We met Jacob Thomson at his comfortable triple-wide mobile home on the Gulf Coast of Florida. (Interviewer's Note: His home survived the recent Florida hurricanes, which all passed to the north.) Contrary to the implications of his book cover bio, Thomson met us fully clothed, and there was no evidence of any naked people wandering around the community.
Q: We may as well start with that. The bio on your book cover refers to you as a "part-time nudist." Obviously, this isn't a nudist community, so when do you do that sort of thing?
Thomson: Whenever I feel like it. By "part-time" I mostly mean I tend to wander around the house with nothing on when I'm alone. I get dressed if anyone comes to the door.
Q: What about the "free lance elderly stud" part?
Thomson: Have you looked around this place. Lots and lots of lonely widows and not all that many old men to take care of them. I suppose you wouldn't see it that way, since you're still fairly young, but when you get to my age you'd be surprised just how hot a 75-year-old grandmother can look. (Smiling) They look hotter now, really. Everybody seems to be holding up a lot better than they used to. When I was your age, a 75-year-old woman looked like an 85-year-old does these days.
Q: So you're doing okay here, then?
Thomson: I can't complain. I've got a bigger harem than Hefner. Of course, mine are older, and they don't all live in the same house with me.
Q: Let's get to your writing. What gave you idea to use a Jewish vampire? The only one I've seen before was a gag character in Polanski's "The Fearless Vampire Hunters," but Zack Nathanson bears no resemblance to that guy.
Thomson: Well, I wouldn't put it past Zack to quote "Oy, have you got the wrong vampire" if someone waved a crucifix in his face but, no, no connection at all, other than that both are presumably native Yiddish speakers.
Q: Where did he come from, then?
Thomson: From my mother, curiously enough. Mama always acted nervous around red-headed people. Eventually, when I was older, she told me some old stories about red-headed Jewish vampires. It was all nonsense, of course. Pure bubbe meiseh. But the stories were mostly intended to scare children into behaving themselves. They worked pretty good, too.
Q: Did they scare you?
Thomson: Not particularly. But I grew up on the Lower East Side, not in a shtetl in the Russian Pale. I didn't need mythical monsters, I had the Italian kids on the next block to make my life miserable. Or, at least, they tried. I was a pretty mean little Yeshiva bochur, when you come right down to it. Sometimes I wonder how I didn't turn out to be a gangster instead of a rabbi.
Q: You also turned out to be a pretty good writer. A bit on the steamy side, though. How do you reconcile that with your former career?
Thomson: What, you think the clergy aren't interested in sex? But I do try not to be crude with that part of the story. You don't need a lot of four-letter words. A bit of imagination works better. Erotic is good, vulgar isn't.
Q: There is a lot of sex in The Alukam.
Thomson: It makes the book a little longer. And it tells a lot about the characters, too. Think about it. When is a person at his or her most open to another? It's not when you're having one of those heart-to-heart talks so much as when you're having sex. When you come right down to it, that's when those talks happen.
Q: You have a strange combination of styles or genres in that book. I don't believe I've ever seen a police procedural vampire story before.
Thomson: I try to be original.
Q: What made you decide to combine the two?
Thomson: It just seemed like a good idea at the time. I enjoy the police procedural genre, and I like horror stories. And, of course, my education included all the Orthodox laws and practices that Schneider follows. Now, granted, I never worked as a rabbi in a town that was quite as secular as Port Morrow.
Q: Is that a real place?
Thomson: Physically, sure. I'd guess it would take anyone who lives in the real town about a chapter and half to recognize it. There's no resemblance beyond the physical layout, though.
Q: No Orthodox cops?
Thomson: I doubt it. I'm not even sure there are any Jewish cops or deputies. There could be, but I really don't know.
Q: Okay, getting back to the story. Your take on vampirism is completely different from anything I've ever seen before. How can you have a vampire who walks on the beach in full sunlight?
Thomson: Why not? Remember, this is an utterly different tradition, and a pretty damned obscure one at that. He can walk around in the sunlight because he's allowed to rest only on Shabbos. His vampirism is a form of divine punishment for his suicide, and it wouldn't be much of a punishment if he could get out of it by just walking outside and exploding.
Q: On the other hand, he's rich, cultured—doesn't seem like that much of a punishment.
Thomson: Ah, but on Shabbos he gets a preview of the next world, doesn't he? Think about it. If you spent all day Saturday in heaven, wouldn't it be some sort of torture to find yourself back here at the end of the day? Even worse, you're going to go through it again and again, possibly for centuries, because no one really believes in vampires any more and, even if they did, they'd need to find a rabbi who knew how to lay him permanently to rest.
Q: Well, when you put it that way, I guess. And this is what you call an alukam, a Jewish vampire?
Thomson: That's one name, though, to be honest, it probably wouldn't be the most familiar one. And, by the way, Alukam is plural. The singular would be alukah, which was the form used in the scriptural quote. It was when I wrote it, anyway. Never trust an editor who doesn't speak the foreign language you're quoting.
Q: Moving along now, you also wrote an introduction and notes for our electronic edition of Dracula, and edited it, too. That's getting back to commenting on a more traditional vampire, isn't it?
Thomson: Here you're getting into the realm of my secular education, which was in English literature. Dracula was written in a transitional period, in more ways than one. It's modern English, but more convoluted than you'd find today. The punctuation, spelling, and grammar are somewhat different, as is the paragraphing. Some editors have "modernized" the text, taken Stoker's words and made them conform to current grammatical styles. I didn't.
Q: Why not?
Thomson: I think literature is a reflection of the time and place it was created. When Bram Stoker was writing Dracula, paragraphs were longer, and it wasn't unusual to write some words that are unified today with hyphens, such as, well, "to-day." The epistolary style was quite common, though Stoker modified that somewhat by writing his novel primarily in the form of journal and diary entries, rather than exclusively in the form of correspondence. What I tried to do was preserve the story as written, eccentric spellings, punctuation, use of dialect and all, so that the reader would be presented with exactly the same story that terrified Londoners read in 1897.
Q: What are you working on now?
Thomson: Some short stories. A few articles and essays. You've read some of them.
Q: Right. We'll be putting some up on your new website.
Thomson: I can hardly wait.
