Jews Vs. Vampires

A Modern Fantasy Blood Libel

A Jewish wizard joins forces with the KKK to end the vampire menace once and for all in this darkly humorous meditation on power, conspiracy theory, and bigotry.

Meet Benjamin Reisman. With his 180 IQ and PhD in physics from MIT, he's easily the most powerful wizard in history—or rather, he would be if he could deal with the crippling guilt. Sure, it sounds easy in the abstract to murder children and drain their blood, but in practice it's essentially impossible—unless you're a psychopath.

So why does he do it? Why does a Jewish boy do anything he doesn't want to do? Family, that's why. Without Ben, his extended family of ancient Jewish vampire hunters would be out of business. But Ben has a plan, one last gig to end the vampire menace forever. Then he can move to Silicon Valley and work for an artificial intelligence start-up.

When that plan gets everyone killed, and the US government turns its back, the remains of his family assign him another unpleasant task: go to Arkansas and form an alliance with the KKK.

Meet Ariel Colescott, performatively woke, about to start her senior year at Yale. Despite her possibly insane father's insistence that the KKK is actually an ancient order of monster killers, Ariel tells him she will not be joining. In fact, she is severing all ties. Having a family that leads a racist domestic terrorist organization is simply incompatible with her values and ambition to move to LA and become a cinematographer. She breaks the news the very day that Benjamin arrives . . . and gets her family killed as well—just a coincidence; twice does not a pattern make.

Fleeing the massacre and the vampire noble Zeppelin Crowe, the pair journey to Boston with Ariel's mysterious Uncle Jim. At Harvard they . . . fine, conceded, thrice is a pattern, but none of this is Ben's fault—not really. And are vampires really the problem, or is it Ben's childhood friend Moshe, whom Ben's dad neglected to murder all those years ago?

Statement of AI Use

Jews Vs. Vampires was written by a human—me. I use a lot of em dashes not because my intelligence is artificial but because they are so useful. My hope is that the uniqueness of my voice will make it obvious that an LLM didn't write it. I don't understand why anyone would have an LLM do the writing instead of doing it themselves. I mean, it's not like there's big bucks in writing novels. As a get rich quick scheme there are many higher percentage shots to be had.

I did use several LLMs as part of my copy editing process. My prompts asked the LLM to check my prose for punctuation and conformance to the Chicago Manual of Style. When the errors it found were not obvious, I would double check and apply the edits myself. In my opinion this is a legitimate use of LLMs in novels but if you are a purist I do understand. The amusing thing about using LLMs this way is that after a time it began to compliment my writing. And not in vague obviously ass-kissing ways. Its compliments were specific and insightful and I must admit that I liked them.

Then, when the LLM had me good and buttered up, it started asking for creative input. I had to shake my head. I even let it give me suggestions a few times to see if it really could write better than I but it could not. Or rather, it did not get my unique voice. I rejected the blandification and left it all human. The cover has a mix of AI and human inputs and I think it randomly turned out pretty amazing.

Oh, and I just realized that the matzo ball joke on the author page was written by Claude as placeholder text. But then a friend of mine liked it, so I'm leaving it. Claude isn't Jewish. Does that make the joke antisemitic?

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