Books for YA!: James Lyon Guest Post and Giveaway (Spooktacular Giveaway Hop)

Welcome to my stop in the Spooktacular Giveaway Hop hosted by I Am A Reader Not A Writer and The Diary of a Bookworm. So far, this is the biggest giveaway hop of the year, almost 400+ blogs are participating and there are tons of prizes to be given away.

So for this hop, we have a very special guest in our blog and I am very pleased to welcome the author of Kiss of the Butterfly, Mr. James Lyon! *applause*

A Guest Post by James Lyon

In honor of rapidly approaching Halloween, Erleen asked me to write a short post on vampires. She suggested that I write on the topic of “ten ways to slay a vampire”. I suppose she assumed that because I have done lots of research on the historical roots of vampires, have written a vampire-themed novel, eat lots of garlic, and have a Ph.D. in Balkan History, I would have a few ideas.

Well, I started to make a preliminary list of how to slay a vampire, but stopped. This is what it looked like:

Send it lots of cute kitten photos on Facebook and email.
Force it to watch the Kardashians or Honey Boo Boo.
Spam it on Twitter.
Make it dance to Gangnam Style.
Tie its shoelaces together.
Take it shopping at an after-Christmas sale on December 26^th at Walmart.
…..?

And that’s as far as I got, because I realized that those things would make a vampire irritable, cranky, and only whet its appetite for blood even further. A kitten merely constitutes an annoyingly tiny hors d'oeuvre that would force the vampire to pick fur from between its fangs afterwards, and the sheer quantity of blood in Kim Kardashian’s posterior or Honey Boo Boo’s body… Well, you get the idea.

Traditional Balkan folklore, however, offers two ways to slay a vampire.

1. Drive a Hawthorne wood stake (other types of wood and metal won’t do) through its heart, cut of its head, and then burn it. In other words, one must immobilize the vampire (the Hawthorne wood stake), detach its head from its body, and then burn it all.

2. A Vampirović/Kresnik must shoot the vampire through the heart with a bullet, at which point it dissolves into a puddle of gelatinous mush.

Since it is doubtful that any of us is a vampirović/kresnik, we are left with only the first method. I should warn you that Hawthorn wood stakes are not easy to come by.

Modern technology, however, has given us several new and innovative ways to slay a vampire. Thus, I present you, dear reader, with a list of an additional eight ways to slay a vampire using modern technology.

Flamethrower. This burns the vampire’s body, slaying it.
High Explosives. This vaporizes the vampire’s body.
Tree shredder. But you need to burn the vampire mulch afterwards. Under no circumstances may you use it for gardening purposes!
Napalm or White Phosphorus. The same as #1, but on a far greater scale.
Thermonuclear weapons. The same as #2, but also on a far greater scale.
Buy the “Vampire-Slaying” app for your iPhone or Android (Note, this only works on models newer than the iPhone 3).
Force the vampire to read or watch Twilight. This would kill it with laughter.
Force the vampire to listen to politicians’ campaign promises and debates.

Personally, I am more worried about warding off vampires than slaying them, which is why I keep long garlands of braided garlic hanging in my kitchen and bedroom. After all, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”.

About the Author

James Lyon is an accidental Balkanologist, having spent the better part of 32 years studying and working with the lands of the former Yugoslavia. He has a Ph.D. in Modern Balkan History from UCLA and a B.A. in Russian from BYU. He has lived in Germany, Russia, England, Massachusetts, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Utah, and California, and spent the better part of 18 years living in the lands of the former Yugoslavia, including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia, and has worked in Macedonia and Kosovo. He has traveled widely, from Africa to Latin America to the Middle East, and all over Europe. He currently works in Sarajevo and bounces back and forth to Belgrade. In his spare time he likes sailing through the Dalmatian islands and eating Sachertorte in Vienna at the old Habsburg Imperial Court’s Confectionary Bakery, Demel. He lost his cat in the forests of Bosnia and can’t find it. If you see a black and white cat that ignores you when you call the name “Cile II”, a reward is being offered…provided the cat hasn’t turned into a vampire.

Connect with James on Goodreads | Facebook |

For this giveaway, 2 winners will win an ebook copy of James Lyon's novel, Kiss of the Butterfly. If you like Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice then you should definitely check this out.

Title: Kiss of the Butterfly
Author: James Lyon
Genre/s: Paranormal Fantasy, Historical Fiction

Synopsis:

Kirkus Reviews wrote: "In the glut of vampire-themed novels now on the market, Lyon’s debut stands out… skillful… authentic… fascinating… inspired… Lyon executes it perfectly... vivid... engaging... highly promising... sophisticated..."

"The smell of blood is in the air, I sense it even now. People thirst for it; the entire country is mad with desire for it. And now we are going to war with our brothers because they look like us, and because we can smell our blood coursing through their veins...” A mysterious letter starts a university student on a journey into the war-torn lands of rapidly disintegrating Yugoslavia. Naively trusting his enigmatic professor, the student unwittingly descends into a dystopian crucible of decay, destruction, passion, death, romance, lust, immorality, genocide, and forbidden knowledge promising immortality. As the journey grows ever more perilous, he realizes he must confront an ancient evil that has been once again loosed upon the earth: from medieval Bosnia to enlightenment-era Vienna, from the bright beaches of modern-day Southern California to the exotically dark cityscapes of Budapest and Belgrade, and horrors of Bosnia.

Vampires have formed an integral part of Balkan folklore for over a thousand years. "Kiss" represents a radical departure from popular vampire legend, based as it is on genuine Balkan folklore from as far back as the 14th century, not on pop culture or fantasy. "Kiss of the Butterfly" offers up the real, horrible creatures that existed long before Dracula and places them within a modern spectrum.

Meticulously researched, “Kiss of the Butterfly” weaves together intricate threads from the 15th, 18th and 20th centuries to create a rich phantasmagorical tapestry of allegory and reality. It is about divided loyalties, friendship and betrayal, virtue and innocence lost, obsession and devotion, desire and denial, the thirst for life and hunger for death, rebirth and salvation. “Kiss” blends history and the terrors of the Balkans as it explores dark corners of the soul.

“Kiss of the Butterfly” is based on true historical events. In the year of his death, 1476, the Prince of Wallachia -- Vlad III (Dracula) -- committed atrocities under the cloak of medieval Bosnia’s forested mountains, culminating in a bloody massacre in the mining town of Srebrenica. A little over 500 years later, in July 1995, history repeated itself when troops commanded by General Ratko Mladic entered Srebrenica and slaughtered nearly 8,000 people, making it the worst massacre Europe had seen since the Second World War. For most people, the two events seemed unconnected…