Whither Vampires?

Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula

When I was a child, if you mentioned vampires most people thought only of Dracula. Heck, to the kids at my grade school, Dracula wasn’t a name, it was a type of monster. They didn’t even know the word ‘vampire.’

Notice I exclude myself from those kids. I was the oddball even then. I was the one who found books about vampire folklore and became fascinated. The regional variations amazed me. In some areas they could not repeat themselves when speaking. In others they drained blood by striking the victim hard on the back and catching the flow in a bucket. Every culture seemed not only to have vampires, but to have their own types of vampires.

These were great books to read by flashlight. Though I did develop the habit of only being able to sleep with the covers tucked up under my chin.

Ye gods, I almost sound like a hipster. “I was into vampires before they were cool.” That’s not what I mean, though. I’m glad vampires have become popular. Not that I like all the vampire fiction out there. I learned that when I tried to read the Anne Rice books. In that era, Nancy Collins’ Sonja Blue books were more my speed. No, what I mean is that I developed my interest in vampires way back in 1975 and it has never waned. In fact, they still hold such fascination for me that my late mother-in-law bought me a boxed set of Twilight books, because she knew the stories were about vampires.

She meant well.*

Anyway, I’m writing about vampires today because I saw this comment yesterday on Twitter:

Yi Shun is a good friend of mine, and in her capacity as fiction editor for the Los Angeles Review she reads a lot of submissions. I can only guess how many vampire stories must have crossed her desk to prompt that statement. That means that not only are a lot of people writing more vampire fiction, they’re sending their stories to literary journals as well as horror magazines.

You might say they’re clotting the market. (All right, maybe I’m the only one who’d say that.)

I’m not surprised. Over the last forty years, the roles for vampires in fiction have expanded. Before I was born, vampires were monsters and villains.** Then Rice’s Lestat and Collins’ Sonja Blue came along and gave us vampire anti-heroes. Next came Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff Angel, in which Joss Whedon gave us Angel: the vampire with a soul, the fallen hero battling for redemption. Looking at this progression, it’s not surprising that Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight contributed Edward, the vampire as romantic hero.***

But as vampires’ roles have expanded, has their power diminished? Vampires in folklore were objects of terror. The hint of one was enough to panic a town. Nowadays our stories suggest that meeting a vampire might not only be safe, but desirable. The fiction is more prevalent, but folklore has the weight of age and tradition. I wonder. If the average person met a vampire on the street, would that person flee or smile?

What would you do?

*I still have them. What can I say? They were a gift.

**They also made occasional appearances in comedies such as Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein and The Fearless Vampire Killers or Pardon Me But Your Teeth Are in My Neck.

***I have not actually read Twilight. If I am mistaken about Edward, please correct me.

Did you like this? Share it:

Liked it? Take a second to support Stefon on Patreon!

Comments

Whither Vampires? — 2 Comments

stefon on February 6, 2013 at 3:57 pm said:

Very good points, Stephanie. Thank you for posting this. I had never thought about “Interview…” in societal terms before. But then, I discovered it as a ten or twelve year old finding a paperback at a library book sale — I expected something very different. I believe I still have that book. I tried to read it a few more times, but Rice’s prose style wore on me. I had a little more success with her second book “The Vampire Lestat,” but even that one wore thin for me after about one hundred fifty pages. You make me want to give her another shot though.

Part of the problem I’m seeing in today’s fiction is that the vampire is in danger of losing its persona as monster, which could deprive it of its ability to fill a role like you describe for “Interview….” Today’s readers will see Louis not in terms of Dracula but in terms of Edward, which diminishes his struggle.

I could not begin to keep up with the growing list of modern vampire authors, so I won’t be much help on the diversity front. The only one I could point you to would be L.A. Banks, whose books featured a female, African-American protagonist.

The vampire book I’m most looking forward to is NOS4A2 (the cover image shows the title on a license plate) by Joe Hill. I loved “Horns” and I can’t wait to see what he does with vampires.

Reply ↓
Stephanie Barbé Hammer on February 6, 2013 at 2:43 pm said:

Thanks for this thoughtful post. What may have gotten lost over time and over-exposure is how absolutely radical Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire seemed in 1976. It actually circulated in galley-form among the staff at Random House, because people were so excited about it. That’s how I first read it. My mother snuck it home from the office and said “wait til you read THIS.” We both experienced it as a wild, sexual, and overtly “queer” telling of vampire desire and its placement in exotic, forgotten New Orleans. At the time, the AIDS crisis was not yet common knowledge and gay rights were just in their infancy as far as the cis hetero world knew. Second Wave feminism was still “new” to many of us. So “Interview” — written by a woman — felt like an incredible bolt from the blue. The use of the “monster” to articulate alternate sexuality isn’t new, but it does seem to gather a peculiar force in the 60’s and 70’s (one thinks of GRENDEL by John Gardner). How that lineage has been used — progressively and regressively (as in the case of Twilight, which makes the vampire quintessentially hetero, and laden with Christian morals) is a complex history worth looking at. I’d be interested to know the extent to which the vampire stories still focus on white people and middle class people (the Kathryn Bigelow movie being an important exception to the class dynamic), and the extent to which queer writers, queer writers of color, trans writers, and others have taken this material on and worked with it creatively.

Reply ↓

Stefon Mears — Official Website

Raven Tested, Coyote Approved

Whither Vampires?

Comments

Whither Vampires? — 2 Comments

Leave a ReplyCancel reply