If you haven’t already, check out the anthology with my story “Survivor’s Guilt”.
Hey, thanks. Now here’s my review of the Bret Easton Ellis short story, “The Secrets of Summer”:
Once, when I was faced with a crisis and feeling distraught, a friend of mine told me “If you’re feeling something, then you’re doing something right.” Reading Bret Easton Ellis makes me think of this maxim. Not because his characters are doing something right, though. Just the opposite. His characters are so terrified of emotion, of connecting to other people, that they go to terrible lengths to avoid the very things that make them human. In the case of Jamie, the protagonist of “The Secrets of Summer”, he fantasizes about being a vampire to cope with his own self-loathing and personal emptiness.
The first scene of the story describes Jamie picking up a woman at a club. He steers her deeper into inebriation, corrals her into his bed, and then attacks her as they’re having sex. As a vampire, he sees himself with shiny black eyes and a “ruptured mouth” that looks like “the anus of an octopus.” There is nothing sexy or alluring about his monster form, and this sense of ugliness underpins the story’s glamorous setting of 1980s Los Angeles.
Each scene unfolds through Jamie’s blasé narration, and his life is an endless pursuit of hedonism and casual sex. Ellis is very adept at portraying this kind of life as unenviable. Jamie’s friendships involve little more than shared substance abuse, bragging about exploits, and watching movies. His life is devoid of intimacy, spirituality, or any other aspect of a healthy inner life.
Throughout the story, it not easy to tell where reality ends and fantasy begins. Jamie himself seems to have a difficult time finding this line. But Ellis leaves some clues. For one, Jamie maintains the decidedly un-vampiric habit of using a tanning salon. He also works out, which has never really been seen as a concern for the undead. But the timing of Jamie’s vampire fantasies is one of the most revealing clues.
Anytime Jamie is threatened with a sense of connection, the vampire bares his fangs. There are a few scenes where he spends time with people he clearly admires, and he fantasizes that they are vampires like him. With his closest friend, he smokes pot, drinks beer, and watches the same movie (Bad Boys with Sean Penn) three times. He also imagines that his friend’s house is filled with human remains and bloody tools. Whenever Jamie has sex, he turns into a vampire, and his violence toward women is as much a desperate plea to rein his own self-destructiveness as it is an act of aggression and dominance.
Ellis later expanded his concept from “The Secrets of Summer” into one of his best known novels, American Psycho. Patrick Bateman is equally shallow, hateful, and self-serving, and he slips between reality and violent fantasy with the same fluidity. Both works are also biting satires of the materialistic culture of the 1980s. But where does “The Secrets of Summer” fit alongside other vampire literature?
In this author’s mind, the story fits quite nicely. Ellis’ use of vampire lore is clever. Some scenes, such as one where Jamie meets a hungover bat named Andre, are quite funny. Jamie’s fondness for raw steak also adds a morbid sense of fun to the story. At bottom, “The Secrets of Summer” is a dark satire, and the ease with which the funnier parts slip into shocking violence can be profoundly disturbing.
Vampires are more or less a symbol of the things we fear and repress, and in most vampire literature that thing is usually sex. For all its merits, Dracula was basically about Victorian Englishmen’s fear of hook-nosed Eastern Europeans corrupting the aspiring mothers of the Empire. With Lestat, Anna Rice made an uneasy peace with our animal lusts and Charlaine Harris invites us to ride the beast so long as you’re tall enough to do so.
But the sexual element of the vampire genre is just a part of a greater whole, and Ellis hits this right on the nose. As one of nature’s most basic, intense drives, sex is tied up in many other aspects of the human experience: connection, reciprocity, acquisition, etc. Sex is never really meaningless because it is always bound to some kind of desire. In this regard sex for Jamie is an act of numbing aggression. Fucking a woman is no different from doing a line of coke. His imagined vampirism is part of the same, desperate scheme to maintain control by avoiding intimacy. He is so terrified of what is really inside of him that he pretends he is a monster.
In a way, “The Secrets of Summer” plays the vampire metaphor so close to home that it turns it on its head. It is simultaneously a vampire story and not a vampire story. Jamie’s vampirism seems so real to both him and the reader that it is equally literal and figurative. And I like that, a lot.
“The Secrets of Summer” can be found in Bret Easton Ellis’ collection of short stories, The Informers.
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
My Top Five List of Vampire Movies and Television
So, my story, “Survivor’s Guilt” is still available in an anthology from Wicked East Press. It’s about a young woman in Nazi-occupied Poland who is turned into a vampire, and then faced with a chance to protect her parents from German Soldiers.
