"It's All Just Symbolism": The Dead Travel Fast by Eric Nuzum

Things are well in Sanguine Diaryland. For one, I am now (sort of) celebrity endorsed. After posting my essay on Patton's Oswalt's "Zombie, Spaceship, Wasteland" on his Facebook page, I received this notice:

Pardon the lousy screencap, but I'm still pretty excited.

Now that I'm done bragging, here's my next review:

"It's All Just Symbolism": The Dead Travel Fast by Eric Nuzum

A few years ago, journalist Eric Nuzum knew next to nothing about vampires, but he couldn’t help noticing that they were everywhere—on cereal boxes, in common figures of speech, and, of course, in countless movies, books, and TV shows. His book, The Dead Travel Fast: Stalking Vampires fromNosferatu to Count Chocula, is the culmination of his efforts to understand this phenomenon. And while his answers are not too surprising, the lengths he is willing to go to find them are so amusing that his conclusions are almost beside the point.

Nuzum’s commitment to his quest is admirable. He begins by trying to watch every vampire movie ever made, but only makes it through a paltry 216 out of 605 titles. He also tries to drink his own blood, and then promptly vomits. After that, he takes a tour of Romania, where Butch Patrick (a.k.a. Eddie Munster) is literally paid to sleep in the back of the bus. Finally, he tries to turn himself into a vampire through a vain ritual involving eggshells, chicken livers, and vinegar.

Along the way, Nuzum disinters an impressive amount of historical information. His biography of Bram Stoker is insightful, but his account of the widow Florence Stoker’s fight to preserve exclusive rights to Dracula hints that the rise of the vampire movie—and thus the vampire’s place in popular culture—was far from inevitable. Madam Stoker successfully sued the producers of Nosferatu and had the the original print destroyed. The film only survived via bootleg copies until it was restored after her death. Tod Browning’s iconic version of Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi, only saw production after protracted legal wrangling. Had Mrs. Stoker’s lawyers won the day, some other creature may have just as easily become the quintessential thing that goes bump in the night.   

The vampire movie’s near miss with obscurity raises the larger question that The Dead Travel Fast tries to answer: why are vampires such a big part of our culture? Nuzum comes to the mundane, yet no less believable conclusion that vampires are “a channel for desires, fears, biases, anger, and longing that would be taboo otherwise.” Over the years, the vampires change styles without losing their fundamental qualities because “our Draculas [are] molded for our times.”

It’s hard to dispute Nuzum’s thesis, but it still raises another question: why don’t other monsters have the same impact? Werewolves, witches, and ghosts occupy meaningful posts in our culture as well, but they don’t have as much cachet as their cape-and-fanged cousins. Zombies get a lot of media presence, too, especially within the past few years, but the fact remains that Dracula has been more frequently portrayed in film, TV, and literature than Sherlock Holmes.

Vampires do not hold exclusive rights to channel our taboo fears and desires, either. Looking back, one has to wonder why Anne Rice didn’t strike it big with “Interview with a Specter”, or why there was never “Buffy the Werewolf Slayer.” Think about this for a second. Sure, the alternatives seem odd, maybe even absurd. Sookie Stackhouse would never enter a love triangle with Godzilla and Mothra. Maybe that wasn’t the best example, but you get the point. Other monsters matter, but vampires are the rulers of Spookytown.

While Nuzum can’t explain vampires why vampires have more status than other monsters, he does hit on another interesting point. Most vampire enthusiasts seem unable to articulate the cause of their passion. When asked why, most people effectively reply “Oh, I just like them.” The one person he doesn’t ask, however, is Jeanne Keyes Youngson, founder of Vampire Empire, a fan club for vampire media and research. Despite describing her as “ground zero for vampires”, Nuzum doesn’t draw much from her expertise. He could have asked academic scholars of vampire literature as well, but he doesn’t. Still, you’d think a lot of the people he did ask could supply some sort of rationale, even if they hadn’t given it much thought until that moment. But maybe the mystery is part of it.

Vampires are the most sophisticated of our monsters. Zombies can’t throw a baroque dinner party. Werewolves change form in a grotesque fashion and, once they’re changed, they’re basically aggressive dogs. Ghosts are generally incorporeal and usually return to the beyond once something’s resolved. Witches are the outlier, especially because of their roots in American history. My guess is that, since witches are almost exclusively women, several centuries of sexism have marginalized their power as villains.

