More on Fledgling

I read Octavia Butler's Fledgling about a year ago and expressed my distaste at its positive depiction of pedophilia. Although Shori is actually 53 years old, she has the body of a ten-year-old girl and is still considered a child by her culture. HELL NO. Also, the writing was blah.

Womanist Musings, one of my favorite social justice blogs, recently published a post, co-authored by blogmaster Renee and frequent contributor Sparky, that I agree with 100%. Not only do they take Butler to task on the pedophilia issue, they also point out that the Ina's aphrodesiac-like venom is extremely rape-ish and discuss some the book's racial problems as well. I recommend this piece very strongly. Like Sparky and Renee, I simply cannot believe so many people rave about Fledgling while blatantly ignoring the freaking child sex, among other things.

Read their post here.

"Predicting the Next Anita Blake Vampire Hunter Book"

By Sparky

Anita: Humpa humpa humpa HUMP HUMP

Asher: Pain pain woe, angst, no-one finds me shaggable anymore except Anita and Jean Claude and Narcisuss and absolutely everyone who sees me. Woe.

Anita: humpa humpa HUMP! *PING* oooh a new super power! It involves sex!

Jean-Claude: *is randomly blamed for whatever problems new super-power brings. Puts running an entire city full of vampires and world wide vampire politics on hold AGAIN, to deal with Anita’s issues*

Mother of all darkness: I AM SCARY!

[Continue Reading]

Damn, I keep hearing about how this series totally goes way downhill. I've only read the first book and loved how awesome and kickass she was! You know, the more I hear about this "ardeur" power she acquires, the more squicked out I get. So apparently Anita and all these men have no choice but to constantly have sex? That's not empowerment, that's . . . really rape-ish. *shudders*


TV Tropes, as always, has more information.

Rifftrax Does Twilight!

I laughed so hard.

Click here to watch Buffy slay Edward.

I Could Corrupt You . . . It Would Be Easy . . . Watching You Suffer . . . It Would Please Me

Anne Rice is famous for her Vampire Chronicles, set predominantly among the French mansions and steamy atmosphere of New Orleans and featuring the sexy, sophisticated, and utterly decadent undead. Her novels seamlessly blend the grotesque and romanticized decay of Southern Gothic with the deep recesses of Europe's long, dark history. Philosophy, religion, sensuality, and corruption all intermingle in one of the vampire genre's greatest literary influences, second only to Dracula.

Now imagine Anne Rice has a younger redneck cousin and you'll have a pretty good idea of True Blood.

HBO's True Blood is pretty much the most spectacular vampire series I have ever come across. Main character Sookie Stackhouse is a waitress at Merlotte's Bar & Grill in Bon Temps, Louisiana. She is both blessed and cursed with telepathy, spending much of her time trying to block out the thoughts of others. When she meets Bill Compton, an undead Civil War veteran, the silence from him is irresistible and Sookie is finally able to have her very first real relationship. But dating a vampire only draws her deeper into their seductive yet deadly world, revealed only several years ago thanks to the Japanese invention of True Blood, a synthesized drink publicized as an alternative to real human blood. But really, one character warns Sookie, would you seriously abstain from all your favorite foods and drink nothing but Slim-Fast for all eternity?

In true Faulkner-O'Connor fashion, the humans of Bon Temps are a colorful collection of dysfunctional personalities, including Jason, Sookie's dimwitted stud of a brother, and her best friend Tara, the volatile daughter of a drunken mother who once slurped up her own vomit so she wouldn't waste the alcohol in it. Fellow waitress Arlene has been married four times and boss Sam Merlotte seems to have no past. Plus, there's a serial killer on the loose, targeting female "fang bangers," a derogatory term for humans who sleep with vampires.

My favorite character is definitely Lafayette, Tara's cousin. Officially, he's a line cook at Merlotte's and works on the road crew with Jason. He is also a flamboyantly gansta gay prostitute who runs his own porn site and deals in vampire blood, nicknamed "V," which is far more potent than any street drug. Lafayette is nevertheless a loyal friend and more principled than he initially appears.

In addition to Bill, other vampires include the 1,000-year-old Viking Eric, who also wants Sookie; his lazy assistant Pam; gentle Godric the martyr; Bill's creator Lenora; and the nasty but thankfully short-lived trio of Malcolm, Liam, and Diane.

Much as I enjoyed Season 1 of True Blood, Season 2 is where things really get interesting. We have two parallel plotlines: a anti-vampire megachurch called the Fellowship of the Sun that may have kidnapped Godric and the arrival a maenad who drives the citizens of Bon Temps into a murderous, sex-crazed frenzy in an attempt to summon forth the god Dionysus.



Having been accused of the murders in the first season, Jason Stackhouse, stuck in jail, was an easy recruit to the Fellowship of the Sun. He shells out $3,000 to attend their Leadership Camp, and for the first time in his life, Bon Temps's blockheaded stallion is someone special, one of the elect chosen by God to strike down the up-sepulcher'd army of darkness and drag its monstrous hordes, the parasitic seducers of humanity, into the holy light of the sun. Sarah and Eric Newflin, the Fellowship's smiley and unnervingly clean-cut leaders, invite Jason to stay at their mansion, where Eric shows off his many guns and various sharp weapons fashioned from silver. Meanwhile, back in Bon Temps, Tara, despondent after a drunk-driving incident following Arlene's engagement party, is invited to the luxurious home of Maryann Forrester. She claims to be some sort of social worker, but then there's this weird pig running around and the townsfolk are suddenly acting all crazy.

From the chorus of Euripedes's The Bacchae:

- When shall I dance once more
with bare feet the all-night dances,
tossing my head for joy
in the damp air, in the dew,
as a running fawn might frisk
for the green joy of the wild fields,
free from fear of the hunt,
free from the circling beaters
and the nets of woven mesh
and the hunters hallooing on
their yelping packs? And then, hard pressed,
she sprints with the quickness of the wind,
bounding over the marsh, leaping,
to frisk, jumping for joy,
gay with the green of the leaves,
to dance for joy in the forest,
to dance where the darkness is deepest,
where no man is.

