In conversations with interviewers, when they ask me about favorite writers or books, there is one writer I admire that I always fail to mention. Leslie (Les) Whitten. Whitten has written a number of novels, and one of them, the Progeny of the Adder, is undoubtedly the influence for Jeff Rice’s novel, The Night Stalker, the source for the television series of the same name, and two television movies, and a later not so good television series of the same name. Darin McGavin was the original Karl Kolchak, and for me, he defined the role of the intrepid reporter out to get a story at all cost. The stories always had to do with vampires and werewolves, and critters of their ilk.

The script for the original The Night Stalker television movie was written by the great Richard Matheson. At the time, it was one of the highest rated movies on television. So popular, it spawned another Jeff Rice book and another made for television movie titled The Night Strangler. This in turn gave birth to the television series, The Night Stalker. But the first film, the story of a vampire in modern times, is the best of all the movies and series episodes, and it owes much to its original influence, Progeny of the Adder.

Whitten’s approach to the vampire is in considerable contrast to the popular version seen today in most vampire films. That of the stately, romantic, attractive and cursed young man that really only wants to love some beautiful woman eternally while sucking a bit of blood on the side. These vampire books, and films, tend to appeal primarily to women, and are romance novels with fangs. Nothing wrong with that, but I’ve had enough of it. I suppose Interview with the Vampire, a very good book, is to blame for this trend, along with certain vampire films, but it seems by now this approach would be as old as death itself. But, alas, not at all.

Whitten’s version is not like this. His version is about a dark, loathsome creature whose breath smells like a rotting corpse, who has a lot of broken teeth, sagging skin, and blood red eyes, tremendous strength and endurance, and who is really hungry. He has some of the common vampire abilities, but he can’t turn into a bat, or smoke, and in many ways he’s more like a deranged human. He is anything but attractive or romantic, and is in fact, scary as hell.

And if it wasn’t enough that Whitten wrote Progeny of the Adder, which defined a certain type of vampire story, sadly lost to the more recent romantic versions, he also wrote what I believe to be the definitive werewolf novel, Moon of the Wolf. Of course, it’s a small field. Only a handful of werewolf novels stand out from, if you’ll excuse me, the pack. Short stories seem to be where this creature is best defined.

Moon was not only a good werewolf novel with a unique approach to the subject, it was made into a creepy television film starring David Jansen. The film has lost some of its, ahem, bite in the following years due to the advancement in special effects, (the same could be said for The Night Stalker, the television movies and series) and the simple fact that more can be shown on TV now than in the past. But when this show first appeared (and it could stand a remake) I remember where I was when I saw it. A friend’s house, and we came upon it by accident–there were only three channels in those days, and I was changing channels, and we did this chore by turning the dial on the set by hand, no clicker–and I came upon the program just as it was beginning. We got hooked. Our plans to go out and ride around looking for girls evaporated. We got lost in the story. Especially me. This was my meat. My writing career was still a few years away from starting, and almost twelve or thirteen away from me becoming a full-time writer, but this kind of story, especially then, was just the sort of thing that made my blood boil and my creative passions jiggle with the excitement of a big breasted stripper working it out to a conga beat.

In fact, I saw the film first, read the book later, then found Progeny of the Adder. This led to Whitten’s The Alchemist, and later to some non horror novels, suspense books as I recall, (I believe he also wrote a historical) but they didn’t stay with me. Not like the first three, Progeny of the Adder, Moon of the Wolf, and The Alchemist, the latter being pretty damn erotic and graphic for its time. But I’m only going to say it’s about a modern man caught up in ancient secrets, with lots of sex peppering the story. It’s a good and interesting read. But it isn’t in the same league as Progeny and Moon of the Wolf. I mention it here because it fits as a kind of trio to his early work.

Leslie Whitten was not a fancy stylist, and could be pretty meat and potatoes in that arena, but he was a good and engaging storyteller and the prose never got in the way of the tale he wanted to tell. In fact, for me, there was something hypnotic about his prose. Just recently this was proved to me again when my friend David Schow gave me a book with two of Whitten’s novels in it: Fangs of the Morning, and the aforementioned Alchemist.

I had never heard of Fangs of the Morning, and think the title is just awful. Since it had a nineties copyright, some many years after the novels I’ve mentioned, I thought it might have been an earlier unpublished novel that had finally found a home. Secretly, I feared it might be a late attempt for Whitten to cash in on his original vampire novel, Progeny. What I mean by this, is often when a writer seems to disappear, and you find a recent novel by them, it’s not always a positive sign. Sometimes the reason that writer has disappeared is because their work played out, or they played out, and when they come back…Well…They’ve been away too long. You can stay away from writing and lose your edge, the way a boxer can. Unlike a boxer, a writer can last a lot longer, but only if they stay in the game. I was worried.

I need not have been. Whatever it’s time frame of having been written, Fangs of the Morning is terrific. I felt the old zing of being captured by a simple story well told. Not the pure guts and gush of many modern horror novels, but that creeping sort of happy discomfort that reminded me of being younger, discovering this kind of fiction, lying in bed with one small light on, the fan blowing, the covers pulled up to my chin. It was a deliciously engaging horror novel and my recommendation is read it late at night when you don’t have to be anywhere the next morning.

Laying it right out there, Whitten tells a cracker jack of a story with characters you care about. He does this all swiftly and without a lot of hullabaloo. Fangs of the Morning doesn’t quite match Progeny of the Adder and Moon of the Wolf, but it’s good. Progeny and Moon are in their own way as classic as I am Legend and ‘Salem’s Lot, yet the books, and Whitten, are mostly forgotten. That shouldn’t be the case. Whitten and Matheson are of the same school. Simple ideas well told swiftly, but with an almost hidden chewy texture.

So go out and find these books. They are worth the search. They are true treats. I just wish some enterprising small press would find him, see if he has something new, and if there is nothing new, pay him to write one, or at least reprint these horror classics in the special volumes they deserve so that they can be placed on the shelf with Matheson and Bloch and Stephen King, whose nasty vampire in ‘Salem’s Lot might owe a little itself to Progeny. The influence of these books is broad, though general knowledge of them is slim. Maybe someone can remedy that with new editions.

Leslie Whitten. Remember the name.