Vampires evade all of those qualifiers. They look like us, can take practically any personality, and they pretty much do what they want. They are simultaneously strange and relatable. The vampire’s power—immortality, wisdom, strength, charm—are things we desire. But their animalistic nature is also something we acknowledge, and fear, in ourselves. Vampires are enough like us that we can see ourselves, our desires and fears, but different enough to separate ourselves from. Other monsters can’t pull off this trick.

One place Nuzum visited in his quest was a gathering of the Court of Lazarus, a group of avid vampire ‘lifestylers’ who get together at a New York burlesque club to dance, drink red cocktails, and dress like vampires. Nefarious Wrath, the group’s leader, opened the festivities with a ritual to call upon Satan, and the night closed with a dance routine involving two lovers pantomiming with a knife. Nuzum was a little weirded out by the whole affair. At the bar, he asked a guy in white contact lenses and a trench coat if he thought the Satanic references and violent theatrics were a little much. The guy just chuckled and said, “It’s all just symbolism.” A good trick, indeed.   

Zombie, Spaceship, Wastland, Vampires?

Not much new to report in Sanguine Diaryland. I’ve submitted two stories for publication, so now I just have to wait. I still have two other projects in the works. More on that later.

For this week’s entry,  I’m going to talk about a funny, interesting essay by the brilliant comedian, actor, and nerd extraordinaire, Patton Oswalt. If you’ve never seen or heard him do anything before, watch this clip:

Ok, good. Now you can read my essay, Zombie, Spaceship, Wasteland, Vampires?

“Are you a Zombie, a Spaceship, or a Wasteland?” So begins the eponymous essay of Patton Oswalt’s book, Zombie, Spaceship, Wasteland. Growing up, Oswalt and his friends devoured movies like Night of the Living Dead, Star Wars, and Road Warrior. As time passed, zombie, sci-fi, and post-apocalypse movies became part of his creative DNA, and he found the same thing applied to his friends as well. Therefore, he argues that creative people’s tend to adapt the characteristics of the genre that influences them the most. Here are the three categories Oswalt identifies, and what makes them unique: 

Zombies Simplify: The Zombie narrows the world to a “microcosm of archetypes, fighting for survival against the undead hordes.” The implication of a tight-knit community aside, the Zombie is a nihilist. The infrastructure of their world is still intact, but ultimately “Zombies can’t believe the energy we waste on nonfood pursuits.”

Spaceships Leave: For them, “it’s easier…to build a world and know its history or, better yet, choose the limited customs and rituals that fit the story.” They tend to work with computers and make good parents (“a good captain knows how to treat his crew”), but skim over the surface of the world, deflector shields up.

Wastelands Destroy: They have no interest in building a community of survivors, and “zooming off in a spaceship…smacks of retreat.” So they’re loners, wandering across a desolate world populated by mutants, who’re basically “variations of the human species grown amok.” But they are also “the most hopeful and sentimental of the bunch. Because…they conceive stories in which a core of humanity…survives and endures.”

Each category is interconnected. For example, Oswalt points out that “Darth Vader is, essentially, a Zombie, born in a Wasteland, who works on a Spaceship.”

“Every teen outcast who pursues a creative career,” he declares, “has, at its outset, either a Zombie, Spaceship, or Wasteland work of art in them.” And this opus usually stems from the nadir of adolescence. Oswalt finds that he is a Wasteland. During his freshman year of high school, he wrote two epic tales of post-apocalyptic antiheroes (apparently, they were both garbage). More importantly, comedians live on the road. They drift from town to town, living off cheap booze and nachos, “pointing out [to audiences] how so much of what we perceive as culture and society is disposable waste.”

Each category makes a lot of sense, and the essay does a great job explaining the personal roots of creativity. But Oswalt makes no grandiose claims here. His views reflect his experience, and his experience alone. He even goes so far as to explain, “I think this chapter is more for me than for you.”

