The Very Image of the Modern Vampire Protagonist

In my reading I've noticed how different authors handle the vampire in a present-day or near-modern setting, and in particular what portions of vampire lore they choose to keep as accurate and what they decide to reject as mere superstitious fancy or ignore altogether. Furthermore, it is interesting to note what rationales they use for those choices, and for the operation of the vampire powers and weaknesses that they are accepting in their version of the vampire.

For instance, Anne Rice's vampires are turned to dust by the touch of sunlight, while Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's can endure sunlight but are strongest at night, and Stephanie Meyer's are undisturbed by sunlight but prefer to avoid direct sun because their more dense body tissue reflects light differently than human flesh, making them sparkle.

And speaking of reflections, there's the old vampire tradition that a vampire shows no reflection in a mirror. This is based on the pre-scientific notion that a mirror contained some kind of spirit or essence that formed an image, and refused to respond to a vampire's undead nature. But for a modern reader who has become acquainted with the actual physics of reflectivity, the notion of a corporeal being who is visible but creates no reflection in a mirror may strain the ability to maintain suspension of disbelief.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg explained it away as an aspect of the Influence, the telepathic power her vampires, the luren, possessed to better enable them to hunt. A luren who was stalking intelligent prey could simply tell their victim's subconscious to edit their image out of what was being seen in the mirror -- and could just as easily send a similar telepathic command to edit their image out of what they were seeing directly, rendering the luren effectively invisible at will (rather like Douglas Adams' "somebody else's business field).

As I'm reading Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's A Dangerous Climate in which she sends her vampire Count Saint-Germain to St. Petersburg at its beginnings, I hit upon that brief mention of the difficulty of casting no reflection while his manservant is shaving him, and it caused me just such a momentary bobble. This is not a fantasy world in which I can allow that light might work utterly differently, but rather a part of the past that I've studied relatively intensely, having a bachelor's degree in Russian language and literature. It wasn't quite enough for me to drop the book like a stone, but now I'm going to be watching to see how she reconciles it with the facts of physics, and hopefully relates it to the fact that her vampires are able to go out in daylight.

The Missed Metaphor

Recently I was pointed to a review of Twilight that harshly condemned the series on the basis that "vampires don’t complete humans, any more than a lion completes an impala." And while there are plenty of things to condemn the series on -- the prose that goes beyond lush to purple and even putrescent, the way in which Edward's behavior toward Bella becomes steadily more obsessive and controlling, in ways that make it look like an abusive relationship should be regarded as normal and healthy -- this complaint tells me that the reader is mis-reading the book.

In fact, it almost makes me think of a reader complaining that the relationship between Superman and Lois Lane is bestiality because Superman is in fact a Kryptonian rather than a human. Well, technically it's true -- as described, Kryptonians would have such an alien biology that a gingko tree would be more closely related to dear Miss Lois Lane than our favorite square-jawed superhero. But most Superman readers would groan with exasperation at such objections and answer, "but that's not the point." A literalistic reading of the Superman universe, along the lines of Larry Niven's "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" (in which he meticulously details exactly what horrors would ensue if a being such as Superman really existed and really tried to interact with human beings) ignores the spirit in which the Superman stories were created. Superman was never meant to be read in the realistic mode, as a rigorous extrapolation of alien biology. It's comfort reading, a way of recapturing in this uncertain adult world the memory of when we were little kids and our parents seemed all-powerful, perfectly able to protect us.

Similarly, we are not intended to read Stephanie Meyer's Twilight as though it were Those of My Blood, in which Jacqueline Lichtenberg creates a human subspecies known as the luren which are the basis of classical vampire legends, and rigorously accounts for each aspect of vampire lore with scientific explanations. Yes, there is effort to create some kind of a narrative rationale for vampirism -- but that is as much because, as Marion Zimmer Bradley frequently said, "suspension of disbelief does not mean hanging it by the neck until dead." Blatant allegory tends to turn off the reader, to increase the mind's "sales resistance" to the ideas the author is trying to convey, so clothing the story in additional layers of versimilitude will help lower that resistance by reassuring the conscious mind that it is in fact reading a story, not a lesson.

At least in my reading, vampirism in the Twilight-verse represents lust -- that fierce, crazy desire that shuts down reason and leads people to do really stupid, self-destructive things just to get laid. And when you realize that, you can see why it works as a vampire novel, and wouldn't if it were written as a straight-up mainstream romance. Obviously Edward's a bad boy, with the traditional risky bad-boy appeal combined with a deep sense of morality and self-control. If he were a mainstream romantic hero, he'd be a character more in line with the protagonist of John Ringo's Ghost . When Mike Harmon sees a pretty girl, he wants to have her, now, like a dog in rut -- yet he also knows that rape is not just a crime, but a betrayal, a tearing of the social fabric, so he controls that animal-heat urge.

But that kind of a character is too real, and thus way too scary, to be exciting in a teen romance (as opposed to a techno-thriller with fantastical elements, aimed at an adult male audience, as Ghost is). But by making the character into a vampire, we move the dangerous aspect of his personality into the realm of the fantastic, and thus make it less threatening.

Now this isn't to say that there's nothing wrong with the books, or that they're great literature. Far from it, the prose is lousy, the characterization is superficial, and the fantastical elements really don't break any ground. But complaining that the vampire doesn't complete the human in the relationship is to completely misunderstand the nature of the metaphor being used, and to actually undermine whatever valid points the reviewer does make against the series.