My interview with author J.M. Celi
4 November 2023
I never knew what a shillelagh was, let alone that it could be used as a rapier, and if I’m really being honest, I didn’t even necessarily recall that a rapier was that thing used in fencing until the author of The Unlife of Lisa Cooper explained it to me. I might have just previously called it a fencing sword, or a fencing thing, who knows? The point is, I learned a lot of cool stuff from J.M. Celi’s Kindle-Vella-turned-Kindle-ebook (and print book) about a Bostonian vampire named Lisa Cooper. Lisa has roamed the streets of Boston as a vampire for about 150-plus years. She’s seen it all—civil wars, world wars, revolutions, women’s suffrage, women’s liberation, the Summer of Love, 9/11, Donald Trump—and it’s fair to say she’s a tad fed up. If you had to spend the past century and a half (some odd) years staying underground when the sun’s up and enduring bad techno after sundown, you might be a tad fed up too. Lisa has spent her unlife using her “curse” just enough to keep it going, but always pulling back before it pulls her in too far. In this way, she remains a vampire, but retains just enough essence of being alive…. Half in, half out, perhaps. She plays the game of the undead, but craves from her non-beating heart the rosy cheeks of the living. You can’t walk two roads—not at the same time, and not if you want to be a master of one path. Lisa survives, but she doesn’t rule. Her fellow vampires organize themselves into “bleeds”—gangs, or clans, who each dominate a city…somewhat peacefully until one gang, or bleed leader becomes power thirsty and seeks to take more territory. (Here are the echoes of Sam Shepard’s The Tooth of Crime that I referenced in the interview.) Lisa finds herself pulled into the latest gang war (or bleed-war) unwillingly, just when she meets Neil and starts to feel something like being in love again. Good ol’ average-Joe, chip off the old block Neil, who makes her feel like Siobhan McQueeney (her mortal self) again. He’s not exactly Buffy to Lisa’s Angel, but he does help her fight off the fae-assasins that someone has sent to…keep her in her place? Teach her a lesson? Send her a message? Who knows? That’s what Lisa has to figure out—who wants her dead (or undead, whatever) and why is she a threat to them? Or, rather, to paraphrase Lisa, she needs to find out who wanted her “to do some shit” or to “give [her] some shit.” Either way, there’s going to be “some shit” going down.
I was pleasantly surprised to learn in the interview that there’s a sequel in the works for The Unlife of Lisa Cooper. “Lisa goes to Ireland,” Jamie told me. That’s all he’s willing to divulge about it. Well, that, plus, he’ll be turning up the heat on the slow burn romance that begins at a low simmer in the first book. Back in July, Jamie wrapped the prequel, The Vampires of 1883, on Kindle Vella. That covers Lisa’s backstory—when she was a fledgling vamp, just three years old in undead years. It takes us back to mid-19th century Boston. There was a missed opportunity to ask about Wicked Wound of Whitney Hill, available as a paperback and free on Kindle Unlimited. That has nothing to do with Lisa, or vampires. It’s actually about witches, though they’re a lot like Lisa in that they have do-gooder instincts in deviance of their underworld trappings.