Still, I really identify with what he says here. I was a teenage outcast, and I had varying levels of experience with those three genres. I grew up on Star Wars and, as a child of the nuclear ‘80s, watched my share of post-apocalyptic movies. There were other genres, too, most notably James Bond movies. But in my late teens and early twenties, I conceived of a wasteland-ish epic about a dystopian America, led by a dictator that waged a fierce, exterminationist war against fundamentalist christians. By my mid-twenties—which counts as one of the various nadirs of my adolescence—I had refined this story to the point of view of a soldier in said war, focusing on the grim choices she had to make to fulfill her ideological commitments (Thank you for your time, Mr. Spielberg. Really, there’s no need to call security).

But as much as Oswalt’s essay speaks to me, I still feel it’s incomplete. Where are the vampires? This is, after all, an essay written by a man who played a scientist who gets killed by vampires in Blade: Trinity. Granted, a reasonable person could say, ‘Well, maybe vampires weren’t that big a part of his childhood.’ But in the preface of Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, he confides that “Nosferatu looms over and lurks under everything I’m writing about here, and in this book.” Yeah. So there.

I won’t second guess Oswalt too much. I’m sure he had his reasons for sticking to those three tropes. But nothing is stopping me from adding my own experience to his model.

Vampires Detach: Unlike Zombies, they appreciate the complexity of the world around them, and they have no desire to zoom off in a Spaceship. Nor are they exactly solitary wanderers.  Vampires interact with other groups, but they tend to be disconnected and secretive. There are three basic kinds of vampire subcategories: decided vampires, self-conscious vampires, and people who kill vampires. In each case, the main character does not, can not, fit into society.

The detachment, the sense of seeing the world in a way that is irreconcilable with a proverbially normal life, often comes with a conceit of superiority. The decided vampire views people as edible playthings. For all their moping, self-conscious vampires are often compelled to show off their power as they divulge their awful knowledge. The vampire hunter protects the world from an unseen threat, so the very nature of their work makes them an outcast.

Look at it this way, Stoker made Dracula as much an anathema to all that is good and decent as he was hard to resist. Anne Rice’s Louis was sensitive and wise, but he was also so deprived of companionship that he wrestled with his turbid lust for Claudia, a vampire in the body of a prepubescent girl. Blade is skilled at killing vampires because he’s half-vampire, so he doesn’t have too many friends.

The Vampire’s alienation is rooted in their own capacity to be a monster. This is the final, deepest layer of the Vampire burrito. This is also why I know I am a Vampire. Teen outcast? Sheesh, I was socially awkward well into my thirties. So I spent a lot of time alone, usually in a room full of people. As a recovering alcoholic, I am also well aware of my ugliest capacities.

Without AA and multiple, daily entreaties to my Higher Power, I am a selfish, self-destructive douche who thrives on chaos. Left to my own devices, I’m the guy who shows up sloppy drunk to your party, presses your guests about the worst details of their lives, and assumes you won’t notice that I’m leaving with half of the beer from your fridge. It’s not as sexy as hypnotizing virgins and drinking their blood, but basically I can be about as white-knuckled over my appetites as Edward Cullen, Stefan Salvatore, or any other pretty-boy vampire who’s afraid to bite his girlfriend.

So that, my friends is my addition to Oswalt’s model. It’s not perfect, but no less so than the original. And like the original, it is strengthened by its overlap with other categories. For example, Buffy Summers is a Vampire slayer, who also fights her share of Zombies; her hometown of Sunnydale sits on a Hellmouth, which threatens to open and turn the world into a Wasteland; and at one point her mother is tormented by a Demon who crashed to Earth on a Spaceship.  So there.

New Deal, Old Scores: American Vampire, Volume 2

Confession: Over the past few months, I have spent many a night reading comic books by flashlight. It was something I never did as a kid, so I guess I'm catching up. But my self-indulgence pays off, for tonight I present you with a review of the second volume of Scott Snyder's American Vampire.

Vampires can hold a grudge. Piss one off, and it’ll launch a long, seething vendetta that makes Richard Nixon look positively gracious (Note: Actor Frank Langella has portrayed both Dracula and Richard Nixon. Coincidence?). It has been said that anything you do can come back to bite you, and the second volume of American Vampire puts a literal twist on this adage. By the end of the story, old scores are settled and new ones have arisen. It’s a good ride, but would have been even better if the creator, Scott Snyder, had settled some of the problems of the first series, notably the development of his central character, the original American Vampire, Skinner Sweet.

