Win DOZEN BLACK ROSES And More From The Freed Book Dude!

The Free Book Dude (A/K/A The Free Kindle Dude) is holding a contest, in association with Biting Dog Press, where you can win my ebooks A DOZEN BLACK ROSES and KNUCKLES & TALES for free. Not only that, but you'll also win ebooks by Neil Gaiman, Jack Ketchum & Neil Barrett Jr. You'll end up with ten (10) ebook titles should you win. The titles made available for the contest are:

A Day At The Fair by Neal Barrett, Jr.
Knuckles And Tales by Nancy A. Collins
The Transformed Mouse by Jack Ketchum
House Guest by John Paul Allen
Suffer The Flesh by Monica J. O'Rourke
Hallelujah by Akela Cooper
Through Darkest America by Neal Barrett, Jr.
A Dozen Black Roses by Nancy A. Collins
Murder Mysteries by Neil Gaiman
Dark Blessings by John Paul Allen

Sonja Blue Fan Art

Ever since the internet came into play, in the mid-late 1990s, I have received (and stumbled across) various examples of fan art depicting Sonja Blue. Some of it I can assign a Real Life name to, while some only have email/online handles. So if I do not properly attribute a piece of artwork correctly, it is not out of malicious intent, but genuine ignorance.

This is one of the earliest examples of Sonja Blue fan art in my digital collection (hell, the entire collection is digital). I no longer know who the original artist is, although I'm fairly sure it was a woman who may have used the pseudonym 'Pixie'. In any case, I'm reasonably certain this piece dates back to the late 1990s, early 2000s.

 This is one is also amongst the oldest examples of fan art I have in my collection. It was drawn by Nicklas Anderson in 1999.

I'll continue posting examples of fan art, as well as portraits drawn by professional artists, on this blog, and will try to identify the artists as best I can. If you recognize your art, feel free to chime in.

Still More Foreign Book Covers--And Some Unexpected Casting

This is the German edition of In The Blood, which was known in Germany (and most of Europe) as A Dozen Black Roses. I liked the title so much I used it for the 4th Sonja Blue novel.

Here's the Russian edition of In The Blood, and its title also translates into A Dozen Black Roses as well.

This is the Festa edition of Sunglasses After Dark, which was known in Germany as The Death Kiss of Sonja Blue. The first paperback edition was from Goldmann. You may notice that Festa has decided to go ahead and cast Angelina Jolie in the role. Oddly enough, during one of the many times I've been poked with a stick by Hollywood about making a Sonja Blue movie, a relatively-unknown Jolie was considered for the part. Other potential Sonja Blues over the years have included Reese Witherspoon, Asia Argento, Jennifer Lopez (don't ask), Milla Jojovich, and the singer Pink.

More Foreign Book Covers

The Japanese edition of A DOZEN BLACK ROSES

 The Finnish edition of Sunglasses After Dark. The title translates to "Glasses Like Blackberries" (?)

The Russian edition of Sunglasses After Dark.

Listen To My Interview on WHQR 91.3 fm

On Friday the 13th I was interviewed live on WHQR, the public radio station here in Wilmington. Here is the podcast of that day's Midday Interview with Jemila Ericson. In it I discuss the world behind the Golgotham urban fantasy series, my upcoming personal appearance on April 16th (today!) and the forthcoming release of the revised & updated ebook edition of Sunglasses After Dark.

Photo Credit: Beth Gwinn

Sonja Blue Related Items Plucked From The Interwebs

The Rest Of Everything has a few nice things to say about the Sonja Blue series, as collected in the Midnight Blue omnibus.

Also, Too Much Horror Fiction remembers Sunglasses After Dark.

And here's a portrait of Sonja Blue as imagined by friend and fellow Arkansan Byron Taylor.

I'll Be Live On The Radio on Friday the 13th!

I'll be on WHQR 91.3 fm's Midday Interview  with Jemila Ericson from 12:06-12:16 pm  on Friday the 13th. She'll be interviewing me about Left Hand Magic, the second book in my new Golgotham series from Penguin.

