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Why I Love Vampire Novels so much – parts six and seven – metaphors and sex

24 Thursday Jan 2013

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Finally, it’s the last day of my “Why I like vampire novels” mini-series. We’ve had history, folklore, romance, perfect characters and awful characters. And to finish, here is one fairly obscure one – a metaphor for everything – and what is for many people, probably the most obvious reason – the erotic power. 

Part Six – A Metaphor for Everything

Most commonly, vampirism tends to be interpreted as a metaphor for sex. All those penetrating fangs and fallen women tell their own story. Beyond that though, they seem to have been as a metaphor for all sorts of things: foreign invasion’ AIDS, the transition from child to teenager or teenager to adult , homosexuality, race. As long as the story doesn’t hit the reader over the head with this connection, I think this can add a real frisson to a novel.

In The Cavaliers, vampirism is fundamentally all about class. You could basically replace every reference to “vampire” with “rich, upper class male.” Underneath all the paranormal romance, there’s a gentle dig at the astonishing statistics regarding the number of Cabinet Ministers who went to Oxford and Eton, and who in many cases, were members of elite dining societies like the one the book portrays. I loved Oxford from day one, but in the first few weeks, everything felt so utterly alien, that if someone reliable had told me that some of the students were vampires, I could almost have believed it. 

Part Seven – The erotic power

Let’s face it, vampires are sexy. Fair enough, a big part of that is the tendency of modern authors to make them incredibly good looking and in many cases to liberally sprinkle their books with sex scenes (I’m undoubtedly guilty on both counts!). However, I also think it goes beyond that. Dracula for example is in no way intended as a romantic hero, and his description makes him sound quite hideous, but rather like the devil in Paradise Lost, there’s still something about him, especially in his scenes with the lady characters, that draws the reader towards him.

The  Vampire Diaries was the first vampire series I read, and it still holds a special place in my heart, however many nominally more grown up or technically better written books I read. In that series, there are no sex scenes at all, but there are scenes of talking, of kissing, and of sharing blood, that are some of the most romantic and yes, erotic, scenes I’ve ever come across.

I think it probably comes down to a combination of a highly charged power imbalance between the human and the vampire, the forbidden nature of what’s going on, and the ever present hint of danger.

Oh and then there’s the blood-taking or blood-sharing (depending on your individual’s vampire’s tastes and manners). I can’t quite come up with a sensible reason for why I like these scenes so much. Even allowing for mesmerisation, it would be pretty horrible in real life (I honestly nearly bleed to death once – long story – and it wasn’t sexy at all) but they work for me and presumably a lot of other readers. I suppose it’s more of the same – power, danger, it being forbidden – only much more so than mere sex. I think all of this is yet another reason that so many readers of vampire fiction also seem to enjoy the new crop (sorry!) of BDSM novels – to a lesser extent, the kinky sex brings some of these elements into play.

With blood though, I think there are two final elements. First blood seems to have had a special resonance in many societies, whether it’s human sacrifices, drinking cow’s blood to become a man, women on their period being considered either unclean or magical, or communion wine. In this context, the idea of someone drinking your blood is simultaneously repellent and magical, part of a grand mystical tradition and utterly outside of the realm of normal human experience. And by some sort of weird transubstantiation, thousands of readers turn that into something sexy. 

 

Phew, that’s my list done. Did I miss any of your personal reasons for loving vampire novels?

 

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Why I Like Vampire Novels so much – Parts Four and Five – Perfection and cads

23 Wednesday Jan 2013

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Every night this week, I’m writing about some of the reasons I love reading and writing vampire novels. If you haven’t already read my intro, check it out here, so we’re clear what sort of vampire books I’m talking about – Introduction

Tonight, it’s reasons four and five, a contradictory pair:

4 – Perfect people that you can buy into

5 – Utter cads that you can forgive 

Perfect people that you can buy into

I have a confession to make. I really like characters who are extraordinary. Who are beautiful and charming and intelligent. Who are either extravagantly lovely, or better yet, utter bitches and cads (see point below). I love characters, whether villain, hero or something in-between, that you know are always going to win, going to either outsmart or outfight everyone around them.

