Bangs, Nina
Bangs, Nina
(pop culture)Romance writer Nina Bangs is the author of multiple series of vampire novels. Bangs was born in San Antonio, Texas, but largely grew up in New Jersey. She attended Rutgers University and, after graduation with a degree in English, became an elementary school teacher. Only after she had spent some years teaching, and reading romance novels in her leisure time, did she try her hand at writing. She was between jobs, with time on her hands when she penned her first book. She had written five book-length manuscripts before selling one of them, An Original Sin (1999), to Dorchester Publishing at the end of the 1990s.
After turning a half dozen romance novels, Bang turned her attention to the first vampire series, which came to be called the “Mackenzie Vampires” series. The first volume appeared early in 2004. Each of the four novels pits a female protagonist against one of the Mackenzies, a Scottish vampire line whose unattached males tend to be young, handsome alpha males ready for love and adventure. The first novel finds Blythe, an employee of Ecstasy, Inc. (a company that assists clientele in obtaining happiness), dealing with the seductive Darach Mackenzie, a five-hundred-year-old vampire. Subsequent volumes focus on other couples—human female and vampire male—but bring back characters from the earlier stories.
Just as the second volume of the Mackenzie vampire saga was to appear, the first volume of the “Castle of Dark Dreams” trilogy introduced readers to three vampires—Eric, Brynn, and Conall McNair. They inhabit a castle that is also an adult theme park where adventurous women can assume fantasy roles in which eroticism is a commanding factor. Each of the three volumes introduced one of the brothers and the woman who challenged him.
In 2008, Bangs initiated a new “Gods of the Night” series, which did not involve vampires as major players, but included vampires as part of the supernatural environment in which all the action takes place. Thus, while Bangs is not bound to vampires, the good guy vampires she has created have assumed an important and continuing role in pushing her career forward. She has become a member of the small cadre of romance authors best known for their vampire characters.
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