At one point, I decided the novel "Dracula" was about depression. After all, vampires slept all day--like the depressed. They sucked the life out of the people who loved them--like I think I used to do. The vampire was unclean, unholy, and full of lust--greed.
So, I have wanted to do a vampire book for awhile. I started one, and didn't like the way it started. I put nearly one-half another first draft in between, and I wrote myself into a corner. Write what you know, so I wrote vampire. Michael. He was born in Florence during the Renaissance. This gave me a chance to think about a city I love. I wrote later about Paris. And most of the book is set in San Francisco.
I have not read all the new books about vampires. Not the ones the teens read. I have seen but one new vampire tale in the last few years at the movies. I read the book, "Let Me In," and saw the movies "Let the Right One In," and the American version "Let Me In." This is a coming of age tale with a vampire (female, well sort of) protecting a young bullied boy, and the boy befriends the vampire. It is an amazing, touching, and bloody tale. The denouement is probably the most exciting of any book or movie I have read or seen. Here you root for the vampire.
I have read one of the Anne Rice books. I liked it. My favorite vampire tale is probably "Carmilla." She is the LeFanu character written before "Dracula." "Carmilla" is certainly the most sensuous of the early vampire tales. It was written in the 1870's. Carmilla is a lipstick lesbian I suppose. She is beautiful, in love, and completely without any sense of guilt. The language--the speeches about love in "Carmilla" are so amazingly passionate, that they rank up there with perhaps "Cyrano DeBergerac" or perhaps, with the passion expressed in "Wuthering Heights" by Heathcliffe and Cathy. Yes, "Wuthering Heights" was considered a Gothic novel. It is another must read. Or, both "Carmilla" and "Wuthering Heights" can be downloaded from Internet Archives in the spoken book section. Both are read quite well by the volunteers.
I do not regret that I did not read the new "sagas" of vampires since beginning the book. I didn't want to be influenced. The newest vampire tales I watched on television was "Buffy" mostly for the Hannigan girl. Ah, that's a lie. I had no problems watching young girls kicking ass. I loved "Hannah," (or was it "Hanna?") That movie is a couple years old, but she also kicked ass. But kicking vampire ass, ala, "Blade," etc. is not high on my list. The "Interview with a Vampire" movie and book was pretty cool for not destroying all the vampires. We can't have that.
In the past, vampires were often blamed for the deaths due to plague and disease. Dead peoples bodies can bloat, bleed from the mouth, their gums shrink making their teeth seem sharper, and the skin around their nails can also shrink and the nails seem to grow. Now, I don't know why people were busy digging up these poor souls already in their graves, but sometimes, if the individual had a bad reputation, they were "stuck" in their coffins with a stake through the heart. Bad people, suicides, and vampires were buried on the north side of the graveyards if I remember correctly.
I read about the "real" Dracula, Vlad the Impaler of Romania. He was an interesting and bloody sort. At one point, in the novel "Dracula," the vampire boasts about his family's history. It is a brilliant book. I have read it two or three times now, and listened to it on tape more than twice. The scene where poor Harker falls asleep in the wrong room, and the three women in white come to him is what makes that novel so chilling and alluring at the same time.
Let's face it. Vampires are about sex. All vampire tales. The greatest horror in "Dracula" occurs when he bares his breast to Mina Harker and makes her lick his blood. This might as well be sexual intercourse because I suppose it is even more shocking. The novel is about breaking the rules of Victorian polite society. Poor Lucy, who has become a vampire, must be killed in her coffin and her head removed. Mina Harker must be used as bait to find the monster.
This is the difference between the old vampire tales and the new. New vampires are sexy and handsome. Somehow LeFanu's "Carmilla" was way before its time. My vampire will be a new-style, not-quite monster, not-quite human. Yes, he will have a conscience--sometimes. Where the original vampire tales allude to sex, Michael trades on it. He is good at it, and gives to receive so to speak. In his world, sex begets time with his victims in which he takes their blood via syringe often. My vampire picks at near human carrion. Before he traded sex for blood, he worked the battlefields seeking the near dead, acting as an angel of death.
I know of one instance of a nearly true-to-life vampire. Some Eastern European countess once murdered and supposedly bathed in the blood of more than 100 women. Actually, that number might be much higher,
This is all interesting stuff. I want to believe vampires have some basis in fact. I can not. Vampires aren't real. They are a figment of a cosmology that believed the earth was flat, that the earth was the center of the universe, and that spontaneous generation explained why the stump that looked like a deer yesterday is a real deer today. God bless illogical thought.
Thanks for reading and Happy Halloween.