The second installment of American Vampire picks up about ten years after the end of the first one. It’s 1936 and Roosevelt’s New Deal is in full swing. The Works Progress Administration has loosed an avalanche of money on Las Vegas, Nevada, and everyone’s scrambling to reap a reward. Skinner Sweet gets his by being a pimp, catering to an army of migrant laborers and the wealthy entrepeneurs who’ve been contracted to build a massive dam. In an effort to attract workers and stimulate the economy, prostitution and gambling have been legalized, but the move ultimately pushes the city to the brink of lawlessness.

The town’s young sheriff, Cash McCogan, tries his damndest to keep the peace, a task made even harder by the fact that he just donned the badge of his father, who was murdered in cold blood. If that weren’t bad enough, the leaders of the engineering consortium in charge of constructing the dam start turning up dead. He gets some help, though, from two FBI agents who are actually Vassals of the Morning Star—vampire hunters who’ve been recruited into the trade because a vampire has harmed them at one point in their life. What McCogan doesn’t know, is that Sweet has set the stage to take revenge on the old-world vampires who turned him. I offer no spoilers, except to say that this is not a cautionary tale. Blood flies, scores are settled, and others have no reasonable choice but to seek revenge.

My only reservation about this story line is that Sweet’s motives don’t seem to make sense. As a character Sweet has three basic traits: he is ruthless, cunning, and absolutely self-serving. This makes for a solid villain, but does little to explain why he has it in for the vampires of the old world. It can’t be because they made him a vampire. Despite a rough start, he clearly enjoys the change. It can’t be that they foiled his spree as a bank robber when he was still human. He’s never, in either the first or second book, complained about the loss. The only motive he ever states is a disdain for the older vampires, but so what? They aren’t really a threat to him. Hopefully, something more complex about Sweet will be revealed in later volumes.

The continuing story of the Scott Snyder’s other American Vampire, Pearl Jones, adds even more layers to her character. Pearl is something quite interesting: a ‘good’ vampire who is neither self-loathing nor remorseful. She still struggles with serious issues, such as the eventual frailty of her human lover, Henry, and whether or not he will one day be revolted by her true nature. But she also freely admits to enjoying certain elements of her ingrained bloodlust. Pearl rarely kills humans, though when she does, it’s for good reason—such as protecting someone she loves—and she doesn’t regret it.

Pearl's past comes back to haunt her, too. Hattie Hargrove, a vampire and former friend who Pearl left for dead after Hattie betrayed her, has escaped captivity and is looking for revenge. Except Hattie’s pursuit of Pearl never comes to a head. This part of the story feels more like a bridging segment, keeping the characters active while nursing earlier conflicts toward a finale. Skinner Sweet's story in this volume is also open ended. New characters, such as Cash McCogan, are introduced, and, if the first volume is any indicator, his story is not finished.

All these loose threads are good news, because it leaves plenty of room for mayhem in the next installment, especially since second volume of American Vampire was almost as good as the first. Once again, Rafael’s Albuquerque’s artwork is terrific, as is the work by contributing artist, Mateus Santolouco. Hopefully, Sweet will gain more depth, but I can’t say I’m holding my breath. Snyder seems pretty content to just let him be mean and selfish. Still, I can’t fathom why he is so bent on destroying his predecessors. 

Volume 3 was published in early February of this year (expect a review soon), and Volume 4 is due out in October. I can’t wait to see where Snyder and co. take this story. 

Baltimore: The Plague Ships

Things are still good in the land of the Sanguine Diary. Tomorrow I am going on a three-day retreat to get some writing work done, and my story "Blood and Soil" is now available in the anthology Dark Light, from the good people at Crushing Hearts and Black Butterfly Publishing.

So tonight, I am pulling myself away from Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts (feel free to wonder if that book is related something I might be working on) to present you with a review of Baltimore: The Plague Ships from Dark Horse Comics.

No doubt, Lord Henry Baltimore is the coolest vampire hunter with a wooden leg. He marks each of his kills by driving a nail into his prosthesis. The first nail was for his wife. Some call him a hero, others call him a curse, and Baltimore himself believes he is damned. In a simpler life he was a soldier, leading his men across the battle-scarred fields of France in World War I— until a chance encounter with a vampire unleashed a plague upon humanity. God may have forged him as a weapon to bring some light back to the world, but Baltimore cares for no greater purpose than vengeance. You see, blighting humanity was not enough for the vampire; he also had to murder Baltimore’s family.

