fiction which gave the pulps a bad name. Pulps didn’t publish “mainstream” in the high literary sense. You did not find Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Dorothy Parker rubbing elbows with Edgar Rice Burroughs in the pages of Argosy. It’s a good thing that the barriers between “literary” and “genre” writing are breaking down these days, but we have to admit that the prejudices of past generations didn’t arise without cause.
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Last Minute Note! Our hard-drive crashed! Thanks to our former co-editor John Betancourt, publisher of Wildside Press and all-around technical wizard, for coming to our aid in this time of need!
THE DEN, by John Gregory Betancourt
Where have all the real vampires gone?
The transformation of vampires from forces of complete evil to romantic heroes must surely be one of the great literary wonders of the 20th century. The first important vampire book, the one-and-a-half-million-word serial Varney the Vampyre, by James Malcolm Rymer (currently being published in five volumes by Wildside Press, of which two volumes are out as of publication of this column), is an excellent illustration of how vampires were originally perceived. The following is excerpted from the a woman’s encounter with a vampire at the start of the first part of Varney, aptly subtitled “The Feast of Blood”:
A tall figure is standing on the ledge immediately outside the long window. It is its fingernails upon the glass that produces the sound so like the hail, now that the hail has ceased. Intense fear paralyzed the limbs of the beautiful girl. That one shriek is all she can utter with hand clasped, a face of marble, a heart beating so wildly in her bosom, that each moment it seems as if it would break its confines, eyes distended and fixed upon the window; she waits, frozen with horror. The pattering and clattering of the nails continue. No word is spoken, and now she fancies she can trace the darker form of that figure against the window, and she can see the long arms moving to and fro, feeling for some mode of entrance. What strange light is that which now gradually creeps up into the air? Red and terrible brighter and brighter it grows. The lightning has set fire to a mill, and the reflection of the rapidly consuming building falls upon that long window. There can be no mistake. The figure is there, still feeling for an entrance, and clattering against the glass with its long nails, that appear as if the growth of many years had been untouched. She tries to scream again but a choking sensation comes over her, and she cannot. It is too dreadful; she tries to move; each limb seems weighted down by tons of lead; she can but in a hoarse faint whisper cry,”Help help help help!”
And:
The figure turns half round, and the light falls upon its face. It is perfectly white, perfectly bloodless. The eyes look like polished tin; the lips are drawn back, and the principal feature next to those dreadful eyes is the teeth, the fearful looking teeth, projecting like those of some wild animal, hideously, glaringly white, and fang-like.
And:
. . . a hissing sound comes from the throat of the hideous being, and as he raises his long, gaunt arms the lips move. He advances. The girl places one small foot on to the floor. She is unconsciously dragging the clothing with her. The door of the room is in that direction; can she reach it? Has she power to walk? Can she withdraw her eyes from the face of the intruder, and so break the hideous charm? God of Heaven! Is it real, or some dream so like reality as to nearly overturn judgment forever? The figure has paused again, and half on the bed and half out of it that young girl lies trembling. Her long hair streams across the entire width of the bed. As she has slowly moved along she has left it streaming across the pillows. The pause lasted about a minute -- oh, what an age of agony. That minute was, indeed, enough for madness to do its full work in. With a sudden rush that could not be foreseen, with a strange howling cry that was enough to awaken terror in every breast, the figure seized the long tresses of her hair, and twining them round his bony hands he held her to the bed. Then she screamed. Heaven granted her then power to scream. Shriek followed shriek in rapid succession. The bedclothes fell in a heap by the side of the bed as she was dragged by her long silken hair completely onto it again. Her beautifully rounded limbs quivered with the agony of her soul. The glassy, horrible eyes of the figure ran over that angelic form with a hideous satisfaction and horrible profanation. He drags her head to the bed’s edge. He forces it back by the long hair still entwined in his grasp. With a plunge he seizes her neck in his fang-like teeth; a gush of blood, and a hideous sucking noise follows. The girl has swooned, and the vampyre is at his hideous repast!
The gruesome imagery, conjuring up elements of animals, particularly snakes, is quite effective in conjuring a mood or horror and terror. Vampires are not meant to be romantic bedfellows. They are to be feared, hated, hunted, destroyed. If you encounter one at night, rest assured, he won’t be a seductive Count.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula is undoubtedly the most famous of all vampire novels, and like Varney, the original Dracula is a monster born of the night, but one that is far more insidious. Dracula can kill outright (witness his arriving in London on a ship of corpses, the sailors whose blood has sustained him on his trip), but his seductions are actually prolonged parasitic feedings. He fixes his attentions on the lovely Lucy and begins to drain the life force from her. But he is not just a senseless monster, striking at random, but a calculating fiend. After drugging Lucy’s household, this is how Van Helsing finds Lucy and her mother:
How shall I describe what we saw? On the bed lay two women, Lucy and her mother. The latter lay farthest in, and she was covered with a white sheet, the edge of which had been blown back by the draught through the broken window, showing the drawn, white, face, with a look of terror fixed upon it. By her side lay Lucy, with face white and still more drawn. The flowers which had been round her neck we found upon her mother’s bosom, and her throat was bare, showing the two little wounds which we had noticed before, but looking horribly white and mangled.
Dracula is brutal, horrible, a true monster in every sense of the word.
So where did vampires go wrong? Blame the Atomic Age. With the invention of atom bombs and the coming of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, monsters weren’t as terrifying as real life. The Universal Pictures’ horror movies of the 1930s gave way to escapist comedies like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. The old monsters were comic relief, not chills and thrills. Of course there have been attempts to reinvent the vampire-as-villain, primarily in movies and television, but Hammer Studios’ productions of the late 1950s and 1960s with Christopher Lee (plus various other remakes and re-inventions of the Dracula legend) never had critical and commercial success on the scale of the original Dracula (1931) with Bela Lugosi. I fault two films in particular with the transformation of vampires to romantic heroes: Dracula (1979), which starred the too-handsome and too-suave Frank Langella as Dracula, and George Hamilton, whose portrayal of Dracula in the romantic comedy Love at First Bite (also 1979) made Dracula a sophisticated romantic hero … and Hamilton gets the girl and gets away at the end of the movie. It’s a short step from these last two films to the romantic figures of Anne Rice, and Laurell K. Hamilton. The emergence of the Goths and their semi-underground culture of vampire adoration yields an audience primed for romantic and heroic vampires. Rice and Laurell Hamilton are probably the two greatest literary proponents of Happy Vampires, McSuckers, safely sanitized vampires as far from Varney and Dracula as you can get. TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel both promote the same world … where mortals can love vampires, vampires can be heroes, and happiness is only a bite away. Laurell Hamilton’s world has not just vampires, but were-animals. Anita Blake, vampire hunter, is involved in a love triangle with romantic vampire Jean-Claude and werewolf Richard. Will they rip her throat out and feed in an orgy of blood? Here is a quote from Laurell K. Hamilton’s new Anita Blake novel, Narcissus in Chains ($22.95, hardcover, due out October 2001). It’s #10 in a series which has already begun to hit the New York Times bestseller list. Goth fodder. Perfect for those who can’t wait for the next Anne Rice vampire novel, or watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When Anita and the romantic monsters unleash some mystic powers, the result is erotic and titillating:
I was still pressed in the circle of Richard’s and Jean-Claude’s arms, a strange amount of bare skin touching all of us -- my back, Richard’s chest and stomach, Jean-Claude’s arm. There was something incredibly right about