V is for... Vampire (a bit of a rant)

For once my ABC Wednesday entry will not involve photography.  And definitely no pictures of my cats.  Instead, I would like to lodge a complaint about the falling standards of literary vampires.  I was in W H Smith's yesterday looking for a book for a friend, and what I couldn't get over was how many supernatural themed novels there were.  Especially vampires - they're everywhere (as Pepper demonstrates...), oh damn, ok so I probably lied about the photo and the cat thing...

Pepper the Vampire Cat about to claim another victim...

Call me a purist but I like my vampires with a hint of the dark and dangerous about them, a strange 'otherness', that both fascinates and repels.  I want them to symbolise our darkest fears about death, about  'un-being', all wrapped in a strange eroticism.  Now what do I find?  That instead of the foreign, aristocratic yet compelling Dracula created by Bram Stoker, we have the tiresome teenagers of Stephanie Myer's novels (I use the term loosely).

Ever since Polidori's The Vampyr, there seem to have been points in history where the figure of the vampire seems to resonate strongly in our society, so just what is it in our fast-moving, technological age that has brought about the plethora of books dealing with the subject (apart from wanting to jump on the Twilight bandwagon and make as much money as possible)?  In a section of his fascinating essay 'Aftergothic: consumption, machines, and black holes', Fred Botting's theory is that we are living in Gothic times where what was once marginal becomes the norm.  What was once dark and dangerous becomes acceptable so that 'Vampires saturate contemporary culture and provide a normative image of the latter-day consumer'.  An  example being of Anne Rice's vampire's living in a decadent world of conspicuous consumption, and where in the film version of Interview with the Vampire, Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise became the acceptable faces of the undead (I am saying nothing!!).

I suppose the rot started with Buffy, although I loved the programme for being funny and sassy.  But Buffy had a few undead boyfriends and no-one seemed to turn a hair at the thought (can you imagine Dracula being described as anyone's boyfriend?  He'd turn in his grave... well, if not his grave then wherever his coffin was being stored that particular night anyway...).  Now with Twilight etc, vampires seem to merely symbolise teenage angst, a rebellion against parental control and morality.  A case of society getting the vampires it deserves? I have to say it's a bit of a come-down - bring back Nosferatu all is forgiven.  Coffin-dwelling, night-crawling, blood-suckers just aren't what they used to be...

For more V words visit ABC Wednesday