My Approach to Combining Romance and Comedy With Vampires
My Roommate is a Vampire asks the age-old question: What would you do if your nocturnal, anachronistic, and sexy new roommate wasn’t just those three things but was also secretly a vampire? Through the character of Cassie Greenberg (a struggling artist in need of a cheap place to live) a series of heartfelt notes between her and her peculiar and secretive new roommate Frederick J. Fitzwilliam, and one unexpected set of magical powers, Vampire provides one potential answer.
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As will hopefully be obvious to anybody who reads my novel (and possibly from just the above paragraph), I have long been infatuated with vampires, romance novels that remind us that everyone deserves to find love, and irreverent humor. Inspired by Beth O’Leary’s exceptional The Flatshare—a love story between roommates that comes to life almost exclusively through written notes the characters leave for one another—and the brilliantly off-the-wall television show What We Do in the Shadows about a found family of vampires finding themselves lost and confused on a modern Staten Island—with My Roommate is a Vampire I set out to capture everything about my favorite kinds of storytelling.
While writing it, I also spent a lot of time thinking about how somewhere along the way, popular culture took vampires—creatures that had for over a century been a gross, terrifying monster—and made them wealthy, powerful, and incandescently sexy. Any one of these characteristics is like catnip for many romance fans like me. When you have all three of them—plus immortality!—you have the ultimate power fantasy.
I think Anne Rice’s tremendously influential books had a lot to do with this gradual change of the vampire from horrible monster to sexy horrible monster, as did Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The lead characters in both series were portrayed as love interests from the beginning—complete with sympathetic, tragic backstories, and hella good hair that just wouldn’t quit. Additionally, these vampires becoming love interests was central to both the plot and major themes of both series. It certainly didn’t hurt that in the case of both the Interview with the Vampire movie, and Buffy, the love interest vampires were played by very conventionally attractive actors!
Television shows like True Blood and books like Nalini Singh’s Guild Hunter series of novels further cemented the idea that, yes—vampires can be hot, and vampire fans should feel free to think of them as romantic leads just as they might any other fictional character.
But in addition to writing a vampire romance book, I also knew very early on that I wanted to make My Roommate is a Vampire funny. Vampires are fantastic—So immortal! So powerful! So hot!!—but my first love was, is, and always will be whimsical, off-the-wall humor. Some of my earliest childhood memories involve watching Jim Henson’s The Muppet Show, Mel Brooks movies, and wildly age-inappropriate clips from Saturday Night Live and Night Court.
And throughout my adulthood I have found silliness (both in fiction and in real life) to be curative, restorative, and an unparalleled escape when life gets to be a bit too much. To that end, during the pandemic, old episodes of Flight of the Conchords and current episodes of What We Do in the Shadows were mainstays. In fact, it was What We Do in the Shadows specifically that made me realize that, yes—I could write a humorous vampire romance if I wanted to.
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I employed two of my favorite humor techniques in writing this book. First: Create situations where the reader knows something that one or more of the characters do not. I attempted to do this by limiting Frederick’s POV so that all the reader knew of what he was thinking came from notes, journal entries, and cryptic text messages. And second: Put an otherwise very powerful character in situations where they are caught completely flat-footed. (Incidentally, when said very powerful character also happens to have other romantic-lead-worthy characteristics, catching them flat-footed like this is also a time-honored romance trope.)
And so in short, by taking an otherwise all-powerful immortal vampire, and making him a literal fish out of water in the modern world, what I was really attempting to do was create my own personal ideal rom-com/comedy. Hopefully, readers will enjoy this too.
Check out Jenna Levine’s My Roomate is a Vampire here:
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