Some people seem to like characters who are ordinary and believable, but I think there are enough plain-looking, pleasant enough  people in casual clothes in real life. Oxford Blood once got a really negative review that said, “they’re all so beautiful and amazing and rich and everyone wants to be them and wants to be with her…sickening.” Whilst I emphatically respect the right of readers to give their honest opinion in reviews,  I couldn’t help thinking that the bit of the blurb which says, “The Cavaliers are the most elite society at Oxford University – rich, powerful, and beautiful,” might have given them fair warning that it wasn’t going to be full of average, flawed types with human failings!

I also think that it’s far easier to make this sort of thing work in vampire fiction than most other genres.  As long as you buy into the trope which says that becoming a vampire makes you attractive, immortal, invulnerable to most injuries and have super strength, then it sort of makes sense that the text is lingering on their good points and most characters are either admiring them, fearing them or swooning at their feet.  And as long as it’s backed up by plot, that’s quite fun.

This can be done well with an entirely human character, but it’s harder to suspend your disbelief quite enough to revel in the fun of it. When a character is completely undone by the charm and beauty of an unearthly beautiful vampire, I can see her point. If they’re acting in the same way about a human man, however hot and rich he’s meant to be, I always feel the urge to tell them to get a grip. 

Utter cads that you can forgive

When I talk above about perfect people, I mean in terms of their looks, strength, intelligence etc. Where I do like there to be some flaws is in their personality. 

In researching history, I have a strange soft spot for cads. You know, the sort of men that charm every woman who comes across them, treat them harshly then disappear.

My university thesis was meant to be a broadly feminist text about a woman called Jane Osbaldeston, who despite being female made a real impact in nineteenth century politics. I utterly loved her.

Unfortunately, I loved her charming but caddish son even more. This is a man who stays at a friend’s house and has a threesome with his daughters, who notices a lady at a ball doesn’t have a flower so rides for two hours to his greenhouse and back to get her one, who abandons a successful political career because he prefers hunting, who despite having a huge fortune runs up jawdropping debts.  Several of my fellow students accused me of writing a Mills and Boon novel rather than a thesis, though the very serious tutor loved it. This George Osbaldeston probably wins my vote, but there are all sorts of historical figures like him that I love to read about.

The only problem is, I’ve met people like this in real life. When I was younger and sillier, I’ve even developed crushes on them, even acted on those crushes. And the truth is, unlike in history books, they’re not actually that fun, and unlike in fiction, you’re pretty unlikely to change them for the better.

Increasingly, when I read about caddish types in modern fiction, I want to hurt them, and I want to get the heroine safely away and find her a nice friendly beta male. I think the worst example I’ve come across recently was in a book called Consequences, about a hot billionaire (is there any other type in fiction?!) who kidnaps a woman and repeatedly abuses her, physically, sexually and emotionally. At his worst, he beats her up so badly (not in a “kinky sex gone wrong” way, just in an “angry psychopath with no self control” way) that she is in a coma for two weeks. And yet, gradually, the heroine starts to fall for him, and rather more worryingly, from looking at the reviews, so do a fair proportion of readers. I think I’m in a minority here (there are endless five star reviews), but I can’t remember the last time I hated a book so much. The horrible male lead isn’t the only reason for this, but it’s a major part of it. I couldn’t stand the fact that anyone could like a character like that.

And then, I took a deep breath and thought about some of my characters. To take probably the most dramatic example, George Stewart has, in no particular order: killed Harriet’s cousin, mesmerised her to allow him to take advantage of her for her blood, stolen her protective necklace, horribly injured her boyfriend in a duel and tricked her into forging a sacred blood bond with him. And yet she still really rather likes him. But I (and hopefully readers) can somehow overlook all of that, because he’s a vampire. He’s not subject to the usual rules. You don’t read about him and think about that jerk that slept with you and never called, because he is an intriguing other.