Lord Baltimore’s story debuted in the excellent novel by Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola, titled Baltimore, Or the Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire, and The Plague Ships is a comic-book sequel by the same authors. Those who haven’t read the novel would not be lost if they read Plague Ships first, though. It not only supplies the necessary back story, but is a solid work in its own right.

Plague Ships follows Baltimore through a Europe choked nearly to death by a vampire’s plague, The Red Death. Those who’ve not been turned into vampires have succumbed to a gruesome, highly contagious disease, and those who have survived live in suspicious isolation.Baltimore’s search for Haigus, the vampire who killed his family and unleashed the Red Death, brings him to a desolate coastal town in France. Ashe secures passage from the town, becomes shipwrecked, and battles a horde of undead German submariners, he also learns he is the target of a new, ruthless inquisition which believes the Red Plague can only end if Europe is cleansed of all sin. And the inquisitors see no difference between Baltimore and the monsters he slays. This is only a brief synopsis of The Plague Ships, which sets up a longer plot to be continued Baltimore’s saga in another collection, titled The Curse Bells (due out this June in trade paperback).

Whereas Mike Mignola (best known as the creator of Hellboy) illustrated the novel with elegant chiaroscuro, Ben Stenbeck, Dave Stewart, and Clem Robins— the artistic team behind Plague Ships— take full advantage of the medium, using single images to express ideas that could only unfold in several pages of prose. Take this image:

Art by Ben Stenbeck. Colors by Dave Stewart.

Here we see Baltimore recovering from his first encounter with the vampire. He is sleeping in a church the army has commandeered as a hospital. The stained glass above his head, depicting Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden, is a perfect symbol of his transformation. Since the back story is told in flashbacks, the reader has already seen Baltimore as a vampire hunter: his dark, haggard features, the seemingly unbearable load of weapons, his lumbering wooden leg. So the reader already knows his fate. But this image shows that when he wakes up, life as he knew it is over. He has been damned by a terrible, new-found knowledge of evil.

Then there is this image:  

Art by Ben Stenbeck. Colors by Dave Stewart.

A skilled writer could describe this scene very well, but the art has a visceral quality that usually only conjures verbal epithets like “bad-ass!” or “god damn!”

Comic book aficionados will probably laugh at me here. Not only do they already know what I’ve described in the past few paragraphs, but I am sure they could give me a thousand other, maybe even better, examples. If that’s the case, then I say ‘please do’, because I will admit that I am only now really learning about comic books.

My greater area of knowledge lies in the vampire genre as a whole, and I have to say that the character of Baltimore is a welcome addition in any medium. Don’t get me wrong, I love the newer, more ambivalent breed of vampires. After all, two of my four tattoos come from Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But I like that Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola are working in the vein of old school vampires who view the human heart as nothing more than the source of a meal.

And let’s face it, as a villain, Haigus is a serious badass. Dracula only molested a handful of wealthy Brits, but this guy unleashed a plague on humanity. But I also like the way the authors show how the nature of evil unambiguous while acknowledging that its faces are subjective and sometimes hard to detect. Baltimore is a force of good, but he doesn’t really look like one. Consequently, he is often persecuted by people he is willing to protect, and he'ss also the target of an inquisition whose sense of righteousness justifies violent atrocity. This is a very realistic portrayal of the evils most people encounter in their own lives.

In the final analysis, I think that the original novel is a little better, but the comic books still capture the spirit of the story. In whatver form, I hope that Lord Baltimore's dismal mission is far from over. 

More Fun in the New World: American Vampire, Volume 1.

And we’re back. Things are good in the land of the Sanguine Diary. For one, I’m engaged. It’s official; we’ve announced it on Facebook and everything.

In other good news, on February 29th my story “Blood & Soil” will be published in the upcoming anthology, Dark Light, by the good people at Crushing Hearts and Black Butterfly Publishing. Check out the trailer: 

In the meantime, I have been catching up on my chosen genre and researching a new project. So tonight, I pry myself away from the official history of Special Operations Executive to share my thoughts on the first volume of Scott Snyder’s graphic novel, American Vampire.