Kindle
Nook
iTunes
Sony
Kobo
Google Play

Sonja Blue Overseas Part I

Here are some covers from foreign editions of the various books in the Sonja Blue series...

This is the Czech (?) edition of  In The Blood, which was known in Europe as A Dozen Black Roses.

This is the cover for the Japanese edition of Sunglasses After Dark. It was popular enough over there that there is a Japanese prog-rock band called Sonja Blue.

This is the French edition of Sunglasses After Dark. The title translates to The Ecstasy Of Blood. It kind of reminds me of trippy mid-70s sf/fantasy paperbacks.

Here is the German first edition of Sunglasses After Dark, which was published under the title The Deathkiss of Sonja Blue.  I have no idea why it looks like a YA novel.

I'll post more covers from foreign editions. If anyone has any they wish to share, please let me know. I'm pretty sure I don't have all of them.

The Original Sunglasses After Dark Cover

The original cover for Sunglasses After Dark, first published in 1989, was by artist Mel Odom, an immensely talented and highly stylized illustrator whose work has graced numerous book covers over the last 20+ years, as well as periodicals such as Playboy, Andy Warhol's Interview and The Advocate (which recently pubbed an article about Gene, a collectible 'art doll' that Mel designed). I attribute a good deal of the success of Sunglasses After Dark to its striking cover. In a time when 99.9% of all "horror" novels had embossed black covers featuring either a skeleton, skull or a demonic child (if not all three) , mine was released with a white cover and free of type. If you have a copy with this artwork, but with a title  across the top, you have a 2nd edition.  Mel's design for Sunglasses After Dark was nominated for, and won, several design awards within the commercial publishing industry that year. He would later provide covers for Tempter and In The Blood as well.

Vampires For Guys Approves Of Sonja Blue

Vampires For Guys, a reminder that vampires are not exclusively the fodder of YA novels and romance novels , gives the Sonja Blue novels a strong recommendation.

Midnight Blue Cover Art by Thom Ang

Authors Note: When the Midnight Blue omnibus was originally published in 1995, this type of cover--made popular by Sandman cover artist  Dave McKean--was considered edgy and cutting edge. Now it is most commonly found on YA novels to the point where it is visual short hand for "aimed at teen-aged girls". How times have changed.

Search & Destroy Promo

Time To Search For Search & Destroy

Sonja Blue is back! In a world full of sparkling vampires, it's time someone finally brought the hurt! Before there was Sookie Stackhouse, Anita Blake, or even Buffy, there was Sonja Blue, the Stoker Award-winning tough-as-nails, wisecracking vampire/vampire slayer. Just as Iggy Pop set the tone for the Punk Revolution, Sonja Blue blazed the trail for the multitude of urban fantasy heroines that would follow her. And now she's back with a vengeance in Search And Destroy, her first original short story in 10 years. Homeless people are disappearing from the suburban No Man's Land known as The Scrub, and Sonja Blue is there to find out why--and put an end to it as only she can.

Cover by Melita "Miss Monster" Curphy

Buy it from Kindle
Buy it from Nook
Buy it from iTunes
Buy it from Sony
Buy it from Kobo

Dozen Black Roses Promo

Cold Turkey: Get It While It's Hot!

 Biting Dog Publications and I are releasing a series of Sonja Blue novellas and short fiction as ebooks. All of the novellas have been revised and updated and will have covers provided by artists I found on Deviant Art.

The first novella in the Biting Dog series is COLD TURKEY, which has a stunning cover by artist Juliane Ayers. Future titles will include Some Velvet Morning, Vampire King of the Goth Chicks and Tender Tigers.

COLD TURKEY synopsis:
Vampire hunter Sonja Blue has battled everything from the undead to ogres. But in Cold Turkey, her deadliest enemy proves to be The Other, the demonic entity that dwells within the darkest recesses of her mind and battles for control of their shared body. For years there has been an uneasy truce between the two—until The Other pushes Sonja over the edge by endangering the man who loves her.  Sonja takes revenge, enlisting the aid of the demon Malfeis in order to contain The Other once and for all. But can Sonja Blue starve The Other to death without destroying herself as well?


