The manuscript for Caitlin R. Kiernan's first novel, The Five of Cups, was completed early in 1993, with some notes and fragments for the book dating back to Kiernan's high school days.

The Five of Cups attempts to blend two subgenres of the contemporary vampire tale, crossing the historical Gothic with the gritty, urban realism of 'splatterpunk.' Grounded in the squalor of street-life in Atlanta in the early 1990s, the story features an epic scope that encompasses the Irish famine of 1847, a yellow-fever epidemic in 1853 New Orleans, and the Union assault on Atlanta in 1864. Kiernan describes the novel as an attempt to unite vampirism, the grail myth, the tarot, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and the Arthuriad into a single storyline.