...when the "conversation starter" question printed on my beer label at dinner tonight read, "Would you prefer to be a vampire or a werewolf?"
Ah, the odds. (And duh, the answer.)
Which reminds me...as I helped people find, and then straightened and reshelved, books yesterday, a growing fury made it hard for me to concentrate. Vampire books are everywhere. The problem is that they're all complete and utter crap. The mythology, the folklore, of blood drinking immortals the world over are absolutely fascinating, and the more anthropological the better...but this? This is horrible. Romance novels, bad teen fiction, supposed interviews with "real" vampires: affronts to the power of what the genre could actually be.
Gah. Oh well...at least the market is ripe for the one I have planned.
I keep thinking that it's strange...the fascination in the 90s was with angels; now it's with demons -- only the twist is that they're demons who act more like angels, at least in the exceptions on which the stories focus. People seldom write about vampires as a blanket evil anymore, except for Kostova. My rudimentary guess is that as a society we long for something supernatural, long for something that outlasts the powerless passive drudgery of the average working citizen's life, long for something to reach us at our deepest natures, long to become immortal ourselves, long, in short (and this is where the "good" vampire comes in as an idea), for redemption.
The 90s were bleak but, as I recall from the attitudes that pervaded my high school experience, also attempted to deny the nastiness evident in human nature. I like that, in this new century, we seem better able to recognize cruelty, injustice, pain, harshness, despair -- and yearn to overcome them, to make them right. In that vein, while the cropping up of vampires in totally trashy literature really bugs me from an artistic standpoint, I also find extremely interesting the centrality of the archetype of the evil being rejecting its nature and living for good, and the centrality of the archetype of eternal life. I would posit, then (and I have by no means really begun to ponder the subject in depth), that the popular preoccupation with the intelligent, powerful, self-controlled and redeemed undead Other, and particularly the unsubtle yearning to become that Other, reflects a purer search for God than our society has seen for many decades.
2 comments:
Your conversation starter is up there with the one introduced to me by a friend of Anne H. one evening in a microbrewery. Ahem: "If you could design your own squirrel, what would it look like?"
I don't remember what mine was, but Anne's had a yellow stripe down the middle of its back so it would blend well when squashed in the middle of the road. That was some start to a conversation.
I love Anne.
What a bizarre question. I think mine would come equipped with some kind of hanging apparatus so that every time it threw a baby bird out of its nest the squirrel would have to punish itself...you know, House Elf style. That would be my perfect revenge for all the naked pink oozing bug-eyed newborn songbirds I had to see littering the sidewalks of my childhood.
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