And then:

- O Dionysus, reveal yourself a bull! Be manifest
a snake with darting heads, a lion breathing fire!
O Bacchus, come! Come with your smile!
Cast your noose about this man who hunts
your Bacchae! Bring him down, trampled
underfoot by the murderous hordes of your Maenads!

Sam likens Maryann to Satan: the horned harbringer of chaos and wild ecstasy that overwhelms all restraint and morality. Ironically, however, she also counterpart to the equally malevolent influence of the Newflins and the cult-like Fellowship of the Sun. Both are sources of temptation - for power, acceptance, and divine favor - that lead their victims to behave in ways contrary to their normal personalities. What eventually defeats Maryann and the Fellowship are the simple ideals of loyalty, genuine love, and friendship.

(Urban fantasy and the like has given us vampires, werewolves, zombies, ghosts, and shapeshifters of all sorts, but maenads are certainly a new one.)

So needless to say, I love me some True Blood. Of course, I had to read the novels that inspired it all: Charlaine Harris's Southern Vampire Mysteries. Unfortunately. . .

*sigh*

Not since Fledgling have I ever had such high expectations for a vampire book and been so let down. Sorry folks, but this is one of those rare instances of the onscreen adaptation being superior to the literary original. Harris's writing is so amateurish I just couldn't get into Dead Until Dark, on which the first season of True Blood is based. Not as bad as Twilight (now there's a tough act to beat) but still had me wondering how this got ever got published.

But there's always the TV, right?



The title of this post are some lyrics from Depeche Mode's "Corrupt," as featured on the True Blood soundtrack.

More Awesome Vampire Stuff

I just found this guest post on Womanist Musings, a non-book blog I like to read. (Blogmaster Renee is an even bigger vampire fan than I am and she's done some great posts on True Blood.) Natalie Wilson of Seduced by Twilight will be doing a biweekly column on vampires, werewolves, zombies and monsters of all types as "reservoirs for cultural critique." She argues that,

Just as freak shows, circuses, horror films, the gothic and the grotesque reveal a great deal about the cultural construction of bodies, of normative identities, of gender and sexuality, so do today’s monsters – the sparkly vampire, the clairvoyant waitress, the shrimp-like alien – reveal a great deal about patriarchy, socio-economics, and racism.

Judging from this opening post, this series should be a very fascinating read. I was trying to articulate similar ideas with my vampire essay from awhile back but Wilson clearly has a much better intellectual background than I do.

Check it out!

In Which I React Like Darth Vader

"I think some of your ancestors were outed and executed as vampires a few centuries ago. Iosif used to joke about it in a bitter way. He said that, physically, he and most Ina fit in badly wherever they go - tall, ultrapale, lean, wiry people. They usually looked like foreigners, and when times got bad, they were treated like foreigners - suspected, disliked, driven out, or killed."


I like vampires. That should be obvious to regular readers of This Book and I Could Be Friends by now. The genre is not without its flaws, however, one of the most glaring being its lack of inclusion. Vampires are always white - literally and racially. Granted, the current pop-culture incarnation of the bloodsucking undead comes from largely from Dracula, which itself was derived from old Slavic myths (as well as lesser-known European works such as the novel Carmilla and the short story "The Vampyre"). But given how society has expanded since the nineteenth century, why can't vampire stories seem catch up? So it was with great anticipation that I looked forward to Octavia Butler's Fledgling. I had heard many great things about Butler and her themes of race, gender, community, and otherness, and I was eager to see what she would do with the vampire myth.

Instead . . . hooo boy, where to begin?

A ten-year-old black girl with amnesia wakes up in a forest near a collection of burned-out ruins. She has horrific burns and gunshot injuries, which means she should be dead. Although she has no memory it is obvious she is not human: she chases down and kills animals, consuming their raw flesh. When she finally encounters a human being, she drinks his blood. He immediately recognizes her as a vampire, although he also observes that she doesn't remotely fit the image he had had of vampires. It turns out, however, that what the world thinks of as "vampires" is actually a second intelligent race that has evolved alongside humanity, living in secret but surfacing only enough to contribute to the legends found in various human cultures of demonic undead entities who feast on the blood of the living.

In "reality," the Ina are a largely benevolent people who take willing humans as their symbionts. The symbiont supplies their Ina with small amounts of blood in exchange for protection, long life (up to 200 years), and the intense emotional and sexual bonds they form with their Ina and with other symbionts. The Ina are not immortal, although they can live up to 550 years. They are nocturnal, but that is where Shori, the little black girl, comes in. She is actually the 53-year-old result of an experiment in combining Ina and human DNA to create an Ina able to withstand the sun. Hence, her darkened skin, which came from a female African-American donor. Unfortunately, not everyone is thrilled about this.

Despite the intriguing premise, however, the whole thing fell flat. To begin with, Butler's prose failed to impress me, especially coming from such a renown author who's won both the Hugo and Nebula awards. Her writing was very bare-bones, but not as though she had made the stylistic choice of minimalism. Instead, it felt very amateurish, like someone who had an idea for a story but didn't know how to add in all those extras that make stories great: description, shading, subtlety, word play, thoughtful ruminations, flights of poetic fancy. Butler couldn't grasp the "show-don't-tell" rule at all. The basic structure went something like: "The next day, we went here. Then we did this and this. I felt very sad and I didn't know why. It was probably because of this." For example:

Victor grabbed his head with both hands and screamed - a long ragged, tearing shriek. Then he passed out.

I didn't want to care. It was clear from the Gordons' expressions that they didn't care. But I had bitten him twice. I didn't want him, wouldn't have kept him as my symbiont, but I did care what happened to him. It seemed that the bites made me feel connected to him and at least a little responsible for him.

Just reread that as I typed it - I'm not sure how to really explain what bothers me about it. It's hard to give a sample because Butler is technically proficient and avoids a lot of the more obvious blunders made by other writers, such as Stephenie Meyers's thesaurus abuse. ("He lay perfectly still in the grass, his shirt open over his sculpted, incandescent chest, his scintillating arms bare." Yep, that's a real quote.) If anything, Butler's prose was all the better for that.

