Children's column: That's enough vampires

Written by Nicolette Jones

Friday, 30 October 2009 10:58

Radio 4's Front Row on Wednesday night (28 October) was devoted to vampires – to the history of them in folklore and literature, and to the current fashion in books and especially films. No-one went into the proliferation, post-Meyer, of young adult vampire romances, so the following were not name-checked: L J Smith’s Vampire Diaries books, Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy, Rachel Caine’s Morganville Vampires, Sophie Collins’s How To Date a Vampire, Ellen Schreiber’s Vampire Kisses, P C and Kristin Cast’s House of Night novels... Not to mention all those proliferating black and red jackets, and apples, with or without a bite out of them. So that from Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games to Becca Fitzpatrick’s Hush, Hush (about fallen angels, not vampires, but still supernatural romance), the pitch is at the Twilight market.

Vampires in legend have always been, as the critics on Front Row said, about desire. They are creatures of uncensored appetite and impulse. They are also, as in Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire, lost souls, and outsiders. Both of these aspects fit teenage preoccupations perfectly: everyone worries about love/sex and about belonging or not.

But it is interesting to note how vampires have changed in children’s books. There was a period when they were comic caricatures for younger children – remember Terry Jones’s The Curse of the Vampire’s Socks, Ann Jungman’s Vlad the Drac series (about a vegetarian vampire), Kaye Umansky’s rhyming The Night I Was Chased by a Vampire, Michael Lawrence’s Young Dracula (which became a children’s TV series), the Little Vampire books by Angela Sommer Bondeburg... None of those vampires was sexy.

Even J K Rowling, who used centaurs and basilisks, werewolves and giants, never thought to make use of the power of vampires. It took Buffy to make vampires hot again. But they have become fashionable only because they are not what they were: the romantic vampires of modern young adult novels have no problem with crucifixes or garlic or stakes; they don’t have fangs or leave toothmarks on your neck; and they do not wear capes or dinner jackets. The legends have been left behind, and vampires have been reinvented as creatures of unusual strength, speed and beauty, wrestling with a thirst for blood like heroin addicts trying to resist the urge for a fix – or like any teenage boy obsessed with his sexual desires, but trying to be a new man. These vampires are moral and conflicted: immortal Mr Darcys in sneakers, with great cheekbones. It is possible for teenagers to read their way through vampire literature and never know the attributes of vampires in 200 years of popular culture.

The trend shows no sign of waning. Gothic love stories continue to appear – coming up in December, for instance, Lauren Kate’s Fallen, from Doubleday – though it suggests in the wake of Hush, Hush, that angels may be stealing a march on vampires. And, oh joy, the spoofs are arriving too: from Scholastic, for example, a book written under the name of Vlad Mezrich: The Vampire’s Just Not That Into You.

But, spoofs aside, is anyone else out there tiring of this?

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