I don’t think this is just a bias for my own writing either. Every bad boy in every vampire novel tends to do the sort of things that would lead any sane woman to call the police if they were an everyday human, but readers and other characters alike can overlook this.

I should emphasise that unlike the other entries, which I think are entirely positive, this one makes me feel a bit uncomfortable. I’m not sure we should be fetishising badness, even under cover of vampirism, but lusting after bad boys and admiring bad girls is a guilty pleasure of mine, and so much pleasanter when it has that detachment from real life that the supernatural allows. 

If you enjoyed this, check back tomorrow for the final reasons – erotic power, and a metaphor for everything. 

Why I Like Vampire Novels so much – Part Three – Romance with meaningful tension

22 Tuesday Jan 2013

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Every night this week, I’m writing about some of the reasons I love reading and writing vampire novels. If you haven’t already read my intro, check it out here, so we’re clear what sort of vampire books I’m talking about – Introduction

Tonight it’s reason three, romance with meaningful tension, which gets a post all of its own.

Part Three: Romance with meaningful tension

Although I believe that there can be good books in any genre if the writer’s talented enough, as a general rule, straightforward romance novels are one of my least favourite reads. It’s not that I’m cynical about love – having recently got engaged I’d say quite the opposite – but there really are only so many ways two characters in the modern, western world can fall in love. There’s very little reason for dramatic tension. Once upon a time, families had a huge say in who their children married. Sex or often any kind of serious relationship outside of marriage was frowned upon. Relationships between people of different classes, races or religions were more or less forbidden. And that’s before you go anywhere near the subject of gay or lesbian relationships.

Most great historical romances have some of these tensions at play, whether feuding families in Romeo and Juliet; class in practically anything from the eighteenth or nineteenth century (Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights all fall into this category, albeit in very different ways), or the perils of becoming a fallen woman in Victorian and early twentieth century literature. Incidentally, the latter has led me to the conclusion that if you’re a serving girl or local peasant and you have sex with the local aristocrat’s son even once, you’re 100% guaranteed to become pregnant.

Nowadays, there’s very little to stop most people in the UK from having anything from a one night stand to a marriage (or civil partnership) with anyone for whom they have requited feelings of some kind.

Historical novels (both in the sense of “written before 1960” and “written recently but set before 1960”) have this sort of tension going on in spades, as do some contemporary novels set in countries that aren’t so liberal (A Thousand Splendid Suns, for example, which is set in Afghanistan under the Taliban, has a beautiful, if utterly heartbreaking, forbidden romance at its core).

Generally though, contemporary romance set in the west has to completely manufacture this sort of tension with silly misunderstandings, an old lover who’s standing in the way, or some sort of minor rivalry, and on the whole, I’m not buying any of that.

Add vampires in though (and let me reiterate once more, I’m talking proper vampires, who need human blood, can’t come out during the day  etc etc) and suddenly there’s tons of tension. Can a centuries old creature who’s become accustomed to seeing humans as food really love you? Will your charming vampire lover lose control and kill you in a fit of passion, of rage or simply not knowing their own strength? If not, might one of their friends or enemies? Are they willing to turn you and would you want that?

Just like with a lover of a different class or race in the past, you might have to keep it secret. Your friends and family probably won’t approve and most likely neither will their’s. There’ll be all kinds of cultural difficulties and differences in lifestyle and moral standards to be overcome. There can be dangers from the relationship (for pregnancy and disease, replace being turned and being drained) and from outside it.

I think this is also behind the sudden surge in popularity of 50 Shades of Gray, Crossfire and all those other “oh no, the hot billionaire I met is into kinky sex” books. In theory, the BDSM creates the tension and the forbidden element, because supposedly a nice girl wouldn’t be into that, and her family and friends will have to either be shocked and disapproving and lied to, and there are potential dangers. Except in this case I just don’t buy into it. It seems so artificial, and so easy to get round via a combination of experimentation and compromise. 

