Kristine Kathryn Rusch's most recent novel, Diving into the Wreck, will be published by Pyr Books in November. She is the author of more than fifty novels, including several in her popular Retrieval Artist series. Many of her novels belong to the mystery or romance genres and are published under the pen names Kristine Grayson, Kris Nelscott, and Kristine Dexter. Rusch is a prolific author of short fiction as well, much of which will be collected in the forthcoming book Recovering Apollo 8 and Other Stories. She has been nominated for the Hugo Award thirteen times, winning twice-once for writing and once for editing, making her the only person to ever win a Hugo Award in both categories. She has also won the World Fantasy Award, the Sidewise Award, and numerous Asimov's Readers Choice Awards.
Rusch describes this story as a kind of sequel to The Great Gatsby-with vampires. "For some reason, I reread The Great Gatsby every two or three years whether I need to or not," she said. "Like Nick Carraway, I am a child of the Middle West, a person who has moved away to a land that's not quite familiar and people who are a bit strange. I have always seen ties between vampirism and alcoholism (and I am the child of two alcoholics). I dealt with that tie in my novel Sins of the Blood, a vampire book, and I deal with it here too."
On one rereading of Gatsby, Rusch realized that the characters were metaphorical vampires, and that was all the inspiration she needed to come up with the tale that follows.