The narrative also didn't flow well. Like Twilight, it felt like the whole book was written in about two days with no outline. There was no mystery in regard to who killed Shori's family - we find out too quickly and too easily, without any build-up or other development. From there it's just stagnant. We know who the guilty party is. What else is there to do?

But there was one issue which, above all, really bothered the hell outta me. More accurately: it royally squicked me out. Yes, I know Shori is really 53 but . . . she has sex, multiple times, with a hairy guy in his 20s. Then she meets another guy the same age, who tells her he was attracted to her the minute he saw her. They do not have sex but it is very highly strongly implied that they sure will.

Okay everybody, repeat after me:




NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!






Now granted, this is not new to vampire literature and can probably be considered a minor trope. Eli in Let the Right One In is a 200-year-old 12-year-old. Anne Rice did it twice: first in Interview with the Vampire and the sexual overtones between Claudia and Louis (or so I've heard - it's been years since I've read the book so I don't remember), and the second time in The Vampire Armand, with the explicitly-rendered affair between 12-year-old Armand and 1,000-year-old Marius. Disturbing, yes, but I liked those books, even though I had to put Armand down the first time I read it because it just got to be too much (a vampire-loving, Anne Rice fangirl friend of mine had the same reaction).

Squicky, yes, but I think what allowed Rice and Lindqvist to pull it off was the fact that the reader is not supposed to view these relationships in a positive light. Eli and her live-in pedophile boyfriend are symptomatic of the overall theme of sickness running through Lindqvist's novel. Plus, the guy is a creep and a loser. Claudia's fate - to be trapped forever in the body of a little girl even as her mind matures - is portrayed as an unspeakable moral horror. Armand was human, but his relationship with Marius was his first step towards becoming a vampire, which Rice has always portrayed as a form of earthly damnation. Plus, he lived in Renaissance Italy, where, according to the Leonardo Da Vinci biography I read last year, girls as young as 14 and 15 were often married off to older men. (Remember Ramborg and Simon in Kristin Lavransdatter?) Totally different social context.

The relationship between Shori and Wright, by contrast, is depicted as loving and nurturing, even as Shori's memory loss only emphasizes her childlike qualities. (Before she recovers her name, he even calls her Renee because it means "reborn.") And then the reader is treated to several pages of strongly implied lesbianism between Shori and several adult female symbionts, which, again, is supposed to be all beautiful, caring, etc. No, just . . . no.

Sorry folks. I just couldn't bring myself to enjoy this one. Fledgling is certainly a fast read that took me only a day and a half, so I guess that's something in its favor. But, alas.

Have you read Octavia Butler? What was your opinion?

Vampire Playlist

Since today is Halloween and I love vampires and music so much, I recommend the following music for all your vampire novel-reading needs.



















And of course:

BBAW: Discovered on Another Book Blog

Today we encourage you to blog about a book you read only because you discovered it on another book blog. Preferably, this will be a book you loved! You might also write a bit about the blog you discovered it on!

Book: Let the Right One In
By John Ajvide Lindqvist

Blogger: Lu of Regular Rumination
Her Review

A thought wanted to get out. Something. A context. He didn't catch hold of it. But then that other thought came out, the terrible, frightening one. That Eli was just pretending. That there was an ancient person inside of her, watching him, who knew everything, and was smiling at him, smiling in secret.

I've been having a bit of a vampire theme going on This Book and I Could Be Friends lately. It began when I read Dracula and wrote this essay in response. It was kind of rambling, but I discussed what I think the modern vampire (dating back to the nineteenth century) represents in the cultural imagination and how they compare to the modern (George Romero) zombie in that respect. In response to a very insightful comment left by Emily of Evening All Afternoon, I did a brief follow-up a couple days later. I then reviewed Eugene Woodbury's Angel Falling Softly.

I like vampires. I have made my Anne Rice fanship known. I've also blogged about Kohta Hirano's Hellsing anime/manga series, as well as Elizabeth Kostova's well-written, well-researched novel The Historian. I've argued that being a beautiful woman who kicks ass doesn't automatically make Anita Blake a Mary Sue. I have trashed that poorly-written, vampire-ruining, anti-feminist, pro-Mary Sue crap Twilight on numerous occasions. No, I can't leave it alone. I refuse to sit by while sparkly teenybopper vampire high school students are on the loose! IN THE SUNSHINE????

So needless, to say, it totally caught my attention when Lu of Regular Rumination specifically stated that John Ajvide Lindqvist's Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma) contains vampires that do not sparkle. It also has zombies, she added, plus it is scary and Swedish. Translated fiction is a major part of This Book and I Could Be Friends; it is interest I share with both Lu and Richard of Caravana de recuerdos, both of whom I met through the 2666 read-along hosted by Claire and Steph. Lu and Richard can actually read Spanish books in their original language (Lu has a BA in Spanish, largely due to her love of Spanish literature), a skill which, alas, I am lacking. Even in English, though, Lu's reading tastes are actually quite similar to mine and I enjoy her posts about graphic novels, poetry, and literary fiction. (Regular Rumination is also where I found the "Books Read in 2009" meme.) Anyway: great blogs all around, check'em out.

(Both Richard and Frances of Nonsuch Book, another 2666 reader, have been shortlisted for the Best Writing Category. Good luck guys!)

So obviously, via Lu's review, I was warned beforehand that Let the Right One In was extremely creepy and best read during the daytime. I actually disagree somewhat - it wasn't really scary in the suspenseful, what-was-that-noise sense. It was shocking, disturbing, and gruesome. In my post-Dracula vampire essay I brought up how the modern vampire often acts as a sort of dark wish fulfillment fantasy. They are beautiful, wealthy, and cultured, but ultimately represent the temptation of evil and a form of corruption. Bram Stoker's Dracula and Anne Rice's creations exemplify this. ("Darkness. No grace," says Rice, on the Interview with the Vampire movie. "No salvation. The film got it. It got 'the glamor of evil' and that darkness, that hopelessness, that despair.") Twilight and its ilk, however, have watered down this moral gray area in favor of a simplistic "bad boy/femme fatale" portrayal. But either way, whether you're reading Anne Rice or the latest YA fantasy, the vampire is always going to be a highly alluring creature.

