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.
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