By Suzanne Carré
Marie is the pivotal character, a mortal chosen to marry into the vampire bloodline and trying desperately to gain acceptance into their world. She provides the single voice of the novel while enlightening us with her experiences, as she learns some very demanding lessons of eternal love and directs us through her awakening from human to vampire. Marie thinks she has an idea of what sex is and love is supposed to be, but her main problem lies in her resistance to the vampire ways. When she compares the vampire lifestyle with that of her own, she concludes the vampire focus to sex is the cause of her acceptance not her self-denial. One of her biggest challenges she faces is that the vampires need sex, they don’t just want sex, so this vital sex forms a part of what defines the supernatural physically, emotionally, on a psychic plane, and culturally as vampires.
Her observations of vampire life and their sexual interactions are detailed, and because Marie is the mediator between the world we know and the secretive world of vampires, my character requires a keen sense of observation and analysis. It is through her eyes that we gain insight into the sexual practices of vampires; some she accepts, others she questions, and most she struggles to align with her human perspective of sex and its meaning in our world. For these reasons, I chose Marie to be a medical doctor, giving her basic scientific skills necessary to report accurately all she sees, but equally allowing her to interact with the human population on a personal level.
Because she’s a physician, Marie is a convincing stranger embraced and integrated into a close-knit community while having the valuable skills necessary to describe the intimate practices of vampires and document her feelings. In her doctor role, Marie occupies a place of trust and authority in the human world, so with perseverance she attempts to achieve this with the vampires too, but if her resistance created a barrier this is matched by the vampires refusal to integrate human thinking into their world. The vampires have hundreds of years to confirm the wisdom of their ways so, as Marie develops her vampire thinking, her evolving expectations become more introspective, and in the process she discovers herself.