What I loved about Let the Right One In was how completely Lindqvist subverted this current pop cultural norm.

One vampire is a grubby little girl who with the scent of sickness: "it was [close] to the smell that came when you removed the bandage from an infected wound." Another is hideously mutilated middle-aged child molester, and another is a 50-year-old alcoholic burnout whose condition causes intense physical torment. In other words: definitely not The Vampire Diaries territory. Like Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, Let the Right One In also closely links vampires to zombies as undead monsters. Even more so than Bram Stoker, Lindqvist makes it abundantly clear that to become a vampire is to suffer a horrific, and never-ending, fate.

But whereas Dracula still had his seductive, aristocratic side, there is absolutely nothing remotely attractive (sexually, aesthetically, culturally, etc) about the Lindqvist vampire. Like his predecessors of the genre, Lindqvist uses the vampire as a metaphor for, and commentary on, the human condition. As Lu noted, Let the Right One In is not simply a vampire story - there are also themes of love, sacrifice, broken families, social class, bullying, and alcohol/drug abuse. The biggest motif is one of disease - in the body, in relationships, in society. Lindqvist's vampires personify this. The atmosphere is bleak, hopeless, run-down. The characters live in bland apartments reminiscent of American housing projects, and even the humans hurt themselves and each other in a variety of ways. As one man reflects:

"I don't want to be here anymore!"

[. . .] "You don't have to. Not for my. . ."

"No, not that. Here. The whole shebang. Blackeberg. Everything. These buildings, the walking paths, the spaces, people, everything is just . . . like a big damn sickness, see? Something went wrong. They thought it all out, planned it to be . . . perfect, you know. And in some damn wrinkle it went wrong, instead. Some shit.

"Like . . . I can't explain it . . . like they had some idea about the angles, or fucking whatever, the angles of the building, in their relationship to each other, you know. So it would be harmonious or something. And then they made a mistake in their measurements, their triangulations, whatever the hell they call it, so that it was a little off from the start, and it went downhill from there. So you walk here with all these buildings and you just feel that. . . No, no, no. You shouldn't be here. This place is all wrong, you know?

"Except it isn't the angles, it's something else, something that just . . . like a disease that's in the . . . walls and I . . . don't want any part of it anymore."

In the very first chapter, Blackeberg is described as a brand-new post-WWII suburb with absolutely no past. The children do not learn about their town's history in school because there is no history. Blackeberg was maybe meant to be a refuge of sorts, from the recent war, the recent depression, a look to the bright future. But human nature does not change. The arrival of Eli, 200-year-old waif, is essentially the catalyst for a chain of events that forces Blackeberg's citizens to finally confront evil - even though it already exists among them, self-inflicted, in one form or another. People will react to a brutal murder, but not to the repeated and brutal bullying of Oskar that's been going on for years.

The sole attraction of Lindqvist vampires, debased as they are, is simply evil itself: the ability to do great harm and get away with it. You can say this of many modern vampires, but Lindqvist is unique in that he never tries to sugarcoat it and make it "glamorous."

Let the Right One In is unlike ANY vampire novel I have ever read. Many vampire authors attempt a new spin on a well-known myth, but Lindqvist actually pulls it off. But please be advised that this book is very dark and very graphic - I was even forced to skim a few pages because it got to be too much. But it is still an awesome read and I would like to thank Lu for introducing it to me! This is why I read book blogs: to discover new books I likely wouldn't have heard about otherwise, ESPECIALLY international/translated literature.

(Also: please check out this review I did for an Austrian post-apocalyptic novel by Thomas Glavinic called Night Work. It was personally recommended to me by Larry. Thanks Larry!)

The Other Mormon Vampire Book

The one thing even the best of recordings on the best of sound systems lacked—all that movement. The weave of the baton, the stroke of the bow, fingers blurring on glittering brass. A symphony was a life lived in exaltation and killed with triumph. Eternity made the best of music monotonous, the best of lives meaningless. The performance was made wondrous by the fact that it would end. Dramatically. She lived in that moment and died with the last, fading notes, in the vanishing echoes before the applause.

Eugene Woodbury's Angel Falling Softly (available online here) is a vampire novel written by a Mormon. Twilight it is not.

Rachel Forsythe is the wife of a respected Mormon bishop in an affluent Salt Lake City suburb. She had the perfect LDS family-centered life until her youngest daughter, Jennifer, developed leukemia and subsequently fell into a coma following a bone marrow transplant gone wrong. Meanwhile, Milada Daranyi, chief investment officer at Daranyi Enterprises International, has arrived in Utah to oversee her company's takeover of a medical technology manufacturer. She looks no more than twenty, and yet she is sophisticated and highly accomplished, with the world-weary aura of one who has lived too long and seen too much. Particularly unusual is her strikingly pale coloring, white-blonde hair, and aversion to direct sun exposure. Milada is a vampire, originally from Romania, born in the sixteenth century. Upon learning of this, Rachel asks for the impossible: make my daughter into one of you - it's the only way for me to save her now.

As expected, Angel Falling Softly is deeply concerned with faith, the power of belief, and the willingness to take risks. "You could say I have faith in other people's faith," Milada tells Troy. "A disciplined passion is an admirable thing. It is good to have believers in the world to keep alive the possibilities of transcendence." A suspension of the laws of nature is what Rachel waits for as she continues, like Job, to beg and plead with a God who seems bent on leading her family to tragedy; it's also what allows Milada to exist, bearing a double-edged gift: Jennifer's life in exchange for what? In many respects, Angel Falling Softly is a meditation on the powers of faith and fantasy and the thin line separating the two. Jennifer is dying and God seems absent. Milada is a flesh-and-blood creature of legend who is clearly, undeniably real - Rachel can reach out and touch her. So upon which supernatural being should Rachel rely for her daughter's life? God and Satan waged battle over Job's soul, with Satan taunting God and edging Him on, constantly predicting Job's inevitable denunciation of his Creator. The question, then, is whether or not Rachel will go outside the religion in which she was raised and turn to another, darker source of salvation.

