And, I think I’m going to name a main character Felix in some story in the future. Recently, I was looking around to see if he ever finished Armor 2 only to find John Steakley had died in 2010.

Everyone needs to eat and selling books usually isn’t the easiest way to make that happen, which is why I still have a full-time job. So it goes and so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut would say. He was important! He’s was not supposed to sell cars, he was supposed to write more awesome books. Not that there’s anything wrong with running a car dealership, but this was John Steakley I was hearing about! He wrote two of my favorite books. When I heard that, my head nearly exploded. While he was working on the sequel, he opened a car dealership. It used to be available on the Internet, but I haven’t looked lately and it may not still be out there. Vampires (it didn’t use the $ from the book) pretty much fell flat.ĭuring all of this, Steakley never wrote another novel, but he apparently spent years working on a sequel to Armor. The studio pulled a whack of the budget during filming and the movie was hamstrung by that fact. Vampire$ got enough steam that John Carpenter turned it into a movie with James Woods (who looked nothing like Jack Crow, but handled the part well enough). Turns out, John Steakley ever only wrote Armor and Vampire$, and neither caught the attention of the world like they should have. He wrote some books that were enormously fun to read and after I went through the first two I eagerly awaited the next one. A buddy loaned me Armor when I was in college and another buddy introduced me to Vampire$ when I got my first real job after college. I was introduced to Steakley by two friends over the space of many years.

The cover art for Vampire$ dropped the dollar sign, but trust me, it was part of the original title. Both of them are easy to find on Amazon and I regularly see them in used book stores, as well. The reference itself is actually Steakley’s internal reference to his other book, Armor. If you didn’t get it, it’s a reference to one of my favorite books, Vampire$, by John Steakley. Coupon redeemable anywhere Internets are sold

John steakley armor 2