As House Majority Leader Eric Cantor moves through Washington like the living dead, it’s weirdly appropriate that the Democrat vying for his Congressional seat has a side-line interest in vampires.
Jack Trammell will have to debate plenty of weighty questions during his campaign against Republican David Brat in Virginia’s 7th district, but I want to sink my teeth into this surprisingly line in his curriculum vitae: “Current projects include a vampire novel.”
That sounds like good preparation for work on Capital Hill.
“It was actually intended to be a little more complicated than a standard vampire novel,” Trammell tells me. “The world has quite a few of those right now. In fact, it was supposed to be in the guise of a vampire novel, but actually turn into a medical type of thriller.”
Like, say, Obamacare?
Trammell’s working title is “A Shape I Wist.” But the blood has drained from this project for now.
“Alas, it is a manuscript that is only half done,” Trammell says, “with various chapters, some complete and some half-formed. One might speculate that I won’t be doing much work on it until after November.”
Till then, interested fiction readers may want to check out his YA novel, “Return to Treasure Island”; his historical novel, “The Saints Departed”; or even his romance novel, “Sarah’s Last Secret.” In these bitterly partisan times, Congress surely could use a little romance.
Trammell, who, like his Republican opponent David Brat, works at Randolph-Macon College, has published a number of scholarly articles related to his interest in history and sociology, but genre novels demand a different kind of creativity and reach a different kind of audience.
“I like to write for fun, as some of my credits no doubt suggest,” Trammell says. “But at a deeper level, I try to write to make people think. If you make people think, you’ve accomplished something.”