Unlike Twilight, which centers on superficiality (sexydudes!fastcars!
fashion!wealth!), Angel Falling Softly takes today's popular image of the glamorous vampire and, like the novels of Anne Rice, goes beneath the surface and explores the moral and spiritual drawbacks of earthly immortality. A particular focus in Woodbury's book is Milada's neverending engagement with humanity and humanity's follies, and how this experience of centuries is ultimately corrosive to her ability to hope, believe, and entertain the notion that there is something beyond and bigger than this material world. (Her immersion in the ruthless realm of business is a reflection of this jaded mindset.) As she says to Troy:

"I believe people can be bad, can be cruel. Perhaps can be clever enough to be evil. But even the clever ones eventually end up against the wall like the Ceausescus. Or erased from history like the Gang of Four. Evil accumulates. It eats away at the core. It destroys its host. For evil to survive, it must find some good that justifies its existence. Some higher purpose—if nothing else, making the trains run on time—or else it collapses almost as soon as it begins. So kingdoms rise and fall. In the meanwhile, a well-run corporation outlasts any government. And most nations."

"Which means you do or don't believe in the devil?"

"I believe there is evil enough in ourselves. I've never met the creature myself. I have met a few of his foot soldiers. And in their time most were thought to be—and thought themselves to be—good and decent men."

Milada herself isn't a "bad" person per se. Still, as the blood-drinking preternatural entity standing opposite God in Rachel's wager (where Satan stood in the Book of Job), she is at the very least amoral. One popular interpretation of Dracula is as an allegory for the perils of unrestricted immigration: a sexualized foreign predator enters the heart of Victorian England and threatens the (racial) purity of its young women. Angel Falling Softly likewise perpetuates this image, sending sexy, exotic-looking, European Milada to a conservative cookie-cutter Mormon neighborhood in Utah, where non-Mormon newcomers are immediately assessed for their conversion potential, preferably at one of the Forsythes' famous backyard barbecues. (Though obstensibly aimed at an LDS audience, reading this book as an outsider definitely adds another layer, allowing one to experience and empathize with Milada's mild culture shock.) She is the worldly, cynical, educated, foreign-born New Yorker who engages in transgressive behavior such as lesbian sex, first-date seduction, overall secular lifestyle, and simply being an unmarried professional.

In other words, even if Milada is not inherently evil, for Jennifer to become like her means Jennifer must leave the LDS Church, which also means leaving her family.

But at least she doesn't have to die in order to live. I didn't understand much of the medical terminology used, but it was obvious that Woodbury's vampires are not undead, but are instead living hosts of a virus. Symptoms include albino coloring, chronic anemia, extreme sensitivity to UV light, and virtual, but not literal, immortality: the infected (vampires) only age one year per century. Furthermore, the vampires do not kill their victims (in fact, the "attacks" are depicted as sexually pleasurable for both predator and prey) and can subsist on regular food. In short, Woodbury is quite good at presenting vampirism as somewhat plausible and I found his virus idea very creative and well-researched. But I also initially felt that presenting the vampire as a non-lethal living being diluted the moral catch-22 faced by Rachel and Milada. Anne Rice's Louis de Pointe du Lac, the angst-ridden protagonist of Interview with the Vampire, was tormented by his undead state and need to consume human life, seeing himself as torn from God and given wholly to the Devil. Reexamining my thoughts in relation to the ideas discussed above, however, I came to the conclusion that going with the traditional undead killer vampire may have been too literal an interpretation of the Book of Job (God v. Satan). It is precisely because Milada is not some demonic entity that Rachel's dilemma is as pressing as it is. It's too easy to be repulsed by evil, especially for the religious individual.

Of course, evil itself cannot exist without good. It is actually defined in relation to good; it is the absence of good. Many people who did immoral things still felt the need to morally justify themselves. "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions." So maybe evil is not always so obvious? Do you really have to be Dracula killing without remorse and violating innocent young women? Isn't evil often subtle, understated, presented in small doses, and even attractive? Is Milada too sympathetic to be evil or is Woodbury asking a trick question?

Hmmm. I guess you'll just have to read it yourself.

Note: Angel Falling Softly may have been written by a Mormon and published by a Mormon press (Zarahemla Books), but, as you may have gathered, it has been a highly controversial addition to the world of LDS literature. Here and here are some negative reviews. This one in probably sums up the feelings of many.

MOAR VAMPIRES!

Emily of Evening All Afternoon left this great comment on my last post about vampires:

. . . It's interesting that vampires have become so desirable/sympathetic in modern literature, and zombies have become so disgusting and killable, since as far as I can tell, in the original folk traditions vampires were victimizers and zombies were largely just victims. A cynical part of me wonders whether there's any racist component to why vampires became all sexy and zombies didn't, since the popular version of vampire lore originated in Eastern Europe, whereas zombi-ism is originally an African and later a West Indian idea (zombis were originally living people reduced to a state of half-death, bewitched to do a sorcerer's bidding - which became a metaphor for the slavery in the Americas). Maybe the western psyche find the idea of being preyed upon by the white aristocracy strangely seductive, but the idea of a rebellion of the non-Caucasian slave class is just threatening?

She actually brought up a couple of points I had intended to address but ended up leaving out. So I thought I'd discuss them here.

Desirability and Aristocracy

When I initially read that comment, I thought the word in the first sentence was "synthetic." Which is funny because vampires nowadays really are very synthetic!

The modern vampire (dating back to the nineteenth century) has always been inherently desirable. Of course, since they're the reanimated dead who want to feast on you, this is also highly disturbing, as exhibited in Dracula. The problem right now is that this desirability is so . . . synthetic. In Twilight Bella actually compares the female vampires' figures to the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. That type of beauty simply does not exist in real life – those models are always posed under specific lighting, heavily made up, and airbrushed afterwards.

And since they're often rich as well, today's vampire is really all about living the ultimate fantasy. They're like the supernatural SS: a perfected, superior master race that wants to kill you. Anne Rice's vampires lamented their eternal damnation as the bloodthirsty undead, but that component is all but gone now.

(Zombies and Nazis: greatest villains ever. In fiction, that is.)