There’s a reason that seemingly every other blurb on a vampire book uses the words “forbidden love.” It’s because it’s at the heart of every vampire romance story and no longer at the heart of much other romance. 

Why I Like Vampire Novels so much – Parts One and Two: History and Folklore

21 Monday Jan 2013

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Every night this week, I’m writing about some of the reasons I love reading and writing vampire novels. If you haven’t already read my intro, check it out here, so we’re clear what sort of vampire books I’m talking about – Introduction Oh and in case you’ve come across this blog randomly, all the title quotes are from my series, The Cavaliers. Grant me a little self-indulgence!

Tonight, we’re dealing with reasons one and two:

  1. History without the baggage
  2. Folklore, tradition and magic

1)History without the baggage

“Harriet thought about the 1920s, one of her favourite periods of history. She was struggling to understand that he had lived through them, had that glorious interwar experience.”

As I think would probably be clear to anyone who’s either read Oxford Blood or spent much time on this blog, I absolutely love history. It was my university degree and it’s an ongoing personal passion. I quite enjoy full blown historical fiction, but only in fairly small doses and only if it’s really well done

There are a few seriously amazing historical fictions novels (Wolf Hall, obviously. Sarum, which tells the history of Salisbury from prehistoric times to the present day. The King’s General, by Daphne de Maurier, which has all the brilliance of her more famous works with the added fun of being set during the English Civil War). I’m seriously considering writing a proper historical novel myself at some point.

I do however have a few problems with the genre. One, unless it’s alternate history (which can be amazing if done well) you know how any major events mentioned in the book is going to end. Two, if characters act in historically authentic ways (eg in their attitudes to women or class) there are only so many ways they can develop, and if they don’t, it can feel jarring. Similarly, an author can either include lots of historical detail, drowning the plot under a pile of cravats, muslin dresses and talk of the war and the King, or they can avoid this and seem inauthentic.

With vampire novels, you can have the best of both world. Most of the plot can be set in the present day, giving the characters freedom to behave as they wish and leaving the ending open, but at the same time, you can have flashbacks to the time when the vampire characters were alive, and you can also have their original time period influence their views on the world. This is done particularly well in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, which whilst they never let facts get in the way of a good story, nevertheless gave me a good understanding of the culture of Renaissance Italy, Ancient Egypt and medieval Russia when I read them in my teens, years before I studied any of those periods properly.

The historical elements were definitely one of my favourite parts of writing Oxford Blood, and the accuracy of them is one of the aspects of the book I’m proudest of. All of this is one of the reasons that one of my golden rules of vampire writing is that at least some major characters need to have been born more than a century ago. Preferably a lot more.

2 – Folklore, tradition and magic

This follows on from the history point and is a very similar argument. I love folklore and mythology and tradition, and vampire novels can be given a liberal sprinkling of this sort of detail without it having to become the entire point of the story.

I find it fascinating how many culture, across the globe and over the centuries, have had some form of vampire legend. I find it fun to compare the differences in detail of these traditions. Oxford Blood plays with this a little, by having two sets of vampires, the Cavaliers and the Roundheads:

“George broke off from his memories. “Tell me,” he asked Harriet, watching her closely, “have you ever noticed how there are basically two sorts of vampires depending on which books you read and which films you watch?”

“You mean that there are the Anne Rice style glamorous brooding ones and then there are the old fashioned scary Nosferatu monsters?” Harriet asked nervously.

“Exactly,” George said with a hint of a smile. “It’s us and them.”

This is taken to a fabulous extreme in the Anno Dracula series, which starts from the principle that all the conflicting tales about vampires are true and pretty much every fictional vampire is real, and that the discrepancy is simply due to their being a variety of different bloodlines, each of which has very different qualities.

Beyond the vampires themselves, vampire novels are a great starting point for bringing in all sorts of other mythology, whether that’s biblical references, ideas about magic and psychic powers or ancient prophecies. I think this sort of thing can put a lot of readers off, but I love it. It comes back to my original point – if the plot would be basically the same if the vampires were human, it’s not a good vampire novel.

