Vampire Fiction to Read While Sunburnt
My partner routinely calls me a vampire because of my propensity towards burning and sun blindness. Summer is just beginning and I already have my first sunburn. These are a fact of my existence every year. I wear zinc-based sunscreen and this year I am considering making a substantial investment in long sleeved light outdoor wear to prevent long-term damage. However, while sunburnt, I tend to stay at home, protecting my skin from further harm and myself from the indignity of a red patchwork of burns. This means I read more.
And right now, vampire fiction feels like a comfortable place. Probably because of the angry fire ball in the sky which causes me so many problems every year. However, their myth and mechanics remain nebulous. Can they go out in the sunshine and merely be sparkly stalkers or will they burn in horrible fiery agony? Do they feed off blood or other vital essences, like memory or psychic energy? How are vampires made; is there some gene which enable humans to be transformed? Are they ageless? Immortal? Do they heal quickly? Are they seductive sex fiends? There are so many questions and each author answers them differently, adding their own personal lore with each successive book. Some of those become part of our collective understanding, the evolving vampire myth. However, some of them are laughed at and scorned. We won’t address those here.
Now Sleep: Du Maurier, George, 1895 From: Old Book Illustrations
Given my vampiric status, I thought it would be interesting to pull together a list of good vampire fiction. Not the kind with sparkly psy-vampires. I mean the kind which is comical, romantic, gives chills, or is haunting. I am also avoiding the Stoker family of story tellers. While Count Dracula is probably the best known of all the vampire legends and the story forms the basis for how modern-day literary audiences think of vampires, I am just unwilling to engage in a book whose primary moral is against women’s sexual freedom. I also avoided anything which was primarily sold as “romance”, this is because often these are lengthy series of books featuring the same grouping of characters and so require a larger monetary and time investment. This is not to say I haven’t read them and wouldn’t recommend them; I do and I would. There are just others I would recommend first, such as all those on the list which follows.
The Classics
There is no better place to start than the classics of vampire fiction. And outside of Dracula there is little more than a few. The first being part of that legendary weekend in Switzerland which also gave rise to Frankenstein. The most creative weekend in all of history also explains another part of the vampire myth: the aristocratic seducer. Polidori, who was part of Byron’s circle in Geneva, is believed to have based his main character in The Vampyre on his friend. As a pertinent side note, Byron was only in Geneva because he was escaping the gossip swirling around his affair and obsession with his half-sister. One of his many, many liaisons in the aristocratic circles, other lovers included Caroline Lamb and Mary Shelley’s stepsister. Also because of debts but mostly because his half-sister’s daughter was rumored to be his as well.
However, this is meant as a list of recommendations and not to peddle out-of-date gossip, no matter how interesting it might be.
CARMILLA BY SHERIDAN LE FANU
The inclusion of this work while I have eschewed other early classics begs the question of why I bothered to include it at all, as I seem to be avoiding most books pre-1900. In this case, it is because it presents the vampire in a sympathetic light, similar to the way Milton presents Satan, although with a lot less poetical flourish. Carmilla, as Lauren Owens says in her selection of it for a similar list in The Guardian, argues for her right to exist. This is also not a vampire filled with blood lust looking to feast on any young woman with loose sexual morals. The true difference here between this and other vampire works from the 19th century is the idea of terror versus horror, which the British Library defines the divide so well in its book Horror: A Literary History: “Terror leads in steps towards the sublime (…). Horror is the broken arc of this ambition, dragging the reader back into the abysmal mud and coils of the body”. Varney the Vampire, despite its comical name, focuses on the visceral horror and was, predictably, published in a penny dreadful serial around this time. This is a book which focuses on terror, and granted, it is now a very out-dated form. Predation, at the time, was a concern for those who sheltered their daughters and then thrust them out into the world without any support except severe scolding and shunning for wrong doing. Carmilla, the character, argues the philosophy of existence and discusses the nature of women, as they existed and as they could be. This provides an excellent counterpoint to the secretive and mysterious side of her nature, with her sudden and ferocious mood swings which inspire trepidation in any reader, leading to terror. A smart predator which philosophical leanings is something to be feared.
Modern Classics
SALEM’S LOT BY STEPHEN KING
This is, in all of its essentials, a retelling of Dracula. All the familiar characters are there, just with different names and more modern sensibilities. However, King eschews the epistolary nature of original, which can only benefit readers. This book draws strongly on the idea that a vampire would need a human familiar to go out into the daylight world and run errands. The vampire and familiar duo are the primary villains during the novel’s first act and in any small-town vampire story the characters will either be devoured or turned, which unbalances the reader. This is horror, plain and simple. It is the visceral fear the characters experience while confronting the vampires which keeps the reader turning the pages and feeling the hairs on the back of their neck rise, knowing the vampire is just on the next page, waiting. King also removes morality from the equation; vampires are monsters which must be stopped for the good of humanity. It is as Tolkein said, and I am paraphrasing here from his essay The Monsters and the Critics, sometimes a monster is just a monster and no other justification is required for the hero to pit themselves against the threat it presents. This is one of King’s more satisfying endings because the vampire is not an unknowable evil which is ultimately disappointing when the reader and the characters confront it and, therefore, know it. The reader understands the threat of the traditional vampire and has met him early in the story. This succeeds more than Stoker’s effort because the vampires are understood from the beginning and King does not suffer the curse of nebulous and changing powers. This is really a must read for anyone who hasn’t yet read it.
INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE BY ANNE RICE
Rice’s book is a seminal classic in so many ways. It gives audiences the vampire tired of immortality and the wrong lesson learned by a naive reporter. The tale romanticizes the predator, and was the first commercial success of this kind. Published the year after Salem’s Lot this novel provided readers with sympathetic forlorn vampires who just happened to view killing and murder as a way to solve all their problems, including loneliness. The ideas of isolation and loss which pervade this narrative make the story haunting. The death of Louis’ brother at the beginning of the book sets the tone and it is further compounded by Lestat’s desire for Louis’ company for eternity. More than Louis and Lestat, Rice gifts us with Claudia, the ageless child vampire whose mind matures but not her body. Caught forever in an odd limbo. This book does tend to end up in the melodrama camp quite often, with drama upon drama, which can border on the Walpolean, however, it is responsible for so much of our romantic notions about vampires that it cannot be skipped in any list like this.
I AM LEGEND BY RICHARD MATHESON
There is one thing I need to make clear from the start here, the film is not an acceptable substitution for this book. The film is good, but like World War Z, the only thing it has in common with the book is the title, and the main character’s name and the dog. The movie offers hope, a cure is found for illness; the book offers humanity’s next form. This book, again trades on terror rather than horror. The visceral fear is there. However, Neville has survived for years after the outbreak which turned most everyone on earth into vampires. There is no one left and he does not even have the companionship of a dog for longer than a week. Matheson lightens the mood a little with Neville’s continual hunt for his neighbour’s daytime hiding place, and he kills so many vampires in the process. He experiments on them, attempting to understand the bacteria which infected them. The terror here comes from what is a bogey man; to Neville, it is the vampires who are attempting to kill him daily, legions of them. To a new society of vampires, it is Neville. In the aftermath of a world war, where everyone was still coming to terms with the new narratives, it does ask the reader to understand relative positions within conflict, especially when it comes to the common person as opposed to political actors. The book still does bear all the hallmarks of science fiction and Twilight Zone episodes of the time, like asking the new society to be less heartless than the last, but it is worth reading to see how vampires can be used differently than just the predator.
Short Stories
Two of my favourites in all of the fiction which features vampires are short stories. They feel almost like a fairy tale, dark, sinister, and violent.
LADY OF THE HOUSE OF LOVE BY ANGELA CARTER
Carter’s retelling of fairy tales has always held a fascination for me. Her collection of short stories, The Bloody Chamber, is a mix between her own short stories and adapted fairy tales. “The Lady of the House of Love” is perhaps the most famous story in this collection. The story starts with an abandoned town and castle, where “the beautiful somnambulist helplessly perpetuates her ancestral crimes”. The descriptions are a bit like Radcliffe’s travelogues, hazy and dream like around the edges. Everything is soft, except the countess’ teeth and claws. A young soldier, about to be sent into the first world war, stumbles upon the place and meets the countess. This encounter does not turn out the way the reader expects. Again, loneliness and the isolation of immortality pervade the story, which seems to be common in the stories which romanticise predators.
BLOOD DISEASE BY PATRICK MCGRATH
This story is insidious. It starts out slowly with an explorer of the old school variety who ends up contracting a blood borne parasite. But this is not the blood disease which features in the story. The explorer heads into England, his body wasted, with his family. They stop for the night, due to the explorer’s failing energy and poor health, at an isolated country inn. However, as with any isolated village and country inn in these stories, there is something malicious and wrong but the characters are so focused on their own pursuits to notice. And it ends the way one might expect. This one, while it has the most recent publication date in this list, returns to the idea of the vicious predator whose only desire is for blood. While the setting is isolated it completely abandons the idea of the romantic vampire with philosophical leanings. The story is visceral reactions from start to finish, from pure lust to blood lust, from hunger to ravenous consumption.
Final Thoughts
Really, I am only ending this before the post gets too long. There are so many other great works of vampire fiction like: The Moth Diaries by Rachel Klein, The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, Blood Sucking Fiends by Christopher Moore, 30 Days of Night created by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith, The All Souls Trilogy by Deborah Harkness, and Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith to name a few others on my bookshelf. Find your favourite.