Dracula was never depicted as a paragon of male beauty. He was more of a Rochester or Heathcliffe – very strong, dramatic features with a charismatic personality. Lucy and the Brides were technically beautiful, but marred by their inhuman bloodlust.

Vampires and Race

There is definitely a racial component to this discussion. I honestly cannot name one single non-white vampire. In the Twilight movie Laurent is played by a black guy with dreads, who actually looks way too badass to be in that teenybopper sparkle-fest. But in the books (I've only been able to stomach the first one, so this is coming from the Twilight wiki) he's described as "olive-skinned," which makes me think of a Greek or Italian or other European Mediterranean look. Anne Rice had some ancient Egyptian vampires, one of whom was played by Aaliyah, an African-American, in the Queen of the Damned film. Again, however, this is another vampire actually described as more "Mediterranean"-looking – like a dark-skinned white person.

I believe Rice actually addressed this issue of non-representation at one point, saying that she wouldn't know how to get inside a non-white character's head or what they would think about or something to that effect. And yet she wrote The Feast of All Saints, a very race-centered novel about the free colored people of New Orleans in the antebellum era. I get the impression that she's simply very interested in European art, literature, and history (particularly ancient Rome, the Renaissance, and the eighteenth century), and that's something she enjoys incorporating into her stories. She really is very knowledgeable. I wonder if she's actually worried that a depiction of another part of the world would seem shallow in comparison to her very rich portrayals of Western culture.

But yes, it is very odd and very glaring. I noticed it a long time ago, even as a white person. I guess you could link it back to the vampire's current association with wealth and power. Even when a vampire doesn't actually have money or influence, they still possess the physical indicators of status: taste, sophistication, good looks, fashionable clothing, extensive knowledge (education), an appreciation of "high" culture, and are often well-traveled. They are also frequently of aristocratic origin (i.e. Dracula, Lestat). And, quite frankly, most of those things have been historically denied to people of color in the West. "Whiteness" has, unfortunately, long been a major social privilege. If someone were to write a vampire story in the current popular style (sexiness, sophistication) but featuring black or Hispanic characters – would it succeed?


(A note: even "smart" zombies, such as Bub in Romero's Day of the Dead, as still bestial and childlike.)

Actually, race seems to be an issue with genre fiction in general. Back in December 2008, an author known as Lilith Saintcrow wrote a really whiny, bitchy essay about how the reason urban fantasy is seen as low-brow is because it's female-dominated. (Um, honey? You call yourself LILITH SAINTCROW and write a series about a katana-welding, airboard-riding "necromance" named Dante Valentine whose boyfriend is half-demon. No, that's not cheesy at all. . .) But not a word from her about how this genre also perpetuates whitewashed beauty stereotypes that have done great harm to women, especially women of color.



*rolls eyes*

But seriously, that video's also a great overview of the current vampire craze.

VAMPIRES! (Some Thoughts on Them)

A little essay - just some general musing that occurred to me upon finishing Dracula.

Reading Dracula was a bit like my experience reading Treasure Island years and years ago. You're so familiar with the tropes of the genre (vampires, pirates) that encountering them in the original source feels ridiculous. It's like a joke I once read in Reader's Digest: "I don't get why Shakespeare is considered this great writer. His stuff is full of clichés!" What you need to keep reminding yourself is that this is where it all started. Of course, in the case of vampires, the cultural mythos has undergone so many revisions that probably the best thing any aspiring vampire author can do right now is go back to the source. I mean, maybe it's time we ditched the werewolf wars (Twilight, Underworld), the teenyboppers (Twilight, The Vampire Diaries, Bite Me, the Blue Bloods series, the Den of Shadows series, the House of Night series, and it goes on. . .), the "woe is me I'm so damned" angst, all that urban fantasy/paranormal romance crap, the vampires-are-legal-citizens-and-everyone-knows-they-exist (True Blood, the Anita Blake series), and the general cherry-picking of what aspects of the fantasy to accept (fangs, nocturnalism, super strength) and what to ignore (aversion to crucifixes and/or garlic, no reflection).

Actually, let's cool it with the whole freaking vampire mania that's going on right now. I love Anne Rice, but the multitudes of sensitive, sexy, angst-ridden, fashionable, century-old vampire dudes (usually French, unless you're reading Twilight) is really starting to get old. I think what was so neat about I Am Legend (the original book) is that - looking back on it in light of George Romero's films and their subsequent influence - it implicitly links vampires and zombies. Matheson chose to write about vampires but, until the very end, his vampires act more like Romero zombies: feral undeads who pursue lone human survivors en masse with the intent of consumption and/or recruiting. (One bite and you're one of them! BRAAINS!) Yet for the most part, vampires are the beautiful people of the night while zombies are mindlessly shambling corpses leaving chunks of rotting flesh behind.

When asked who was sexier, vampires or werewolves, Carrie Vaughn, author if the Kitty Norville urban fantasy series, made the point that the choice between the two is really a choice between necrophilia and bestiality. (Nice.) There's a moment in the Twilight film (I watched about half of it on surfthechannel.com) when Bella accidentally sees the forearm of a dead body fall out from under the sheet as it was borne away on a stretcher. The pale, ashen flesh immediately reminds her of Edward's complexion. (It's called "pallor mortis.") Naturally, the fangirls eat this up and beg for more. But really, both zombies and vampires are reanimated corpses.

And yet vampires have also, since Dracula, been a metaphor for sex. In his intro to the Signet edition of Dracula, Leonard Wolf observes that lurking behind the narrative, subliminal in a way that Bram Stoker himself may not have fully understood, are the sexual undertones of the biting and sucking of the neck, and the exchange of bodily fluid: "In Dracula we see how that force transforms Lucy Westenra, a beautiful nineteen-year-old virgin, into a shameless slut." I wouldn't say she's a "slut," since all she actually does is non-fatally drink some children's blood, but in the moment right before her death and transformation, she does behave in an uncharacteristically seductive manner towards her fiancé Arthur. However, there is in her overall manner and appearance a sense of decadence and moral corruption that was definitely not there before:

Again he lifted the lid of Lucy's coffin and we all looked . . . and saw that the body lay there in all its death-beauty. But there was no love in my heart for the foul Thing which had taken Lucy's shape without her soul. . .