I’d love to hear whether you agree or disagree on my thoughts so far, or about any points you think I’ve missed from my list. If you enjoyed this, check back tomorrow for reason three: romance with meaningful tension.

Why I like Vampire Novels so much – Introduction

21 Monday Jan 2013

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Last week, I started thinking about just what it is that makes me enjoy both reading and writing vampire novels. I intended a quick bullet point list, and instead, I’ve ended up with an essay, so I’m doing a separate post for each point each night this week.

So we’re clear, I have a few requirements for my vampire books. Outside of these, my love very quickly risks turning to hate:

  1. I’m mainly talking about books somewhere on the paranormal romance/urban fantasy spectrum rather than old fashioned horror. I like a bit of horror too, but if the vampires have no interaction with humans other than killing them, they probably don’t fall into the sort of category I’m talking about.
  2. At the same time, the plot can’t be just romance. Don’t get me wrong, I like a bit of vampire romance, but there needs to be something else, such as the way all the True Blood books are at least nominally based around a murder mystery.
  3. The vampires need to be more than just super attractive people. If the plot would be basically the same with human characters, I’m generally not interested. To tick this box, they need to tick at least some of the following boxes – has to drink human blood, has killed people at some point, can’t come out during the day.

Oh and finally, all my examples are based around the idea that the lead characters are a vampire man and a human woman. This seems to be the case in the vast majority of vampire books I’ve read, and I generally prefer this approach, but most of what I say makes sense if the genders are reversed or the couple are same sex.

Some of my reasons apply to other genres too, (and that’s great, because I love lots of other genres), but think that they are more pronounced in vampire novels, and that it’s probably the only genre that includes them all the a decent degree, though feel free to argue with me if you disagree!

So without further ado, my reasons (in no particular order) are:

  1. History without the baggage
  2. Folklore, tradition and magic
  3. Romance with meaningful tension
  4. Perfect people that you can buy into
  5. Utter cads that you can forgive
  6. The erotic power
  7. A metaphor for anything

One and two are coming up in a moment.  Check back each night this week for the rest of them.

Anno Dracula and rekindling my love of vampire fiction

12 Saturday Jan 2013

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Despite the fact that I obviously love vampire books (you’d have to be pretty stupid to attempt to write a trilogy in a genre you disliked!) until this week, it’s actually been ages since I’d read one. Partly, this was because all the work I’d been doing on my own vampire novels had left me fairly sated, partly because it’s so hard not to compare similar books to mine. In that situation, I don’t know which is worse – the bad ones that make me mentally scream “why is this piece of rubbish selling so much better than Oxford Blood?” or the ones that make me think “I wish I had written this.”  With a really very finite amount of time to read in between my day job, writing, and attempting to maintain a social life, I’ve been trying to make an effort to make my reading time count and make sure I experience as wide a range of genres and styles as possible. Finally, the sad truth is that there are an awful lot of awful vampire books (I claimed you have to love a genre to write it – I strongly suspect that in the wake of twilight, far too many people jumped on the vampire bandwagon, with little interest in or knowledge of what had gone before). Awful in the sense of being badly written, awful in the sense of far too similar to lots of other novels and awful in the sense that although supposedly a vampire book, you could replace the characters with attractive, slightly mysterious humans and the plot would barely change (as Fifty Shades of Grey, Twilight fanfiction with humans, demonstrated so neatly).

Anyway, I finally read a new (to me) vampire novel – Anno Dracula, by Kim Newman. I only cracked because a friend had leant it to me, and looking nervously at the trashy eighties horror cover, it took me ages to get around to reading it. I’m so glad I did. It’s one of the best books, vampire or otherwise, I’ve read in a long time. After failing to give a single book five stars last year (apart from one re-read) my first read of 2013 is straight into the rarefied world of a perfect score.