Cold Turkey is available only on Kindle

Pretender Vision!

From Sunglasses After Dark:

The creatures who call themselves Pretenders dwell in the cracks in mankind’s perception. To the untutored eye they are nothing to look at: beggars, cripples, prostitutes, and anonymous strangers. Their faces are unremarkable, their demeanor bland. They normally aren’t the types who like to draw attention to themselves. Although there are numerous subcategories, they all pretend to be human, hiding their demonic otherness behind a mask of carefully constructed banality. Only to those who truly know how to see do they stand revealed, their auras suffused with fearsome energy.

Kevin Weir's Flux Machine is dedicated to revealing the horrors that hide in plain sight, courtesy of spooky gifs created using old photographs from the Library of Congress.Sweet old grandmother or fiend from the Outer Dark? You be the judge.

A Dozen Black Roses Now Available As eBook

 The good folks at Biting Dog Publications approached me recently about making some of the Sonja Blue stories available in ebook format. So I used this as a chance to rewrite A Dozen Black Roses, the second most popular Sonja Blue novel, which was originally released as a crossover with White Wolf's Vampire: The Masquerade roleplaying game in the 1990s. I have removed all references to the Vampire: The Masquerade world and game-play and have extrensively re-written many passages, adding and deleting scenes.  This new, revised version is  now available to the reading public for the extremely reasonable price of $3.99.

 You can buy it from Kindle
You can buy it from Barnes & Noble/Nook
You can buy it from iTunes
You can buy it from Sony
You can buy it from Kobo

Welcome To True Blue: The Official Sonja Blue Blog

Hello! For those of you have stumbled over this blog courtesy of a search engine  or some other form of internet jiggery-pokery, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Nancy Collins, and I am the creator of the female punk vampire/vampire slayer Sonja Blue.

I first created Sonja back when I was in high school as a response to the lack of suitably dynamic, strong female characters to be found in the pop culture landscape. Originally a synthesis of Emma Peel, the original Blade from the old Tomb of Dracula comics and Philip Marlowe, I continued to tinker with her character over the next ten years, later tossing in a dash of Patty Hearst and Iggy Pop into the mix. Sonja Blue finally made her world debut in 1989 as the protagonist in my first novel, Sunglasses After Dark. 

At the time of its original publication by New American Library, Sunglasses After Dark was released as a horror novel, although today it would be recognized as what is now called Urban Fantasy. Sunglasses After Dark debuted to wide-spread critical praise and quickly became a best-seller. It won the Horror Writers Association's coveted Bram Stoker Award and the British Fantasy Society's Icarus Award, and was nominated for the John W. Campbell & James Tiptree Awards. In the years since its original publication there have been 5 follow-up publications: In The Blood (1992), Paint It Black (1995), A Dozen Black Roses (1997), Darkest Heart (2002), and Dead Roses For A Blue Lady (2002). There was also been a comic book series and a line of T-shirts featuring the likeness of Sonja Blue. As of this date, Sunglasses After Dark has been published in France, Germany, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Poland, Russia, Japan, and Italy.

With the rise of Kindle, the iPad, the Nook and other dedicated ereaders, I have been inspired to release the Sonja Blue series (and all my other Out Of Print novels) in digital format. In doing so, I have taken the opportunity to update and revise the individual texts for today's market. I have also made a point of commissioning new covers from some of the most talented graphic artists currently working in the field.  I am also working on a new Sonja Blue novel--the first in over a decade--called Kill City, as well as arranging, in collaboration with artist Stan Shaw, for a revised reprint edition of the Sunglasses After Dark graphic novel from IDW Publications.

From here on out, I will be posting information and news regarding the Sonja Blue series, as well as my other work, including the new Golgotham series from Penguin. Keeping checking back for updates.
You can also follow me on Face Book at eitherhttps://www.facebook.com/nancy.collins
or https://www.facebook.com/pages/Sonja-Blue/196692653687195