She seemed like a nightmare of Lucy as she lay there; the pointed teeth, the bloodstained, voluptuous mouth - which it made one shudder to see - the whole carnal and unsprititual appearance, seeming like a devilish mockery of Lucy's sweet purity.

Equally explicit are Jonathan Harker's feelings of temptation when faced with the "Brides of Dracula" and the scene in which Mina Harker is seen drinking blood from a wound in Dracula's breast. But unlike practically every modern vampire tale (*cough* Twilight *cough*), Stoker constantly reminds us that vampires are inherently demonic. It makes far more sense than our current fixation on vampires as objects of human desire (Julie Plec, a writer and producer for The Vampire Diaries, describes them as "erotic predators" who are "the new James Dean"). Sex with a dead body is a vile, unholy act. Ergo: vampires, as sexually attractive corpses that feed on the living (semi-cannibalism), are intrinsically and unavoidably monstrous.

Vampires, in other words, are damned and outcast from the natural order. In some fictional universes, they themselves recognize this. Anne Rice reflects on her earlier works:

Interview with the Vampire, the novel that brought me to public attention, is about the near despair of an alienated being who searches the world for some hope that his existence can have meaning. His vampire nature is clearly a metaphor for human consciousness or moral awareness. The major theme of the novel is the misery of this character because he cannot find redemption and does not have the strength to end the evil of which he knows himself to be a part. . . It is an expression of grief for a lost religious heritage that seemed at that time beyond recovery.

. . .Much could be said, and has been said, about all of my works. I would like to say that the one thing which unites them is the theme of the moral and spiritual quest. A second theme, key to most of them, is the quest of the outcast for a context of meaning, whether that outcast is an 18th century castrato opera singer, or a young boy of mixed blood coming of age in ante-bellum New Orleans, or a person forced into a monstrous predatory existence like the young vampire, Lestat. For me, these themes are inherently significant and noble themes. They are worthy of exploration; they are evocative; they can and do reflect the deepest questions that humans face.

To Rice, the vampire is a metaphor for the human condition: adrift in a world where God seems to be absent, always searching for some transcendental Truth that will bring meaning and order and purpose to a short, contingent life. "Faith is an instinctive response to aspects of existence that we cannot explain by any other means, be it the moral void we perceive in the universe, the certainty of death. . ." says Andreas Corelli in Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Angel's Game. "In this case, the problem is that man is a moral animal abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no other purpose than to perpetuate the natural cycle of the species." Similar analyses have been made of Shelley's Frankenstein (loneliness, isolation, abandonment, the search for the Creator).

But if vampires may be thought of as a fictional philosophical device, so too can they come to represent the opposite end of the spectrum of human nature. Says Rob Pattinson, who played Edward in the Twilight film:

"When I read it I was convinced Stephenie was convinced she was Bella and it was like it was a book that wasn't supposed to be published. It was like reading her sexual fantasy, especially when she said it was based on a dream and it was like, 'Oh I've had this dream about this really sexy guy,' and she just writes this book about it. Like some things about Edward are so specific, I was just convinced, like, 'This woman is mad. She's completely mad and she's in love with her own fictional creation.' And sometimes you would feel uncomfortable reading this thing."

Gaimangirl, a poster on an Amazon thread addressing Twilight's anti-feminist criticism, agrees: "[I]t's like her id wrote the book." She then goes on to compare the "nothingness" of Bella's character (astute readers will realize that she has zero depth or personality) to the role of the male actor in porn. Most porn films aimed at a male audience, she argues, are designed so that the male viewer can imagine himself as the guy onscreen. Similarly, Twilight basically functions as "emotional porn" for women, enabling the female reader to insert herself into the tabula rasa that is Bella and fantasize about herself as the object of the sexy vampire's affection.

Stephenie Meyer claims to be a faithful, conservative Mormon housewife. Ironically, however, her books seem to strike a dark cord with their audience, one which she may not be fully cognizant of, just as Bram Stoker was probably unaware of the full sexual force of his creation. The allure of the vampire, says fashion designer Rick Owens, is "all about the titillation of imagining the monsters we could be if we just let ourselves go. . . We’re all fascinated with corruption, the more glamorous the better . . . and with devouring, consuming, possessing someone we desire." Similarly, I've often thought of zombies, in the current pop culture imagination, as guilt-free objects of violence. They're already dead. They're mindless, so there's no danger of empathizing with them. They sure don't have good intentions toward you. So why not just bust out the weapons and go completely berserker? (One of my favorite Facebook groups: The Hardest Part of a Zombie Apocalypse Will be Pretending I'm Not Excited. Look at all those NRA-happy gun photos people have posted.) Sure, re-killing an undead friend or family member may be rough, but it's not really them you're blasting with an Uzi. It's just their body, hellishly resurrected for nefarious purposes, and they would probably have wanted you to do it.

In Dracula, it is the same with vampires. As with I Am Legend (and 30 Days of Night, I believe), a retrospective look at Dracula reveals an intriguing (if anachronistic) connection between the vampire and the modern zombie. As the predatory undead, both represent an appalling, hellbound fate. If I feel myself beginning to transform into a vampire, intent on harming those I love, says Mina Harker, I will kill myself "if there were no friend who loved me, who would save me such pain, and so desperate an effort!" Like our zombies, in Stoker's universe the vampire cannot avoid bringing death and horror. It is an intrinsic part of the undead nature - to become undead is to become evil. Today, on the other hand, that diabolical aspect has been watered down to a mere "bad boy" or "femme fatale" portrayal. Today's vampires - as popularized in myriad YA fantasies and paranormal romances - are simply not monsters, no matter how often, in moments of self-pitying angst, they like to claim they are. For all her religious convictions, Stephenie Meyer never once addresses the fact that her beloved vampire protagonists are the bloodthirsty undead; therefore, they are likely damned in the eyes of God and all that is good. No, Bella simply gets to have her money, mansions, sports cars, private island, American Express Black Card, super-sexy husband, adorable and powerful daughter forever and ever and ever.

It's like a never-ending episode of VH1's The Fabulous Life.