I’ll be reviewing other, newer works soon, but until then here’s a list of movies and TV shows that inspired me to write about vampires.
5. Near Dark (1987): Long before she made The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow co-wrote and directed this classic horror film of the late nineteen eighties. Set against the lonely, arid backdrop of the South Central U.S., Near Dark follows a young man’s struggle to remain human after he is drawn into a gang of vampires. The thing is, the vampires in this movie are so much more compelling than the humans that you want him to just give in and go hematovore. Near Dark’s central weakness thus becomes it’s greatest strength, largely due to a solid cast. Lance Henriksen is reliably spooky as the vampires’ leader, but the real scene-stealer is a leather and spur-clad, gleefully violent Bill Paxton. I watched this movie with obsessive frequency in my early teens, which probably explains a lot about me.
4. Fright Night (1985/2011): When I first saw this movie, I wanted to be Jerry Dandridge, the sinister vampire next door played by Chris Sarandon. He strolled through the night presuming to rule all he surveyed, and it had a big impact on my socially awkward, 12-year-old psyche. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t age very well; what with its tinny special effects, stiff acting, and some tone-deaf casting (such as a romantic lead played by Amanda Bearse, better known as Marcy from Married with Children). Like Near Dark, Fright Night accidentally made its villain far more interesting than the hero but the remake, scripted by Buffy the Vampire Slayer veteran Marti Noxon, obliterates the original’s shortcomings. Colin Farrell gives Dandridge an aggressive sleaziness that is absolutely skin-crawling. By the end, you pray that the hero, played by Anton Yelchin, rescues his girlfriend and saves the day. David Tenant’s turn as a phony vampire hunter doesn’t hurt matters, either. The original Fright Night had a great feel and sense of atmosphere, which Noxon’s script fleshed out to its full potential.
3. True Blood (2008- ): I borrow a lot of vampire physics from this series: super speed and strength; sprouting fangs without changing any other facial features; immunity to crucifixes. Some of my own characters also bear resemblance to Pam De Beaufort, with her sullen disdain of humans. And with all due respect to Charlaine Harris’ skillful use of the first person, I prefer the multiple points of view that Alan Ball and co. employ to tell the twisted tales of Bon Temps, Louisiana. Has the series peaked after four seasons? Hard to say. Is the whole Sookie-Bill-Eric love triangle grating? It depends on who you ask (though I think so). But the beauty of the show is that if you don’t like one character, you can just focus on another. Personally, I’m hoping Season 5 has a little less Sookie and lot more Pam. Why? Find out here.
2. Let the Right One In/Let Me In (2008/2010): Both of these movies hew closely to John Ajvide Lindqvist’s story of a bullied young boy’s friendship with a vampire in the body of a young girl, but the original, Swedish version does a better job capturing the feel of the book. Granted, the American remake, Let Me In, can’t be faulted for being set in New Mexico instead of Lindqvist’s native Sweden, but Lina Leandersson strikes a perfect balance of cute and creepy whereas Chloë Moretz is almost too pretty as Eli’s American counterpart, Abby. Both filmakers mostly eschew the novel’s themes of pedophilia and genital mutilation, which would’ve alienated wider audiences, but each movie is suitably bleak in setting and adept at conveying the major characters’ longing for security. In terms of absolute quality Let the Right One In wins by a nose, but if you’re not one for foreign films, that’s okay. Let Me In will forever change the way you hear Blue Öyster Cult’s “Burnin' for You.”
1. Buffy the Vampire Slayer & Angel (1997-2003/1999-2004): Watching these two overlapping series led me to believe there was nothing Joss Whedon and his crack team of writers couldn’t do. Serious, artistic drama? Check. Musicals and Puppets? Check. What about a willingness to not only jump the shark, but also openly mock it as you hover a few feet above the water? Check. Here’s the secret: Make clear rules, break these rules in a way that fits them in a broader context, turn reliable tropes on their head, kill off popular characters, and never, ever lose your sense of humor. I write about vampires, they have their own quirks, and that’s where my aspirations of Whedonosity hit the Joss ceiling. I would love to do what Whedon and co. achieved in these series: create worlds that are at once lucid, complex and flexible, conjure deep, crisply defined characters who constantly evolve, and tug at every conceivable emotion along the way. Buffy and Angel changed my life, and I am grateful. Because of them, I have the courage to say ‘screw it, I want to write about a vampire with PTSD.’
