Gentlemen Prefer Succubi

I’ve always been a bit of an armchair Egyptologist, and a lot of scattershot, offhand research went into some of the historical elements of this book. The Temple of the Aten is generally believed to be one of the first-if not the first-monotheistic temples known in history. I thought this might be a pretty perfect setting for the back story of my fallen angels and Queen Nitocris. Not much of current-day Amarna is left standing, and no stonework, as it was likely cannibalized for other projects during later reigns.

The passage about Herodotus’s The Histories that Jackie and Remy read off the internet is more or less paraphrased from the original. It was too awesome and bizarre not to use.

To make my story flow, I also adjusted a few other bits. The most famous bust of Nefertiti is actually in a museum in Berlin. That didn’t suit my story, so Jackie viewed a similar one in the Cairo Museum. The wings/black cloaks mentioned on the wall paintings are as completely imaginary as my Serim and vampires are. The real Nitocris and real Nefertiti existed over 800 years apart-impossible if you’re a mortal, but not such a stretch if you’re immortal.

Also, visitors to the Amarna site today must ferry in across the Nile, but I’ve no idea if you can actually take a speedboat from Cairo to the site. In all my research, this was the most difficult piece to find out. I found nothing that said you could, but nothing that said you could not, either. Given that and the distance between the two cities (about 200 miles), I made the artistic decision to make such travel possible in the boundaries of the story.