Since I seem to have struck a nerve with my previous post, I’ll note that I agree that I’ve found vampires pretty much, well, bloodless since Anne Rice’s books. In my brief review of Interview With the Vampire (from my Halloween Picks piece, which has made it over it here yet), I note:
“The film does a good job translating Rice’s conception of vampires to the screen. Vampires remain popular (check out the number of cheezy vampire novels and movies that have come out in the last ten years) because they are adaptable as metaphors. Once they represented spiritual corruption, tempting us with earthly power and immortality, but at the cost of eternal damnation. Indeed, this more subtle concept can still carry a lot of power, even in modern times, as Stephen King’s novel Salem’s Lot and the film Fright Night show. However, in an age where the idea of damnation is more or less ignored or scoffed at, the vampire symbolically has changed to keep up with these secular times. Now vampirism is purely attractive, a physical phenomena rather than a spiritual one, promising raw power and eternal youth and invincible sex appeal, and costing at best a little guilt about killing people (though generally less than, say, vegans would feel about eating meat or an egg). Vampires are cool now, their attractiveness no longer a dark one, but openly to be lusted after. Rice is the most successful purveyor of this brand of vampirism, where instead of the reader fearing to become a vampire he wants to become one, so that the vampire functions as the protagonist of the story instead of the antagonist. ”
That was true at the time, but Rice’s mantle has been picked up by Laurell K. Hamilton, whose increasingly sex-driven Anita Blake books have kicked off literally dozens of knock-off series by now. In this regard, her books follow Rice’s like Friday the 13th followed Halloween; it’s really the latter that kicked off the flood of imitators by showing how knock-offs could be done easily and profitably and, not to put too fine a point on it, without overmuch finesse.
So Anita Blake starts as a straight pulp series, with Blake as a kick-ass vampire hunter. Then she starts dating vampires, and now she’s basically having sex with anything she can get her hands on. Even the occasional human, probably. Really, that’s pretty much all the books are now.
As a result of this, she gains various powers of her own (in addition to the dead-raising ability she already had), so again the juvenilization of the vampire into a hot sexy power fantasy continues. People don’t like to compromise their power fantasies, which is why vampires now have sex, and lots of it, and, needless to say, awesome sex. Vampires don’t procreate that way, so biologically it makes no sense, but whatever. People might be willing to kill humans and drink their blood to become enternally youthful and powerful and desireable, but give up sex?! Shudder.
Give me the old vampires. Many people here have called for forthrightly evil vampires, but really, to me they remain strongest when their Christian subtext is strongest, when they represent spiritual corruption. That’s why Fright Night remains perhaps my favorite vampire movie. Chris Sarrandon could kill humans in that film, but to turn them, he had to get to acquiesce. His seduction of Evil Ed in the film pretty much sums up my personal conception of vampires, in which Ed must, in the end, agree to his own damnation.
For a vampire book, I’d suggest Kim Newman’s extraordinarily fun Anno-Dracula, although I fear the sequels aren’t quite as good. Used hardcover copies can be picked up for a song at Amazon, and of course your local library can probably get it for you.
Anybody got any other suggestions?