Post Script: Twilight (2008): I rented Twilight on December 6, 2009. Among other things, I witnessed a scene where a group of sparkly vampires played baseball. When one of the boy vampires scaled a tree to catch a pop fly, a girl vampire cooed, “That’s my monkey man.” Then I said to myself, 'This has to stop. The whole sparkly, sensitive vampires who fall in love with high school girls thing has to stop.' Then I decided to be fair and tried, and then failed, to get through the first book. Clearly, Stephanie Meyer has done something that resonates with a lot of people, and I respect that. Truthfully, I owe her a great debt. After that day, it still took months of research and hem-hawing to get myself to start writing, but Twilight edged my toes up to the line between thinking and doing.
Next week, I review a vampire story by Bret Easton Ellis. Who'da thunk it?
I’ll be reviewing other, newer works soon, but until then here’s a list of movies and TV shows that inspired me to write about vampires.
5. Near Dark (1987): Long before she made The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow co-wrote and directed this classic horror film of the late nineteen eighties. Set against the lonely, arid backdrop of the South Central U.S., Near Dark follows a young man’s struggle to remain human after he is drawn into a gang of vampires. The thing is, the vampires in this movie are so much more compelling than the humans that you want him to just give in and go hematovore. Near Dark’s central weakness thus becomes it’s greatest strength, largely due to a solid cast. Lance Henriksen is reliably spooky as the vampires’ leader, but the real scene-stealer is a leather and spur-clad, gleefully violent Bill Paxton. I watched this movie with obsessive frequency in my early teens, which probably explains a lot about me.
4. Fright Night (1985/2011): When I first saw this movie, I wanted to be Jerry Dandridge, the sinister vampire next door played by Chris Sarandon. He strolled through the night presuming to rule all he surveyed, and it had a big impact on my socially awkward, 12-year-old psyche. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t age very well; what with its tinny special effects, stiff acting, and some tone-deaf casting (such as a romantic lead played by Amanda Bearse, better known as Marcy from Married with Children). Like Near Dark, Fright Night accidentally made its villain far more interesting than the hero but the remake, scripted by Buffy the Vampire Slayer veteran Marti Noxon, obliterates the original’s shortcomings. Colin Farrell gives Dandridge an aggressive sleaziness that is absolutely skin-crawling. By the end, you pray that the hero, played by Anton Yelchin, rescues his girlfriend and saves the day. David Tenant’s turn as a phony vampire hunter doesn’t hurt matters, either. The original Fright Night had a great feel and sense of atmosphere, which Noxon’s script fleshed out to its full potential.
3. True Blood (2008- ): I borrow a lot of vampire physics from this series: super speed and strength; sprouting fangs without changing any other facial features; immunity to crucifixes. Some of my own characters also bear resemblance to Pam De Beaufort, with her sullen disdain of humans. And with all due respect to Charlaine Harris’ skillful use of the first person, I prefer the multiple points of view that Alan Ball and co. employ to tell the twisted tales of Bon Temps, Louisiana. Has the series peaked after four seasons? Hard to say. Is the whole Sookie-Bill-Eric love triangle grating? It depends on who you ask (though I think so). But the beauty of the show is that if you don’t like one character, you can just focus on another. Personally, I’m hoping Season 5 has a little less Sookie and lot more Pam. Why? Find out here.
2. Let the Right One In/Let Me In (2008/2010): Both of these movies hew closely to John Ajvide Lindqvist’s story of a bullied young boy’s friendship with a vampire in the body of a young girl, but the original, Swedish version does a better job capturing the feel of the book. Granted, the American remake, Let Me In, can’t be faulted for being set in New Mexico instead of Lindqvist’s native Sweden, but Lina Leandersson strikes a perfect balance of cute and creepy whereas Chloë Moretz is almost too pretty as Eli’s American counterpart, Abby. Both filmakers mostly eschew the novel’s themes of pedophilia and genital mutilation, which would’ve alienated wider audiences, but each movie is suitably bleak in setting and adept at conveying the major characters’ longing for security. In terms of absolute quality Let the Right One In wins by a nose, but if you’re not one for foreign films, that’s okay. Let Me In will forever change the way you hear Blue Öyster Cult’s “Burnin' for You.”
