More Details about “Steve Newlin’s Field Guide to Vampires”

In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Michael McMillian shared details about his new book coming this fall, Steve Newlin’s Field Guide to Vampires (and Other Creatures of Satan).

This fall, the book Steve Newlin’s Field Guide to Vampires (And Other Creatures of Satan) will be released.True Blood associate producer Gianna Sobol came up with the idea, and you helped co-write it. Tell us about it.
This was Steve Newlin’s field guide that he was putting together after the Fellowship of the Sun takeover by the vampires at the end of season 2 and before he was turned sometime in that year where Sookie was missing. So it kinda fills in the gaps during that period where Steve and Sarah were splitting up, and he was doing a lot of spying and investigating on characters in the show and learning more about the supernatural world of True Blood, and these are all of his notes. And then once he was kidnapped by the vampires, this notebook was found in his abandoned car and eventually made its way into the hand of Pam and Eric, who go through and rewrite and annotate with snarky flair all of the things that Steve got wrong. Since we started writing it before season 6 really got into production, it covers a lot of seasons 1 through 5, and then we incorporate as much of season 6 as we can. It’s kinda like a True Blood wiki in a published form through the eyes of some of the funnier characters on the show.

And there are re-created letters, postcards, and handwritten notes?
The graphic design department at Chronicle did such a good job with it. We have little fliers that the Fellowship of the Sun would hand out to children on how to kill vampires. There’s an Anubis Airlines emergency instructional pamphlet on what to do if the plane is crashing and you need to evacuate your coffin. There’s a lot of really fun found materials. And then I went through and did a lot of doodles as Steve Newlin, so you get to see his drawings of werewolves and vampires and what he thinks fairies might look like if they do exist. [Laughs] It was a really fun book to put together. We try to keep that sense of humor alive throughout the whole thing.

It sounds like in addition to being funny, this will give us some insight into what happened between seasons 3 and 4, and possibly who turned Steve. Can’t wait! Pre-order your copy now!