Gateway Essentials: Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro was the first woman to be named a Living Legend by the International Horror Guild (2006) and is one of only two women ever to be named as Grand Master of the World Horror Convention (2003). In 1995, she was the only novelist guest of the Romanian government for the First World Dracula Congress, sponsored by the Transylvanian Society of Dracula, the Romanian Bureau of Tourism and the Romanian Ministry of Culture.

Although her early work was SF, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro is best known as the creator of the heroic vampire, the Count Saint-Germain. With her creation of Saint-Germain, she delved into history and vampiric literature and subverted the standard myth to invent the first vampire who was more honorable, humane, and heroic than most of the humans around him. She fully meshed the vampire with romance and accurately detailed historical fiction and filtered it through a feminist perspective that both the giving of sustenance and its taking were of equal erotic potency.

A professional writer since 1968, Yarbro has worked in a wide variety of genres, from science fiction to westerns, from young adult adventure to historical horror, publishing dozens of books.

So where to begin? Call us predictable, but when an author has a signature series so well known that it has dominated her career for decades . . . we’d start there!

Hotel Transylvania is the first of the Comte Saint-Germain novels, and is followed by over two dozen further volumes, of which Gateway is please dto have the first two: The Palace & Blood Games.

You can find more of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s work via her Author page on the SF Gateway website and read about her in her entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.