American Vampire weaves the history of the U.S. with the evolution of a new, powerful breed of vampire. As opposed to the Wampyr of old Europe, the American Vampire can walk in daylight. Where the old-world vampire is jaded and cautious, the new-world vampire is brash and mercurial. American Vampire tells the story of America’s break from it’s European roots with formidable nuance, representing the different facets of the American soul with the savage, vulgar bank robber, Skinner Sweet, and the faithful, optimistic Pearl Jones, an aspiring actress. While Pearl and Skinner’s European forebearers are more wealthy and sophisticated, they are no less cruel than their offspring.

Skinner Sweet’s story, which was written by none other than Stephen King, unfolds in the Wild West. Sweet’s transformation is an accident, an unintentional by-product of an ancient vampire’s attempt to punish him. In un-llife, as in life, Skinner Sweet is lawless, and nearly impossible to kill.You get the impression he prized the violence of bank robberies more than the money. After he rises from the grave, his only mission is to seek revenge on those who put him there, and he prosecutes this goal with harrowing glee.  

Old-breed vampires aren’t his only enemies, either. Before his transformation, he murders the fiancée of James Book, the law man who apprehended him, and as a vampire he exacts a bloody revenge on Book himself. Skinner’s ultimate goal, though, appears to be the destruction of his vampire forefathers.

Pearl’s story, written by Scott Snyder, is a little less dark than Skinner’s. In the Hollywood of the roaring twenties, a vampire/silent film producer lures her with the promise of stardom, and then feeds on her. Like Skinner, Pearl’s survival is an accident. But Skinner deliberately transforms her as an unwitting pawn in his plot to destroy the old breed.Pearl’s motive, though, is far easier to identify with than Skinner’s. She was betrayed, bled, and left for dead; her goal is justice. After settling accounts, all Pearl wants, in her own words, is to go “somewhere simple and quiet.” Can you blame her?

But Skinner makes it clear to Pearl that her story won’t end there. At the final page, it is also clear that Skinner’s story is far from over, as well. This is a good thing because the overall execution of American Vampire is very good. The art, drawn by Rafael Albuquerque is terrific and the two stories tie together well. I look forward to reading the next two volumes, even though they don’t include Stephen King.

I also hope that the next two volumes resolve a couple of American Vampire’s problems with character development. James Book— the law man who came closest to bringing Skinner to justice and the man who Skinner spends a great deal of story-time pursuing in vengeance— is two dimensional and predictable. He has so little depth that sympathy for him is more perfunctory than visceral. This is unfortunate, because he is the most prominent force of good throughout Skinner’s origin story. In the evil-vs-evil battle between Skinner and the old-world vampires, a really engaging, just character would have provided an interesting counterpoint. Instead, Skinner’s vendetta against Book seems like too much of a side story.

The character of Skinner Sweet is also somewhat underdeveloped. Beyond his crass, violent nature, there is little to him. King and Snyder may very well be playing a long game here, introducing him in the first volume and exploring his motives and personality in greater detail in subsequent stories. Still, can’t they throw us a little piece of something? A hint of something more to come? It is strange that Stephen King, a writer renowned for creating vivid, believable characters, handled this part of Skinner’s story. Snyder, on the other hand, fleshes out Pearl beautifully, with voice-over style narratives from her childhood and dialogue that illuminates her personality.   

That said, the first installment of American Vampire is well worth reading. I will say it again: Rafael Albuquerque’s artwork is terrific. Just look at this image:

 
Image by Rafael Albuquerque, copied from the website Gutter Geek: http://www.tcj.com/guttergeek/

The best thing thing about American Vampire, though, is that it is a welcome tonic against the surge of dewey-eyed, pretty boy vampires. I pray that stories such as this are the first rumbles of a tsunami of dirty, gritty, squirm-inducing vampire lore, and if so, I will gladly pitch a tent on the beach.

The Sanguine Diary: Writer’s Block Edition.

Hello and welcome to the newest entry in The Sanguine Diary. Good news! My story “Restless” is now available in the newest issue of “Dark Eclipse.” Not as good news: I am still writer’s blocked. So instead of reviewing a movie,TV show, or written work, this week I am going to chip at the block by talking about why I chose to write about vampires in the first place.

