A Job They Sink Their Teeth Into

Up in the hills, past cornfields, past grazing cows, past weather-beaten barns, past an American flag flapping in a grove of sunflowers, past a little river called the Little River, is a tiny white house with bird feeders on the deck and a green flag festooned with pictures of flowers and butterflies.

It’s the headquarters of the empire that vampires built.

Here, Angela Kessler and Warren Lapine live in bucolic wedded bliss. And here they produce Dreams of Decadence, America’s foremost magazine of “vampire poetry and fiction.” She’s the editor. He’s the publisher.

Dreams of Decadence features stories about undead bloodsuckers, told in appropriately lusty prose: I met her halfway, tangled in a messy embrace that left her helpless and her neck exposed. My new teeth sank in, and the taste of blood washed over my mouth. Delicious.

The covers tend to depict beautiful women, frequently with blood running down their necks, or over their pouty lips, or in teardrops spilling from their sad, sad eyes.

“The running joke is that I always have vampire babes on the cover,” says Kessler, 30. She’s wearing geeky oval glasses, dangling earrings and a discreet stud on one side of her nose. “If I don’t have vampire babes, it won’t sell.”

She pulls out her bestselling issue. The cover shows a very pale woman with very red lips and two red dots on her throat, right over the jugular vein.

“That one jumped off the newsstands,” says Lapine, 37. With long black hair, he looks like a heavy-metal musician, which is exactly what he used to be.

“I wish somebody would send me a cover with a male vampire babe,” Kessler says.

The two are quick to point out that they are not vampires. And, unlike some of their weirder readers, they don’t aspire to vampire-hood. They just happen to like vampire stories and poems. Lots of people do. In fact, Dreams of Decadence is so successful that they’ve used the profits to buy several other magazines.

None sells more than about 5,000 copies. They’re “genre magazines” with names like Weird Tales and Mythic Delirium: fantasy, science fiction, even science fiction poetry. They don’t publish any romance magazines--not yet, anyway--but if they did, they could include their own story, which is romantic in a goofy sort of way.

It begins with Kessler walking into a potted palm. The potted palm was in the lobby of a Lynchburg hotel, site of a 1993 science fiction convention. There, Kessler saw Lapine for the first time. She swiveled her head to take a gander at this guy with rock-star hair and boom! She banged into the potted palm.

“He came over and asked if I was all right,” she says, laughing. “And the rest is history.”

Kessler was 22, a Roanoke girl who’d gone to nearby Radford University and then worked as secretary. She came to the convention because she loved sci-fi and fantasy stories.

Lapine was there hawking his sci-fi mag Absolute Magnitude. He’d earned an English degree at the University of Massachusetts, then spent 10 years as a bass player in heavy-metal bands. But playing bass gave him carpal tunnel syndrome, so he decided to try writing science fiction. He bought the mags he’d loved back in high school, to get a feel for the market, and was shocked.

“I said, ‘My God, these stink! These are boring!”’ he says. He’s in his living room with Kessler, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with sci-fi and vampire novels. “The stuff they’re publishing now is just boring, pretentious literary tripe, like the stuff I had to read in college.”

“Literary with a capital L,” Kessler says, parodying a snooty British accent.

“Science fiction has always been plot-driven but that went away,” Lapine continues. “I figured I could do better than that, so I decided to start a magazine.”

He called it Harsh Mistress, after the Robert Heinlein novel “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.” Unfortunately, a lot of bookstore clerks figured it was some kind of kinky bondage magazine and put it on the shelf with Hustler. So Lapine changed the name to Absolute Magnitude, a scientific term nobody could possibly find suggestive, and promoted it at sci-fi conventions.

After meeting in Lynchburg, he and Kessler kept in touch by e-mail.

“We decided we were perfect for each other,” says Kessler, who moved to Greenfield, where Lapine lived with his daughter Tiffany, then 11.

“After I moved up there,” Kessler recalls, “he said, ‘I’ve been wanting to start a vampire magazine, but I just don’t have the time. Would you like to edit it?’ I’ve been a fan of vampires since I started reading Anne Rice novels at about 15, so I said OK. I had no idea what I was getting into.”

Kessler produced a cheesy-looking 40-page magazine called Dreams of Decadence, the title of the Lapine poem printed in it, which went like this:

*

Dreams of decadence

haunt me through the ages, blood

my only relief

*

Heavy. Anyway, Lapine took 50 copies to a sci-fi convention in Atlanta and sold them all on the first day. Soon, Dreams was a full-size quarterly magazine with 1,000 subscribers and newsstand sales of about 4,000 copies an issue. Since Lapine and Kessler produced the mag on a home computer, and paid writers only about a nickel a word, they made about $3 on every $5 copy they sold.

It was enough for Lapine to quit his day job. In 1998, they moved with Tiffany to Virginia, in Kessler’s beloved Blue Ridge Mountains, and married.

Their company, DNA Publications, then published just two magazines, Absolute Magnitude and Dreams of Decadence. That soon changed.

First, Lapine bought the legendary pulp fantasy magazine Weird Tales. Founded in 1923, it had published classic stories by H.P. Lovecraft and Ray Bradbury but was going bankrupt. Now it started making a bit of money, and eventually he bought Fantastic Stories, Aboriginal Science and Mythic Delirium as well. In 2000, he took over Science Fiction Chronicle, a monthly trade journal for the sci-fi industry. None sells many copies, but each makes a little money. Together, they give Lapine the power to cut better deals.

“I’m able to get better terms from distributors and better prices from printers,” he says.

Now Lapine and Kessler find themselves running a little media empire out of a tiny house in Floyd, about 20 miles from the North Carolina border. And they owe it all to vampires.

“Vampires are glamorous and sexy,” Kessler says. “Who wouldn’t want to be gorgeous and live forever?”

“Young and gorgeous for all eternity,” Lapine adds.

“Sounds good to me,” Kessler says.