witness to blasphemy.)