I’ve always like the genre. In addition to my aforementioned adolescent love of Fright Night and Near Dark, I was also an avid fan of the Bunnicula Books as a kid. So looking back, I’ve always had at least some affinity for blood-drinking things that go bump in the night. But I never really got into Anne Rice, and my interest in vampires was never an ongoing, singular obsession.

I’ve been taken with a lot of things in my life: guitar, movies, science fiction, history, and plenty more. For a long time, I believed my lack of a ‘singular obsession’, was a liability— as if I could never produce something worthwhile if I did not have an overwhelming ‘calling’ since my earliest days. An irrational part of me still believes that, but an equal part recognizes that such an idea is absurd. There is no teleological narrative of how I came to write about vampires, and that’s okay, though a few clear markers pop up in the rear view mirror.

Like many things, one source of inspiration came from that wonderful fount of culture, The Simpsons. In the episode where the school bus driver, Otto, moves into the Simpsons’ garage, he asks Marge if she has any books “from the vampire’s point of view.” This became a favorite quote of mine, and in hindsight, it resonated with me more than I realized.

It’s true, I do like things from the vampire’s point of view. In Near Dark, I wanted Caleb just to give in and start drinking people’s blood. It’s the same reason I was willing to sit through all three (and soon a fourth) wowzerly bad Underworld movies. But all that time, something still was missing and I couldn’t figure it out, until the summer of 2007, when I started watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I’d always thought vampires were cool. They’re outsiders with superior strength and piercing, yet detached, insight into the human condition.. Millions of kids who never felt like they fit into the boring social scene of their school have entertained similar fantasies. But before watching Buffy, vampires had never been relatable to me on a level deeper than wish-fulfillment.

And when it comes to carrying a good story, wish-fulfillment is a stubby pair of legs. There needs to be something more, and the Buffy episode “Lovers’ Walk” is a perfect example. Spike, a gleefully mean vampire who sports a leather jacket and wicked cockney drawl, goes on a bender after his lover of over one hundred years has left him. He passes out drunk, and is jolted awake because the rising sun has set his hand on fire. In that moment, I actually felt sorry for him, knowing full well that he was a literal monster. It was the most I had ever felt about a vampire, until later in the series, when Spike had a chip implanted in his head that prevented him from harming humans (long story).

I had no life-changing epiphany when I first saw “Lovers’ Walk,” but the scene comes to mind because it encapsulates what I want to do with vampire fiction. I have often waxed and wanked about how vampires are a metaphor for what we repress. While I believe this is true, and can cite many examples, it isn’t really what I want to do with the genre.

One one hand, I’ve never began a story by saying, “I want to say ‘X’ about the human condition.” But there are some common themes, mostly restlessness and disconnection (note the title of my newly-publsihed story). My characters tend to long to fit in somewhere, and are frustrated that they can’t. Even my more ‘herioc’, proverbially bad-ass characters are kind of bumbling or awkward somehow. There are a couple exceptions, but I think that’s just because these characters haven’t been fully explored.    

Is this because I am restless? Unfulfilled? Unable to fit in? The answers are: sometimes, in some ways, and mostly not. But these are feelings I can easily connect to. I was socially impaired into my early thirties. As I get older, I am more aware of closed doors and the consequences of decisions. Like a lot of people, I sometimes wonder how things could be different. So I like to write about vampires who wrestle with these kinds of feelings.

Monsters are also a metaphor for the uglier things that lurk just under the surface of our civilized façades. I believe this one, too. But I want to delve the more common, less extreme gremlins that drive our behavior. So, yes, I write about blood-sucking monsters that can only reproduce through violent, generally forceful, acts but they still carry the baggage of their erstwhile humanity.

That’s really the best I can explain why I choose to write what I write. That said, I won’t claim that I ever hit this goal on the bull’s eye, but when I actually reach into my self and do honest writing, this is the place I come from.

My Top Five List of Non-Vampire Fiction

There have been better weeks over here at The Sanguine Diary. We had an escaped cat who has― Thank God ―safely returned. As I write this, I am home sick from work. And I’ve had a serious case of writer’s block for about a month now.

But the show must go on. Very soon, I will have another story published. The good people at Dark Moon Books are including my story, “The Restless Warrior”, in the upcoming issue of their monthly Horror e-Magazine, Dark Eclipse.

As always, my story “Survivor’s Guilt” is still available from the kind souls at Wicked East Press.

