The Vetala, A Vampire-like Parasite That Possesses Its Victims!

Guest Post by Phillip Ernest, who wrote a Sanskrit vampire novel, called "The Vetala."

I thank Tami for offering me the opportunity to write this guest blog post on The Vetala: a novel of undying love.

Phillip Ernest, author of "The Vetala"

My vampire novel took me by surprise, like an unquiet spirit back from the dead, like a lost memory.

When I was growing up in Canada, I loved vampires in comics and films, and later, in fiction. But from the beginning, my own writing was always poetry. And in my thirties, my fascination with Sanskrit, the ancient literary language of India, drew me away from creative writing into academics. It was a wrong path for I would wander lost for many years.

In 2014, I had been living in the Indian city of Pune for eight years. As I walked home from my office job one day, I stopped at a junk paper shop to check out their used books. Among the English books, there was almost a whole shelf of novels from the new generation of vampire fiction that had developed since I had left Canada in 2004. I also saw Bram Stoker's Dracula, which I had actually never read.

The Vetala: available from the publisher 

I left that shop without buying anything but what I had seen had stuck in my mind. The vampire had come back to haunt me!

Over the following days, I found myself brooding. My academic ambitions had failed, my literary ambitions had failed, my life was going nowhere, I was a disappointment to myself and to others...

Then, I had a sudden inspiration! Maybe, from my strange perspective as a non-Indian Sanskritist living in India, I could write an Indian vampire novel that appealed to readers everywhere! Maybe I could, after all, despite so much past failure, finally achieve something!

So I went back to the shop and bought a copy of Bram Stoker's Dracula, and I began to read it in my spare moments at work. One day, after reading a few pages, the essential plot of The Vetala came to me, almost automatically, just like a possessing spirit. Yet it didn’t seem to owe anything to Stoker’s novel. It arose out of my Indian experiences and dreams, and the Sanskrit literature that had never stopped obsessing me. And as I wrote —for an hour each day before dawn—it surprised me to see how much love for India was coming out. I had almost forgotten...

The Vetala is a love story that spans many rebirths. The protagonist, a woman professor of Sanskrit at the University of Zagreb, has been translating an obscure Sanskrit manuscript on the vetala for more than twenty years. The vetala is a parasitical vampire-like being that possesses the bodies of his victims. In fact, it was a vetala that long ago killed Nada’s lover, setting her on this path of obsessive scholarly revenge.

Later, when her Indian mentor and collaborator dies in Pune, the monster suddenly reappears, emboldened and determined to seize the manuscript at last. His opposition grows increasingly desperate as Nada nears the text’s conclusion, and with the help of two fellow-scholars, she struggles to decipher its climactic secret—a secret which would allow her to exorcize the vetala at last. She would free not only the mysterious man whom he had possessed for centuries but also, perhaps, her own imprisoned and forgotten love.

The Vetala: a story of love forgotten and remembered. Nada’s, and mine.