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What do you think about True Blood ’s representations of the supernatural?

I am a great and long-standing fan of all the creative talents involved, am chomping to read the books, and I follow the fan fiction on Twitter. It’s really quite brilliant and I can’t wait for more. I favor horror that openly relates to the status quo, and sets about challenging it, with teeth.

Written in Blood

Talking to Author Kevin Jackson (Bite: A Vampire’s Handbook)

When I approached Kevin Jackson for an interview, my reasons were three-fold. I adore his book Bite, and was worried I’d copy it note-for-note (out of jealousy or spite, I don’t know) if I didn’t create some familiarity between us; his Canadian publicist happens to be a good friend of mine, and the contact seemed too good to waste; and, finally, I was born in England and have never returned save for a quick stopover en route to Nairobi many years ago. I think I’ve always wanted a British pen pal.

What happened after that is simple, as these things go. The correspondence came easy, and while I keep Google nearby at all times, I’ve learned a lot from Kevin. His enthusiasm for his subject is fused directly with his knowledge of it. It only confirms my belief that vamp lovers are some of the coolest kids around.

It’s been suggested that as modern society became more individualistic our view of vampires softened. Once used as scapegoats, we now sympathize with them as lonely rock stars, less like monsters and more like our own alienated selves. Do you agree? And, if so, can you point to a moment in time or popular culture that reflects this?

“Softening.” Broadly speaking, this is, of course, true — a majority of the vampires in the most commercial and/or artistically successful films and books of recent years have had sympathetic and even admirable qualities, and in some cases are shown to be ethically superior to humankind. Examples: Eli, the androgynous 200-year-old boy in Let the Right One In, who saves poor lonely Oskar from murderous bullies; or the existentially agonized priest-hero of Park Chan-Wook’s utterly brilliant take on Therese Raquin, Thirst. I’d also like to point out how many contemporary vampire tales take place not merely in modern-day surroundings, but in positively dull, ugly, quotidian locations — a working-class housing estate in Stockholm, a business district in Seoul, a scruffy Bristol suburb (Being Human) . . . even True Blood, though it reads as exotic to those of us not from Louisiana, is deliberately set in an unglamorous backwater. This anti-exotic aspect of the mythos is fairly new; whereas the idea that vampires might be attractive and sympathetic has been with us at least since Polidori’s tale of 1819. The vampire as Romantic lead is much more a re-discovery than a discovery.

I’d say that the Barnabas Collins character has a fairly good claim to being the progenitor of this kind of vampire. (He is, incidentally, all but unknown in the UK; I had heard about Dark Shadows in my childhood via comics and pastiches — maybe in Mad magazine? — but only saw episodes a couple of years ago, thanks to my novelist friend Matt Thorne, who loves the show and has it all on DVD.) I’d say, though, at the risk of repeating a small chapter in my book, that the softening up was being done for years before, thanks to (a) reruns of the Universal films on television, so that they became familiar and charming instead of frightening, and (b) comedy shows of the mid-’60s such as The Munsters and The Addams Family. (Was Morticia a vampire? In my mind she was. Lily Munster was obviously a true vamp, as were Eddie and Grandpa, but that show was much less interesting.)

The softening tendency obviously isn’t universal — think, say, of the vampire horde in 30 Days of Night (nice touch: the vampires have their own language), or the mutated, post-viral vamps in I Am Legend. These incarnations look back to the pre-Romantic, folkloric vampires, who were largely disgusting, incapable of human speech, none too clever and