In 1994, I saw a movie called Interview with the Vampire.
Afterward, someone asked me a simple question. It turned out to be a disturbing one, and it stayed with me a lot longer than the movie did.
'Why are there no Arabian vampires?'
My answer came fast, and looking back, it was pretty naive. 'Because we don't believe in them.'
They weren't having it. 'You believe in jinn. Demons. Devils. A whole unseen world. But vampires are where you draw the line?'
I didn't have a comeback. And honestly, I was a little offended. Not because they were wrong, but because I had never thought about it.
So I went looking. I searched and I researched. The old stories, the older texts, the things we grew up hearing and never questioned. Almost every culture on earth has something that feeds on the living in the dark. Ours has an entire population of beings we can't see. So where were they?
The more I dug, the more I realized the answer wasn't that Arabia had no vampires. The answer was that nobody had connected the pieces. There was a missing link.
I found it. And it came with a twist.
This book is that twist.
It took me more than thirty years to answer that question properly. Here's my answer.
Mishal Samman