We’re thrilled to have here today Simon Rosedale from Lev Raphael’s new historical/supernatural book Rosedale the Vampyre. Rosedale is forty and a banker living in Gilded Age New York.
It is a pleasure to have Mr. Rosedale with us today at Beyond the Books!
Thank you so for this interview, Simon, if I may call you that? Now that the book has been written, do you feel you were fairly portrayed or would you like to set anything straight with your readers?
Readers might be shocked by the ways in which I have sunk into sexual excess, but unless you have lost your wife and the child that would have been your firstborn, I beg you not to judge me. The author was true to my experience, and I have been true to my heart.
Do you feel the author did a good job colorizing your personality? If not, how would you like to have been portrayed differently?
His insight into my soul has been frightening at times. Who would want to be so exposed before the public? And yet, despite my crimes, I believe he has sympathy for the ways in which life has twisted and turned for me.
What do you believe is your strongest trait?
I am determined. My mother’s family cast her off because she ran away with someone they didn’t approve of, and I fought my way back into their good graces after she died. I’ve helped build the family business and my own fortune by ceaseless application to work. Though I am new at hunting for blood, I presume I shall continue to be successful at it, and escape the attention of the police.
Worst trait?
My secrecy. Even when happily married for a brief two years I could not open my heart to my beloved wife, and now, of course, it’s too late.
If you could choose someone in the television or movie industry to play your part if your book was made into a movie, who would that be (and you can’t say yourself!)?
I have studied the career of Mr. Michael Fassbender and find us not dissimilar—though I admit him to be taller than myself. And possibly handsomer.
Do you have a love interest in the book?
I am excessively fond of Dominique, a woman of pleasure in a select Tenderloin bordello, but no one can replace my wife Florence.
At what point of the book did you start getting nervous about the way it was going to turn out?
Finding blood on my neck and losing an hour of one evening provoked grave concern. My perturbation was not unwarranted.
If you could trade places with one of the other characters in the book, which character would you really not want to be and why?
Any of the young women in the bordello. I would not want to sell my body for another’s pleasure. And yet, you will note that I purchase that pleasure myself. Wealth and hypocrisy are not unknown to one another.
How do you feel about the ending of the book without giving too much away?
It is a triumph for myself and the author, an ascension I could never have expected.
What words of wisdom would you give your author if s/he decided to write another book with you in it?
Be as determined as I am.
Will we be seeing more of you in the future?
Yes. Perhaps when you least expect it.
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Lev Raphael is the author of twenty-four books in genres from memoir to mystery to Jane Austen mashup. He’s been in love with storytelling since second grade and a reader of catholic tastes since he discovered his first public library. Lev has published traditionally with large and small houses, and recently gone indie because it’s the wave of the future. His latest fiction, Rosedale the Vampyre, grows out of his love of The Gilded Age. Lev has been a newspaper columnist, a radio talk show host, a DJ and even an academic. He writes and reviews full-time and is currently working on three different book projects.
You can visit his website at http://www.levraphael.com.
Hop over to his blog and say hi at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lev-raphael/.
About the Book:
Grief-stricken by his wife’s untimely death, a wealthy New York banker turns to sexual abandon in the bordellos of 1907 New York. Then one fateful night, after a mysterious attack, he dies to his old life and is reborn a Vampyre. Once obsessed solely with making money and social advancement, he’s now driven by a new, perverse hunger for blood. Written in a period voice, this deeply erotic work takes us into dark corners of the psyche as it explores a secret world of power and obsession.
Beyond the Books 