I spent around seven years working as a freelance editor/proofreader for a fairly large publisher of romance novels. I hit all the subgenres—Regency, contemporary, sweet, erotic, and of course, paranormal. It was a fun job for someone who loves to read, even if genre fiction wasn’t previously my thing. I got to read tons of books for free, and some of them were very good. I worked on an erotic romance series that made the bestseller list (not the one you know; it was MUCH better than that one). Eventually I got kind of burned out because I couldn’t read for pleasure anymore without picking things apart and thinking about how I would suggest any book be made better. (Thankfully that wore off.) It was also more a labor of love than a labor of getting paid well. But I learned so much about story structure, the mechanics of genre, and most of all, what people like to read. And people love to read about vampires (and werewolves, but that is a story for another day).
By the time I started editing, vampires were actually on their way out because the market was a bit oversaturated, what with the Sookie Stackhouse books by Charlaine Harris and the TV show True Blood which was based on that series. The Twilight series had come and gone, and the movies were wrapping up, so it started to seem like people had maybe finally had enough. But no. I still got vampire romance assignments, and a quick search showed me that even now, people are still really into these stories. But I personally never found a vampire romance or a vampire series that I was particularly taken with. I read all the Sookie Stackhouse books, but the vampires were just part of that paranormal world, and what kept me reading were the shifters and the fairies, which were uncommon creatures you don’t run into every day. I read all the Twilight books, and I thought they were pretty well written overall, but by the end, everything got a bit complicated for my taste. I kind of felt like I was forcing myself to keep reading vampire books because if people liked them so much, there must be something I was missing.
In retrospect, and after our discussion on the podcast, I think it may just be that my early experiences with vampire lore kind of made me think that being a vampire—if you’ll pardon the pun—sucks. The Lost Boys does not in any way make me want to join the undead. As John and I mentioned in our episode, it doesn’t seem cool to spend your un-life in a trashy (and sunny) beach town, terrorizing tourists and serving a middle-aged video store owner overlord (as sharp dressed as he may be). No matter how hard Keifer and his pals try, I’m not convinced. Jami Gertz gets to wear some cool fortune teller gear, but I can thrift shop too. During the daytime even. And don’t get me started on Laddie again. I watched Interview with the Vampire around the same time I saw The Lost Boys, and there’s a depressing child vampire in that movie too. Being a lame teen vampire is one thing, but being an undead preteen stuck in puberty forever has to be worse.
I think what soured me on immortality was a movie (also based on a book) that isn’t even about vampires. I saw the 1981 movie of Tuck Everlasting sometime around the late 80s/early 90s. My mom knew the book and was really excited to show me the movie. I should mention that my mom is very into feelings, so she loves movies that give you the big feels. I kind of do too, but she’s on a different level. She is seriously into being traumatized. Like watching every version of Jane Eyre and and re-reading the book regularly traumatized. She’s a high school English teacher, so I alternately envy and pity her students, since they get to experience her great passion for good literature, but also her great passion for depression. I should play her the Garbage song “I’m Only Happy When It Rains.” She would love that. Anyway. Tuck Everlasting is about a group of people who live in the woods and drank from a spring that made them immortal. One of the boys in the family falls in love with a girl and wants her to drink from the spring and join them. I’m not going to flat out say what happens because I don’t want to spoil it if this sounds like the kind of thing you would really like to check out. But the point is, the whole premise opened up a big can of worms for me about life and death and if life is worthwhile without death and just a whole lot of questions that are pretty heavy duty for an anxiety prone ten-year-old.
There are other things about being a vampire that seem pretty garbage to me too. Like not eating food. I like food. Never seeing the sun again? Sounds terrible. One thing I really liked in True Blood was that they called vampire suicide “meeting the sun.” I have to imagine that if I had lived in the darkness for hundreds of years and finally decided I’d had enough, I’d want to go out meeting the sun, getting that last glimpse of a sunrise before I burst into flames. I guess immortality is the big great thing for most people, but honestly. What kind of life are you really getting?
I finally did find a few vampire books I actually liked quite a bit. Christopher Moore’s Bloodsucking Fiends series is a lot of fun. His sense of humor is up my alley anyway; I got into his writing through his Fool series, which features King Lear’s Fool as the major character, making his way through different Shakespeare plays in an extremely irreverent and hilarious way. I wrote my master’s thesis on King Lear, with the Fool character being a major key to my overall argument, so seeing the character I’d spent so much time with having a much richer life than Shakespeare allowed him was great fun. After I finished those, I moved on to the Bloodsucking Fiends series and found it to be similarly irreverent, playing with the genre even while it’s deeply embedded in the genre. And I also think Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which I didn’t read until I was in my 30’s (an amazing feat for an English major to manage—I’ve had to read Beowulf upwards of 5 times), is a must read, whether you like vampires or not. It is completely genre-defining, and rarely do you have the opportunity to read something that so captured the world’s imagination that it gave birth to the sheer awesome numbers of vampire stories that came to be over the span of the next 115 years or so. (The Coppola movie is also great; people like to complain about the accents of some of the actors, which I get, but Gary Oldman in a huge butt-head wig at the beginning is hilarious. Also, Richard E. Grant plays Dr. Seward, so I get to watch one of my favorite actors playing one of my all-time favorite characters.)
When I actually stop to think about the things I’m saying I like, I’m realizing that Dracula is actually more about the vampire hunters than the vampire, regardless of the title. The TV series Buffy, which I fell in love with way late in life, is like that too, although it features some great vampire recurring characters among the main cast too. And of course, one of the best parts of The Lost Boys is the vampire hunters. The movie wouldn’t be half as great without the Frog Brothers/Sam team up. So I guess it turns out that there is something I really like about vampires after all – the people who hunt them.
Comfort Films Episode 4: The Lost Boys (Released October 29, 2021)