1. Buffy the Vampire Slayer & Angel (1997-2003/1999-2004): Watching these two overlapping series led me to believe there was nothing Joss Whedon and his crack team of writers couldn’t do. Serious, artistic drama? Check. Musicals and Puppets? Check. What about a willingness to not only jump the shark, but also openly mock it as you hover a few feet above the water? Check. Here’s the secret: Make clear rules, break these rules in a way that fits them in a broader context, turn reliable tropes on their head, kill off popular characters, and never, ever lose your sense of humor. I write about vampires, they have their own quirks, and that’s where my aspirations of Whedonosity hit the Joss ceiling. I would love to do what Whedon and co. achieved in these series: create worlds that are at once lucid, complex and flexible, conjure deep, crisply defined characters who constantly evolve, and tug at every conceivable emotion along the way. Buffy and Angel changed my life, and I am grateful. Because of them, I have the courage to say ‘screw it, I want to write about a vampire with PTSD.’
Post Script: Twilight (2008): I rented Twilight on December 6, 2009. Among other things, I witnessed a scene where a group of sparkly vampires played baseball. When one of the boy vampires scaled a tree to catch a pop fly, a girl vampire cooed, “That’s my monkey man.” Then I said to myself, 'This has to stop. The whole sparkly, sensitive vampires who fall in love with high school girls thing has to stop.' Then I decided to be fair and tried, and then failed, to get through the first book. Clearly, Stephanie Meyer has done something that resonates with a lot of people, and I respect that. Truthfully, I owe her a great debt. After that day, it still took months of research and hem-hawing to get myself to start writing, but Twilight edged my toes up to the line between thinking and doing.
Next week, I review a vampire story by Bret Easton Ellis. Who'da thunk it?
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
First Posting: My Top Five List of Vampire Fiction.
First off, if you haven't already, buy the anthology Once Bitten, Never Die from Wicked East Press and read my story "Survivor's Guilt."
Now that you've done that (and thank you), you can read my first post.
Hello, and welcome. I write about the manqué-filled adventures of life-sized vampires. I started doing this about a year and a half ago, and since then I've had two stories published. One has already been adequately pushed for today, and you can always read "Love is a Battlefield" at Spinetinglers.co.uk. Two more stories have been accepted for publication, and will be released in early 2012.
The Sanguine Diary will feature book reviews, movie/TV reviews and other discussions of vampire, supernatural, and writing-related topics.
For my maiden blog entry, I’ve decided to talk about five works of vampire fiction that have had a signifcant impact on my work. This is not a ‘canon’ list. I give mad props to Bram Stoker and Anne Rice, but they don’t represent the direction I want to take with the genre. The works I list here inspired me to write, and I hope I can one day hold a candle to them.
5. Mario Acevedo, X-Rated Bloodsuckers: When I decided I wanted to write about vampires, I went to a bookstore and this novel leaped off the shelf. Admittedly, I was no expert to the genre but the very existence of his book opened doors for my imagination. Acevedo’s vampire noir detective novels are funnier than they are scary, but they’re still plenty twisted. The protagonist, Felix Gomez, is a vampire, Iraq War veteran, gritty private eye, and reluctant servant of a sinister vampire syndicate. In X-Rated Bloodsuckers, Gomez is hired to investigate a series of murders in the porn industry. Fun.
4. Kim Newman, Anno Dracula: In 1888, Dracula has married Queen Victoria, Van Helsing’s head’s impaled on a stake outside Buckingham Palace, and Jack the Ripper is murdering vampire prostitutes. Alternate history doesn't get more fascinating than this. As someone who writes in historical settings— Vietnam, Nixon-era Washington, DC, Nazi-occupied Poland— I am inspired by Newman’s depth of imagination and attention to detail. Anno Dracula is also an inventive gore-fest. One scene in particular, where a nearly decapitated vampire tries to change into a wolf and teeth accidentally grow out of the wound in her throat, had me gushing to my strong-stomached friends.
3. Jonathan Langan, “The Wide, Carnivorous Sky”: It’s been more than a year since I’ve read this short story and I still think about it at least once a week. Part of an anthology titled By Blood We Live, “The Wide, Carnivorous Sky” recounts a group of veterans’ efforts to rebuild their lives after they encounter a vampire during a firefight with Iraqi insurgents. It spoils nothing to say the vampire is an alien that feeds almost exclusively amid humanity’s least humane behavior, and in hindsight this story is probably one of the reasons why I have written four stories set during chaotic periods of modern history.
2. John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In: Lindqvist’s prose, which tells the story of a bullied young boy’s friendship with an old vampire in a child’s body, is as bleak and beautiful as the novel’s setting of Cold-War era Sweden. Two movies have been made from this book, one Swedish and one American. Both of them are quite good, but they are not as dark, twisted, or layered as the novel. Parts of this book are disturbing almost to the point of sickening, but it didn’t stop me from wanting to read on. If you liked either of the movies, then you definitely need to read this book.
