The Night Inside
A Vampire Thriller

Penguin Books, 1993
ISBN 0-670-84426-8  (trade paperback)  

The Night Inside: Jacket Copy

    Ardeth Alexander’s life is the wholly predictable one of a graduate student.  She lives by schedules – for papers due, classes to attend, small jobs of research to complete for extra income.  Ardeth is the responsible one – steady, dependable, maybe even a little boring.  
    One day, when she is out for her customary early morning walk, all that changes.  Ardeth is abducted by two men, blindfolded, gagged, and taken to a dirty, dank prison cell.  
    Even more terrifying than the abduction itself is the purpose for her presence there – to sustain with her blood the life of another prisoner.  But as she observes the strange grey-haired man who is kept mad with torture and hunger, and the men who force her to do their will, she begins to fear and despise her captors even more than she does the man in the next cell.  Slowly, tentatively, she talks to him and tries to reach behind the madness to the man she believes is hidden within.  As her relationship with Rozokov develops, the nightly feedings become sensual celebrations.  Then, filled with desire for the man, fuelled with a desperate urge for revenge, and lured by the promise of immortality, Ardeth takes the final step.
    From the moment the vampire’s slumbering body pulsates to life until the shocking conclusion in a crumbling old mansion, The Night Inside is a thrilling and erotic tale of the thirst for blood and the lust for revenge.

The Night Inside: Publication History 

Canada: Trade Paperback, 1993
              Paperback, 1994

 U.S: Hardcover, Ballantine Books 1994
         Paperback,  Ballantine Books,  retitled Kiss of the Vampire 1995

U.K: Paperback, Penguin/Creed, 1993

France:  Trade paperback,  Nuit Interieure, Albin Michel, 1997
             Paperback, 1999

Germany:  Paperback, Blutgesang, Bastei Lubbe, 1995

Holland:  Trade Paperback, De Beet!,

Norway:  Paperback, Dodens stemme, Fredhois Forlag, A/S , 1994  

Sweden:  Hardcover, Nattvarelser, En Vampythrille, Wahlstroms, 1994

The Night Inside: Reviews

(selected and edited by the author.  Hey, it’s my web site.)

“It’s almost impossible not to finish The Night Inside in one frenzied, chocolate donut munching sitting.  It’s also impossible not the root for its feisty, feminist vampiress heroine.”
Charles Busch, author of Vampire Lesbians of Sodom

“Studded with passages of dark lustre … truly original.”
Publishers Weekly

“Baker has obviously thought about what surrendering to the dark side means that lifts this book up above the vast …morass of romantic vampire fiction.”
Quill & Quire

“Baker has here contrived a riveting story, and her compromised heroine, a historian whose plunge into the past remakes her life, is a strikingly drawn and hauntingly memorable figure.”
USA Today

“Terrific … The unrelenting tension between the monstrous and the human propels this unique tale of gripping suspense."
Katherine Ramsland, author of The Vampire Chronicles

“The metamorphosis is achieved in a highly charged ritual as sensuous as any written: this is consummation as bloodbath, as mutual blood-letting and blood-sucking … breathless, lingering, erotic…”
The Globe and Mail

The Night Inside: Notes

The Night Inside started out as a short story set in a carnival.  It then took an odd sidestep into the short story "Cold Sleep" and, at one point, involved drug smuggling and the Mexican Day of the Dead (this phase was very brief and inspired by ideas from my husband, Richard, whose scale of action is much, much bigger than mine).

It took me about seven years to write the book, mostly because I was working 10 hours a day at my real job.  I wrote mostly while I was on vacation or during visits with my friend, Kim Kofmel.  We spent a week at a cottage, a long weekend at a farm, and several weekends in Stratford in February (why Stratford in February? Because we could both get there on the train and the hotel rooms are really cheap at that time of year!). 

What interested me in the story was really Ardeth's struggle to decide who and what she was going to be.  In the course of the book, she trades one stereotype for another on her way to trying to transcend them both.  I was also intrigued by the difference between the popular image of the vampire (cool, sexy and dead) and my own imaginings about what vampire life would really be like.  These concerns were why I created that vampires I did.  The fact that I live in Toronto, one of the safest cities in North America, is another.  You just can't leave dead bodies lying around in Toronto and not have it cause a major panic.  (I suggested in a radio interview once that you could do such a thing in New York - my fellow panelist from NY was not amused.  But certainly you can do it in books about New York or L.A., which was really my point.)

In my fiction, the process of becoming a vampire does not in itself change your personality.  The changes that occur over time are the natural results of each individual vampire's adaptation to the rules of their new existence.  Becoming a vampires does not automatically make you evil - but it does make it much harder to obey the general moral standards of society. 

Because my vampires don't have to kill, when and why they choose to kill becomes significant.

Music has always played a big part in the writing experience for me and this book was particularly influenced by music and musicians.  The title and section titles are all from songs by the British band Shriekback and musicians as diverse as X and Richard Thompson all contributed songs to my private soundtrack to the story.

As an aside, using songs for titles can end up being a great deal of trouble.  I almost ended up having to pay an outrageous sum of money for the foreign use rights to the Shriekback songs (the record company would have been making far more per word than I did!) but managed to get away with a much smaller payment in the end.

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