Truly, Madly, Deadly_ The Unofficial True Blood Companion - Becca Wilcott [1]
In fact, my earliest notion that vampires were even remotely bothersome was the Bugs Bunny cartoon Transylvania 6-5000 (1963), in which Bugs engages in a magical duel with Count Blood Count. (“Abacadabra!” “Hocus pocus!”) At the time, I had a fear of open waters, so, in my child’s mind, I equated vampires with fish nibbling at my feet: relentless, but something to overcome nonetheless. The vampires I envisioned in my childhood weren’t killers; they were people with a lot of time on their hands. They were well read, well traveled — cool.
And dude, they had great hair.
They could take whatever they wanted and in the next moment disappear as if nothing had happened. Isn’t that a universal fantasy? It’s the adrenalin of shoplifting a chocolate bar. (And if I’d been a child vampire, I wouldn’t have been caught.)
It never occurred to me that vampires could be violent, remorseless creatures who lived by a savage code. At a young age, while my own sexual awakenings were only just beginning to take form, I had yet to consider the consensual desire to be turned or fed upon, relinquishing your mortality to sustain another’s immortality. Nor, even in my advanced appreciation for the subversive, had I yet to make the connection between metaphor and actual flesh-and-bone Real Vampires — sanguine, psychic, psi, or energy — those who feed off the blood or emotional energy of individuals or nature to sustain their health, or the intersection between vampirism and the bdsm (Bondage, Discipline, Sadism, Masochism) lifestyle.
For me, vampirism was a performance enhancer, less a way of life in death than a way to make what life you’d been born into something harder, better, faster, stronger, as Kanye West might say. The contemporary, romantic vampire was a better you, a sexier you, the kind of you even your worst enemy would want to be, at once admired and feared by audiences who were safely off the page, or on the other side of the television or film screen. By the time vampires found me, they’d already evolved into everything from rock stars to sparkling high school students, with Slayers in hot pursuit wielding sharpened stakes and witty comebacks. I spent my efforts considering instead what they mean to others, why they’re so pervasive, and, through Alan Ball and True Blood, how the metaphor of vampirism could finally be extended to include those of us who are both natural and super — the mortals who love them.
Vampires are the perfect (and endless) fodder for any writer. With all the time in the world, what would a vampire look like in this day and age? Breathtakingly beautiful or a paunchy couch potato?
To state my bias, I don’t like all fictional vampires. Namely, those who can survive in sunlight. Don’t get me wrong; I enjoy the hot-bodied actors of the Twilight series and The Vampire Diaries. (See aforementioned references to good hair.) But, stake me where I stand, anything that normalizes the vampire to the level of a high school student risks de-everythinging that which makes vampires the ideal personification of our more subversive, non-mainstream wants and desires. I say this as a tried-and-true fan of Buffy (where we never saw a vampire on campus . . . well, except for that one time that Spike got that ring that allowed him to walk in the sun, and — ahem, never mind about that, you know what I’m saying). You want an ideal coming-of-age metaphor, stick to werewolves and witches. But leave me my deepest, darkest vampires. To be precise, that which is not seen, not surface, and not freakin’ sparkling.
Why a book about vampires then? Why True