Writing longhand, Martindale made Stiles a Vietnam vet because at the time, “if you wanted someone who was good at killing in pop culture, they were a Vietnam vet,” and he made up the fictitious town of Isherwood, Indiana, population: 800. After two years of work he had Nightblood (originally titled Shadow War). A descendant of Robert E. Howard’s evil-hunting, witch-killing, monster-fighting Puritan, Solomon Kane, who’d enjoyed a mid-Eighties revival in Marvel’s Sword of Solomon Kane miniseries (Sept. 1985–July 1986), Chris Stiles was exactly the kind of badass who could anchor an adventure series. At the time, long-running men’s adventure series were getting increasingly baroque, full of cyborg cops (Steele, 1989), soldiers in mechanized warsuits (C.A.D.S., 1985), and lots and lots of killer mutants (Mutants Amok, 1991). But no one had a monster hunter. Chris Stiles perfectly fit a hole in the market.

Martindale sent two queries and partial manuscripts to Gold Eagle, an imprint of Harlequin and the premier publisher of men’s adventure paperbacks, but they rejected it. Once Martindale finished the manuscript, however, the first person he sent it to was agent Jay Garon, and he liked it so much he landed the young author a two-book deal at Warner Books. Chris Stiles, Ghost Breaker, was born.

A little bit Blade, Marvel’s African-American vampire hunter, and a little bit Solomon Kane, Stiles is the quintessential paperback action hero. His back and chest are a “roadmap of scars”, he wears leather gloves and a long overcoat, his “gruff yet vulnerable, like a lost child, searching for something” looks make women’s hearts melt, and his backstory sounds like the lyrics to “Born in the USA”. In addition, he’s haunted by the ghost of his brother, Alex, found dead in Central Park (“Where in the park?” “All over it!”), who guides him from one pocket of evil to another in the hope that eventually they’ll stumble across the monster that killed Alex, pump it full of hot lead, and ghost brother can finally rest in peace.

This deeply inefficient display of brotherly love leads the Stiles Bros. to Isherwood, which has a vampire problem. Sebastian Danner went vamp back in the day and his brother walled him up in the basement of the old Danner place, now abandoned and essentially Marsten House from ’Salem’s Lot. Chris arrives in town and starts romancing single mom Billie, a diner waitress with a heart of gold and two kids. Her ankle-biters, Bart and Del, are Fangoria-reading, GoreZone-loving horror nerds, cut from the same cloth as ’Salem’s Lot’s Mark Petrie, only Del gets to display his totally sweet nunchaku skills in a fight with the accidentally unleashed Sebastian Danner before Stiles shows up. It turns out these vampires are vulnerable to stakes through the heart and “stainless steel semi-autos sporting an extended twenty-two shot magazine and a miniature flashlight mounted on the frame.”