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By Root 423 0

at least pretty damned good, at times verging on terrific, from the dazzling opening sequence (I simply can’t think of a better one in the whole history of TV series, not even the one for The Sopranos) onwards. It seems to have dragged in a fairly healthy audience who otherwise wouldn’t go near vampire fodder, some of them drawn by the raunchiness, some just by the general air of knowing cool that suffuses the whole enterprise. I’d read a few of the Charlaine Harris novels out of a sense of duty, and found them passable but forgettable (this is praise of a kind — a lot of the vampire fiction I dipped into turned out to be unmitigated drivel); this series is decidedly a case of the visual medium improving on its written source.

One of the things that most people who are not blind drunk when they watch it soon twig to is that it uses vampirism as a successor to the Civil Rights, Gay Rights, and other emancipatory movements (this includes lovely touches in the credits, like “God Hates Fangs,” and the child dressed in KKK robes) to make drama and comedy — it’s a very witty show — of the Otherness question. A delicious moment in an early episode: Sookie, who is a nice Christian (thus off-setting the vamp-hating Christian fundamentalists and bigots we see both in the cast of characters and on news-show style clips from TV), says that Jesus would have embraced vampires in divine love. Theologically dodgy, perhaps, but spot-on in terms of Sookie’s warm-hearted character. As even my cat has figured out, the series dances elegantly around the question of Otherness, and how much of it we will welcome/tolerate/stand. In the early episodes, at least, questions of ethnicity and sexual orientation are treated as trifling if not invisible in the context of a homo sapiens/homo Nosferatu divide; thus, the series doesn’t feel liberal-preachy in the mode, say, of early dramas about race relations, but sucker-punches you with a juicy, sexy yarn and lets the play of values go its own way . . . I look forward to becoming addicted.

During research for your book, did you encounter any real vampires (i.e. sanguine, psi, psychic)?

Yes, in the sense that I hung out with, and then joined, a crowd of fanged and dark-dressing types who call themselves vampires or more exactly vampyres, and am now a fully paid-up member of the London Vampyre Group. They can look rather alarming, especially in full regalia — one of them recently showed up at a talk I gave in dark body armor, a giant helmet, a face painted like a human skull and a genuine ram’s skull as a codpiece — but, you will hardly be surprised to learn, are entirely sweet and gentle people, almost to the point of bathos. (At one of the meetings I attended, there was an ’80s pop trivia quiz. I do not know whether I am boasting or confessing when I say my team won.)

However, at the launch for my book at a fine emporium called Wynd’s Little Shop of Horrors, I did become aware of a rather more sinister sub-group in attendance who were bragging about more dubious practices than trivia quizzes, including the ritual consumption of actual human blood. The main braggart was someone I had already identified as a bore and a jerk, and I wasn’t altogether surprised. It didn’t fill me with horror, just mild contempt.

What is your earliest memory of vampires? Was it literary? Animated? Cinematic? Do you recall how it impacted you? And how else has your interest in vampires manifested itself in your life?

Well, I ask again, was Morticia a vampire or not? I was about 10 when I first saw her, played by Caroline Jones I believe, and it was something very much like love at first sight. But it was only a matter of months after that, if I recall correctly, when I discovered a wonderful publication called Famous Monsters of Filmland — wholly unaware that countless thousands of other baby boomers were also feasting greedily on it — and encountered both the Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee incarnations of Dracula. The identification with the latter was instant, though I knew Lee’s Dracula only through black-and-white