If you’re new to Sanguinem Emere, we figured you’d like to know a little more about us (why else would you be here, right?)
Sanguinem Emere is the passion project of authors Carmen Dominique Taxer (Dominique Ruthven) and Richard T. Wheeler (Elizabeth Pellori). Decades of intense consumption of vampire fiction led both writers down a path towards creating what they deemed to be the greatest image of the archetypal vampire.
Being avid readers of vampire literature and media, Carmen and Richard found that the vampire in fiction possesses boundless potential, but is often sequestered to some or other corner of popular culture’s position on the monster in fiction. Vampires were traditionally monsters steeped in fear of personal lust, progressing to primarily romantic leads and then being cast as sheer monsters to undermine the Romance element. Carmen and Richard write to create a blend of these archetypes and others, to create a super ego idea of what humanity can be. But also that which humanity can become if we neglect to keep ourselves in check. Sanguinem Emere is a universe that is a shadow reflection of real life, wherein the authors use vampires to encourage an intuitive understanding of the successes and failures of being human.
But Sanguinem Emere is also about escape. Through the publication of the core series – the Gaslight Vamp novels – set in the fictional city of New Babylon which pits seemingly ordinary humans against nighttime monsters and subsequent spinoff novels, such as the Shades of the Sea and Flame series, the authors have created a world of haunting beauty and graphic horror that is always balanced by the hope for brilliant illumination, and the sweet promise of love.
“If our death could be indefinitely postponed, we would not go on postponing it, indefinitely…”
– Alan Watts on the Acceptance of Death
Drawing inspiration from Fantasy, Horror, and Romance alike, with influencers in almost all genres, Sanguinem Emere is the fulfillment of a lifelong desire to create perfect fiction. An impossible task, of course, but keeping one another in line, Carmen Dominique Taxer and Richard T. Wheeler promise to always remember the intended purpose of this universe: to create a legacy that will keep the coals of the vampire literary platform burning forever.