I wrote a post a few months ago about how relatively few vampire fans have actually read Dracula, and how it was actually a genuinely good book rather than just an outdated, cliche-ridden founder of a genre. ( Have You Ever Actually Read Dracula?) Well all I can say is that Kim Newman is clearly fully in agreement with me. Unusually for a piece of entertainment riffing off Dracula, it takes its inspiration from the original book rather than later films or a vague idea of the story. All the obscure characters than cinema tends to ignore such as Dr Seward and Lord Godalming are present and correct. If you have read it, you’ll really appreciate the way this book continues the story of all the characters, large and small, keeping their personality intact, but also, in some cases, putting a different spin on it, eg. implying that Lucy was giving herself to Dracula willingly, and that Van Helsing’s attempts to give her blood transfusions, rather than Dracula’s ministrations, was what killed her (due to a lack of understanding about blood types).

The plot is quite straightforward. Dracula survived the events of the eponymous novel, married Queen Victoria and is now ruling Britain. As a result, people know about the existence of vampires and it’s becoming increasingly common and fashionable to become one. The basic premise is therefore broadly similar to the Parasol Protectorate, another book I really enjoyed, but I feel that this book took the concept and ran with it much better.

The first good point about the book is that it’s simply a damn good read. There are some interesting characters and it’s a real page turner.

Secondly, I found it really quite well written, with some fantastic turns of phrase. I’m quite puzzled by a few reviews that claim this isn’t the case – it’s one of the most technically adept paranormal novels I’ve ever read.

Thirdly, the author is clearly passionate about Victorian history and literature, and about vampire novels and films, and has very obviously done his research. It’s not just Dracula –  there are characters from a whole host of other old vampire novels, such as Carmilla, Varney the Vampire and the imaginatively titled The Vampyre. I haven’t read, all of those, but from his fabulous treatment of the Dracula cast, I imagine they’re pretty cleverly represented. In particular, the title character from The Vampyre, Lord Ruthven, is the Prime Minister in AD, and so awesome that I’m now desperate to read the original.

Beyond vampires, pretty much every character, from the stars to the cameos, is either a historical or literary figure, from Sherlock Holmes to Bram Stoker’s wife (the author being in jail for writing a seditious novel against the Prince Consort!), Oscar Wilde to Dr Jekyll. It was great fun spotting the references I knew, although even as a history graduate and huge vampire fan, lots of them went over my head, leading to a bit of fun on Wikipedia.

Finally, there were lots of little historical jokes (eg. some people were more concerned about Dracula being Catholic than being a vampire when judging his suitability for the throne) which were both amusing and cleverly done.

There’s a murder mystery, lots of political intrigue and a bit of romance, all of which are handled well.

To get the full benefit from this book, it’s probably useful to have read Dracula and ideally to have at least some familiarity with the Victorian period and/or Victorian literature and/or other famous vampire books and vampire mythology. Nonetheless, I’d recommend this book to anyone who’s looking for a fun but absorbing read. I rarely give five star reviews, but this has shot up into my list of favourites.

I’m now going straight onto the sequel, the Bloody Red Baron, set in World War One with Dracula leading the German air-force.

In another blog post, I commented on how important I think it is for writers to read, to maximise both inspiration and enthusiasm. (Writers: Don’t Forget to Read and Write) Reading this has rekindled my love of vampire novels, and I suspect can only help encourage me to finish the Cavaliers Book Three. With this in mind, on Monday I’m writing a post detailing just what it is I enjoy about vampire novels and whilst their a worthwhile genre, not just pure trash. Check that out, and in the meantime, I really can’t recommend Anno Dracula enough. Pop over to Amazon and get yourself a copy – http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B005G4GJJQ

(Oh and whilst you’re there, if you haven’t already, get yourself a free Kindle copy of Oxford Blood before the promotion ends tonight –  http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B009SQ1LPK  – both are also available at Amazon.com)

NOTE: I obviously don’t own the rights to the Anno Dracula cover pictured at the top of this post. As I’m only using it as part of my attempts to sing the book’s praises, I hope the the authors, publishers and lawyers don’t mind too much!