07.27.08
Why Vampires?
As I someone striving to be a published author, I often get asked the question (when I dare admit that I want to be a published author) “What’s your book about?” I actually have several, and I usually try to explain the concept of urban fantasy and then tell “The One About the Changeling and the Chola” or “The One About Heaven’s Youngest Angel.” I always get asked if it’s finished, and sometimes I admit that, while I haven’t finished either of those, I have finished another one called Fish in the Sun. “Well, what’s that about?” Then I blush. See, it’s about vampires. And I’ve discovered that the world can be pretty neatly divided into two groups – those that think vampires are fascinating and have also written a book about them, and those who don’t get why a blood sucking corpse makes a good romantic lead. And put that way, I can see their point.
“Why vampires?” I’ve heard the question often enough, usually posed to a room full of people who shrug their heads and laugh while I mentally beat my head on the table for apparently being the only one in the room who reads (and writes) about fangs and flesh (even though that statistically can’t be possible based on the number of these books that get sold every year). So. In honor of every time I haven’t been able (or haven’t had the guts) to stand up in a room full of people and proudly declare, “I write vampire novels! Who’s with me?” here’s the first entry in a series that attempts to answer the oft-asked question. Why vampires?
*** You’ll have to forgive me; this first edition is a little ponce-y. 
Ahh…. English majors…. ***
The Historical Vampire is Evil
Which does make a lot more sense. We find them in legends of the Norse draugr, the Celtic dearg-du, the Russian upir: corpses that feed on the living, representing the power of night, death, and the real dangers that came with being alone in a world without technology to brighten the darkness.
Stoker and other writers of the 19th century created a modern vampire – the ultimate dead, white male that was rich, powerful, and had no qualms about killing for food, money, or pleasure. Dracula was a Lord in a time when their power was feared because they represented a class with few boundaries and a monstrous appetite. Their decadence was someone else’s death. Their blood siphoning could be likened to sucking away the life of the people who worked their fields and scrubbed their chamber pots so that they could have another party. The vampires as immortal corpses show us a fear that we are working ourselves to death for a status that will never change. There is no social revolution; as a class we are dominated eternally by the beautiful untouchables with historical power and money.
In Victorian times, gothic writers also found unlikely heroes in characters like Rochester and Heathcliff – men who were domineering and could be evil, but who at least had some inner conflict about it. This made them human and separated them from the monsters; they were social predators with guilt. Rochester was even depicted as victimized by the same society that upheld him and forced him to make victims out of others. Keep this in mind as we progress. A lot of people adore Rochester and sob over the fate of Heathcliff and Catherine, but neither of them are good people and represent the same power and domination that Dracula did, just in a more socially palatable form.
And this combination leads us to what I consider the first “modern” vampire (or at least the first popular example of it):
Interview With a Vampire and How It Changed Everything
In Lestat and Louis, we have the first popular vampires of conscience. Louis hates that he has to prey on people to survive; Lestat has a more cavalier attitude about it, but there’s a sense that his whimsy hides a deeper conflict about the potential for God and salvation in a world of such chaos. How could any God let him become immortal while others die? And what God would make immortality dependent on others’ pain? Such questions could drive a man mad, so let’s party like a rock star instead.
But here we have the the vampire as hero – he is a killer, but like the Byronic heroes of the 19th Century, he is no longer cold about it. Here is a vampire we as Americans in the 21st century can understand, because we have much in common with him. Americans on the whole have a guilty conscience because it seems like we can’t help siphoning the life out of the world. One day I looked at my closet and it struck me that a lot of people’s lives got sucked away in factories under a government with no labor laws, working insane hours for starvation wages… so that I could have cheap shirts. My friends have starting having children, and I see them with their toys that might’ve been made by children not much older than them; children who will never have a chance because our kids need more plastic crap. I drive to work every day of the school year, alone in my car, and suck gas out of the earth. I take home leftovers and fill another landfill with one more styrofoam box. I am a vampire, and every day people are dying while I maintain my lifestyle.
The vampire has become the archetypal hero of an industrialized nation- beautiful, powerful, educated, wealthy, and constantly wondering if he is damned just for existing. Can God possibly exist if I, with all my flaws, am in charge? Can God possibly be fair if I am damned for not hermitizing myself away from the society that created and raised me?
And that, I believe, is the first step to understanding the fascination of the literary vampire. The exchange of blood with a modern vampire is not about eating platelets, but a guilty acknowledgment that we live on the pain of somebody else – whether we want to or not.
And that’s episode 1 in my answer the question… Why vampires? Next time, I promise less English-major-y historical exhortation.
***Note, I am going to RWA Convention! If you’re a convention attendant, I hope to see you there! If not… I probably won’t update for awhile, so forgive me. I’ll see y’all again in August! ***