Daniels III, Leslie Noel
Daniels III, Leslie Noel (1943–)
(pop culture)Leslie Noel Daniels III, author of a series of vampire novels, was born in 1943 in Connecticut. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1965 and his master’s degree in 1968 from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. His master’s thesis was written on Frankenstein. Daniels has since pursued a career in writing and in music.
During the early 1970s he produced two nonfiction works, both of which touched on the vampire: Comix: A History of Comic Books in America (1971) and Living in Fear: A History of Horror in the Mass Media (1975). He then edited two anthologies of horror stories: Dying of Fright (1976) and Thirteen Tales of Terror (1976).
In 1978, in the first of five novels, Daniels introduced a new vampire, Sebastian de Villanueva in The Black Castle. The book told the story of the origin of Don Sebastian, a brother of a local inquisitor in Spain in 1496. The vampire next appeared in sixteenth-century Mexico in The Silver Skull (1979) and as Citizen Vampire (1981), surviving amid the French Revolution. Yellow Fog (1986) found Sebastian, now known as Sebastian Newcastle, settled in London where he found love in the person of Felicia Lamb and an enemy in Reginald Callender, who was engaged to Felicia until Sebastian stole her away. In the end, Felicia lay dead and Sebastian fled, pursued by Callender. The chase led them to India and an encounter with the followers of the goddess Kali in the last of the five novels, No Blood Spilled (1991).
Since No Blood Spilled, Daniels has not returned to the vampire genre. In the new century, he has been best known for his nonfiction writing on the world of comic book super heroes—Batman and Wonder Woman.
Sources:
Danis the Dark Productions see: Vampire Fandom: United States