And since man can’t live on fangs and frilly capes alone, here is a Top-Five List of Non-Vampire Fiction:

5. Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections: Okay, so pretentious jerks name drop him at parties, he snubbed Oprah, and there are loud rumbles that he’s overrated. So, yeah, there’s some backlash against Jonathan Franzen. But he’s still good, really good. He has an incredible gift for description and surprising, incisive turns of phrase. He also wrings gripping drama from the mundane motions of life, which in other hands could easily sputter like a tempest in a tea kettle. When I try to describe The Corrections to people, I am surprised by how little justice I am able to do it. This is because it is not about just one thing. A single family ties the plot together, but Franzen explores each character’s lives with exhaustive detail. But to me, an aspiring writer, the most amazing thing about Franzen is the way he inverts a cardinal rule of the craft: show, don’t tell. Franzen “tells” practically every part of his stories with dense exposition and I can’t imagine him doing it any other way.

4. Stephen King, All-Around Awesome Guy: Technically, including Stephen King overlaps with the first list I published here, because of Salem’s Lot and his other vampire works. But his vampire stuff has not effected me as much as other things he’s done, on and off the page. My favorite King novel has to be Under the Dome, with 11/22/63 running a close second. The man was born with a talent for storytelling, and he has refined that gift beautifully over the past few decades. He is also, by all accounts, a remarkable human being. As told in On Writing, he is a recovering alcoholic and addict. He’s a devoted husband, loving father, and humble social commentator. He’s also funny in an unpretentious, self-effacing way. Oh yeah, and he’s also one of the most successful authors in history. The very existence of Stephen King inspires me as a writer.

3. Harry Turtledove, Great War, American Empire, and Settling Accounts series: Ten books in row is a lot of reading, and Turtledove’s sprawling alternate history of two world wars involving the Union and Confederacy are worth every word. At root, Turtledove is a historian and he thinks like one, weaving complex social and political corollaries into multiple personal narratives. You have to put up with some awkward scenarios, like Confederate slaves arguing about Marx in thick dialect (think: “Dey’s ain’t no such thing as no ghosts! Da histo’cal dialectic says so!”) But Turtledove successfully transplants the convulsions of Europe in the first half of the 20th century onto a divided America. Southern apologists may chafe at the fact that the Confederacy becomes a dictatorship led by a vulgar populist, but Turtledove is too nuanced to be strident and his portrayal of good and evil is too muddy to be polemic.If you don’t want to do all ten books, decide which period of history interests you most and go from there. Great War deals with World War I, American Empire is about the interwar period, and Settling Accounts is about World War II. My own writing deals with a lot of historical settings and these books are Alternate History 101.  

2. Jim Butcher, The Dresden Files series: A friend in my writers’ group once complimented the way I described a character’s hair. My reply: “I nicked it from Jim Butcher.” While I do not directly steal phrases from other authors, I am heavily influenced by Jim Butcher’s precise, colorful, and often witty method of physical description. Not to mention that in Harry Dresden, Butcher has drawn a character so well-defined that he is at once familiar and surprising. Dresden is a wizard detective, and the laws of the magic he wields are as consistent as his cautiously optimistic view of human nature. Butcher’s blend of noir and urban fantasy is as dark as it is funny, and has taught me a lot about what makes for a good story.

1. Philip Caputo, Indian Country: Early on, I decided I wanted to write about a vampire who must deal with the trauma of her human past, and a friend’s sister, who works with veterans, recommended I read this novel. As it turns out, Indian Country is one of the best things I have ever read. Caputo deftly weaves back and forth in time to describe a Vietnam veteran’s struggle with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and the costs his trauma lays upon his family. Christian Starkmann’s internal torments, and the unhealed wounds that drive them, are vividly rendered, as are the efforts of his wife June, who tries to understand her husband’s illness while maintaining her own sanity. Both characters make difficult choices that some may find less-than-ideal― Caputo is not one for storybook endings― but the reader feels so close to them that their actions make perfect sense. Indian Country is also beautifully written. His characters' inner worlds teem with as much life as the novel's setting of Michigan's wild Upper Penninsula. I have made two false starts on a novel that is directly inspired by this work, and without it, one of my best stories, “Survivor’s Guilt”, would not have been possible.