1. Christopher Moore, Bloodsucking Fiends: On my most confident days, I pretend my writing is a darker version of Moore’s unique, funny take on vampire lore. I yearn to tell a story with the deft point-of-view shifts with which Moore spins the tale of Jody, a neurotic, painfully ‘modern’ vampire gal, and her clueless paramour and manservant, Tommy Flood. Set among San Francisco’s down, out, and outright weird, Bloodsucking Fiends is a decidedly un-gothic vampire novel. And as much as it appeals to my love of humor and the macabre, I still feel bad about what happened to those turtles. To know what the hell I’m talking about, you’ll just have to read it.
Now that you've done that (and thank you), you can read my first post.
Hello, and welcome. I write about the manqué-filled adventures of life-sized vampires. I started doing this about a year and a half ago, and since then I've had two stories published. One has already been adequately pushed for today, and you can always read "Love is a Battlefield" at Spinetinglers.co.uk. Two more stories have been accepted for publication, and will be released in early 2012.
The Sanguine Diary will feature book reviews, movie/TV reviews and other discussions of vampire, supernatural, and writing-related topics.
For my maiden blog entry, I’ve decided to talk about five works of vampire fiction that have had a signifcant impact on my work. This is not a ‘canon’ list. I give mad props to Bram Stoker and Anne Rice, but they don’t represent the direction I want to take with the genre. The works I list here inspired me to write, and I hope I can one day hold a candle to them.
5. Mario Acevedo, X-Rated Bloodsuckers: When I decided I wanted to write about vampires, I went to a bookstore and this novel leaped off the shelf. Admittedly, I was no expert to the genre but the very existence of his book opened doors for my imagination. Acevedo’s vampire noir detective novels are funnier than they are scary, but they’re still plenty twisted. The protagonist, Felix Gomez, is a vampire, Iraq War veteran, gritty private eye, and reluctant servant of a sinister vampire syndicate. In X-Rated Bloodsuckers, Gomez is hired to investigate a series of murders in the porn industry. Fun.
4. Kim Newman, Anno Dracula: In 1888, Dracula has married Queen Victoria, Van Helsing’s head’s impaled on a stake outside Buckingham Palace, and Jack the Ripper is murdering vampire prostitutes. Alternate history doesn't get more fascinating than this. As someone who writes in historical settings— Vietnam, Nixon-era Washington, DC, Nazi-occupied Poland— I am inspired by Newman’s depth of imagination and attention to detail. Anno Dracula is also an inventive gore-fest. One scene in particular, where a nearly decapitated vampire tries to change into a wolf and teeth accidentally grow out of the wound in her throat, had me gushing to my strong-stomached friends.
3. Jonathan Langan, “The Wide, Carnivorous Sky”: It’s been more than a year since I’ve read this short story and I still think about it at least once a week. Part of an anthology titled By Blood We Live, “The Wide, Carnivorous Sky” recounts a group of veterans’ efforts to rebuild their lives after they encounter a vampire during a firefight with Iraqi insurgents. It spoils nothing to say the vampire is an alien that feeds almost exclusively amid humanity’s least humane behavior, and in hindsight this story is probably one of the reasons why I have written four stories set during chaotic periods of modern history.
2. John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In: Lindqvist’s prose, which tells the story of a bullied young boy’s friendship with an old vampire in a child’s body, is as bleak and beautiful as the novel’s setting of Cold-War era Sweden. Two movies have been made from this book, one Swedish and one American. Both of them are quite good, but they are not as dark, twisted, or layered as the novel. Parts of this book are disturbing almost to the point of sickening, but it didn’t stop me from wanting to read on. If you liked either of the movies, then you definitely need to read this book.
1. Christopher Moore, Bloodsucking Fiends: On my most confident days, I pretend my writing is a darker version of Moore’s unique, funny take on vampire lore. I yearn to tell a story with the deft point-of-view shifts with which Moore spins the tale of Jody, a neurotic, painfully ‘modern’ vampire gal, and her clueless paramour and manservant, Tommy Flood. Set among San Francisco’s down, out, and outright weird, Bloodsucking Fiends is a decidedly un-gothic vampire novel. And as much as it appeals to my love of humor and the macabre, I still feel bad about what happened to those turtles. To know what the hell I’m talking about, you’ll just have to read it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)