As I said earlier, I really think someone out there needs to go just back to the beginning. Create a perverse, undead monster who can be repelled by crucifixes and garlic, lives in a ruined castle, sleeps in a coffin, is sociopathic and predatory in nature, and doesn't give a damn about fashion and certainly not high school drama.

A brief note: it seems that there is another Mormon author who did, in fact, address the moral questions posed by the myth of the vampire. Eugene Woodbury's Angel Falling Softly is about the wife of a Mormon bishop whose daughter is dying of leukemia. She struggles with the ethical dilemma of saving her child by having her made into a vampire. It's been slammed by some conservative Mormon reviewers for its alleged sexual content, but I think it sounds very promising. I'll probably read this some time.

Buffy vs. Edward: Twilight Remixed

HELL YES! This is BRILLIANT! Eat your HEARTS out, Twitards!

But on a serious note: why is it that poorly-written anti-feminist tripe that portrays abuse as love SO damn popular with millions of teen girls and bored housewives who should be old enough to know better?

Here is an article by Jonathan McIntosh on why he created this video.

For some more great Twilight criticism, click here and here. And here is my review.

Anita Blake and Mary Sue

There was apparently a bit of a mix-up when I went to order Laurell K. Hamilton's Guilty Pleasures, the first book of her wildly popular Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series. I ended up with the first volume of Marvel's graphic novel adaptation instead. Illustrated lavishly by Brett Booth, it is certainly a visual feast but I was more interested in the story itself. I enjoy vampires (except Twilight) and have heard a lot of good and interesting things about Anita Blake. There has also been quite a bit of chatter on the speculative fiction blogosphere about a current publishing phenomenon called "urban fantasy," of which Anita Blake is said to have been a major forerunner and influence (Guilty Pleasures was published in 1993). Urban fantasy author Lilith Saintcrow has sarcastically referred to the genre as "angry chicks in leather," a label others have objected to, but from what I've seen, powerful, ass-kicking female protagonists do seem to play a huge role in these types of books.

Now I'm not sure whether I'd classify urban fantasy as explicitly feminist or not. One thing I noticed immediately about most of the book covers was that every single one of these tough, hard-hitting ladies (with the exception of both Patricia Brigg's Mercy Thompson and Anita Blake herself) seems to be a size 4 white girl, a beauty paradigm that's been widely proven to be harmful. Of course, you can make the same criticism of sci-fi/fantasy in general. And I'm not sure why every female character has to analyzed in terms of how "feminist" she is. In fact (to be fair), this has been a common counterargument among Twilight fans when confronted with accusations that Bella is terrible heroine (and personally, I think she is, but I've already beaten that topic to death). Why, they ask, can't Bella simply be Bella? By reducing her to a statement on feminism/anti-feminism, aren't you dehumanizing her as a character? (And why are you spending so much time on a series that you hate? Um. . . *cough cough*)

All that being said, however, I was forced to reexamine my own perceptions of women in genre fiction. I realized that I had been ready to dismiss Anita as a mere "Mary Sue," a dreaded term that originated in Star Trek fan fiction to describe an impossibly beautiful and impossibly talented female character who acts as a vehicle for her author's fantasy wish fulfillment (since most fan fiction writers are female). A Mary Sue in, say, a Star Wars fanfic would be a gorgeous young lady, maybe from Alderaan nobility, with the strongest Force powers seen in generations. Anakin or Obi-Wan will inevitably fall in love with her. She will end up either triumphantly saving the day or suffering a romanticized martyr's death. While there is a male counterpart known as "Gary Stu," a closer examination reveals that the Mary Sue burden seems to fall almost entirely on women. Editor Joanna Cantor has even blamed the specter of Mary Sue for the lack of "believable, competent, and identifiable-with female characters." A panel of female authors at a 1987 Star Trek convention has actually stated that they do not write female characters at all just to avoid the Mary Sue label.

Now I'm not denying that Mary Sue exists. But all serious authors want their characters to be real and identifiable. Having a protagonist who is just a freaking paragon is the sure sign of an amateur. I don't know about you, but I can think of quite a few fictional men who fit the Gary Stu model. James T. Kirk, for instance, is the proverbial sci-fi Alpha Male who commands his own starship, is renowned as a hero throughout the fleet, beds a whole lotta sexy aliens, and beats up a whole lotta bad guys. Of course, any Trekkie will also tell you that Wesley Crusher from The Next Generation actually has been widely reviled as a Gary Stu (to begin with, Wesley is Gene Roddenberry's middle name) but I think he was just hated from the beginning. Geeky über-kid saves the Enterprise - again! The "Gary Stu" criticism towards Wesley simply justified a loathing that already existed and finally gave fans a concrete reason to despise a character who had long rubbed them the wrong way.












And now the Big Question. Why does Mary Sue largely haunt female authors writing female characters? As Carrie Vaughn, author of the Kitty Norville series asks in her blog, "What is [the popularity of urban fantasy] symptomatic of? What anxiety in our culture is being expressed so eloquently in these works that they’re striking such a powerful chord in the readership, leading to phenomenal popularity?" It's women and power, she answers, women and violence. It's our willingness to accept female warriors but not without "apologizing" for them because Western culture is ultimately ambivalent about them. An ass-kicking femme will nevertheless submit to the smokin' hot Alpha Male or exhibit some psychological flaw such as low self-esteem. It's the paradox of the author who feels comfortable writing a strong, beautiful, confident female protagonist but who is still aware that her character may be dismissed as a "Mary Sue." Women have come so far, Vaughn argues, and yet we are still ostracized and undercut for appearing powerful and in control.

So yes, Anita Blake is a bold and sexy female fighter who gets her man. Yet she also values friendship and loyalty, shows sympathy for a recovering "vampire junky," and wears an oversized t-shirt with a cartoon penguin on it to hide her gun holster. I personally found the Guilty Pleasures to be a bit over-the-top in terms of the supernatural ("wererats"? "freak parties"?) and containing way too many sleazy Fabio types (what Smart Bitches, Trashy Books snarkily calls "quivering man-titty") but I ended up enjoying it. No, it wasn't Anne Rice, but it was great fun. I really need to read the actual book!