We're deep in the spooky season (and I'm not just talking about elections!). So how about about pitting two Texans who write (or wrote) about vampires against each other?
First up, of course, is Anne Rice.
Her Interview with the Vampire will live long as the book that put the blood suckers back on the literary map. Sure, they’d been around for ages, or at least since Bram Stocker’s late 19th-century Dracula opus. But what a dreary group they were. Asocial beings, they spent the day sleeping in dusty coffins, rising at night, clad in outdated garb, only to eat. Despite the implied sexuality of their blood lust, their romantic life was a dead end. Literally.
Wait! How is this a post about Texas writers?
Anne Rice a Texan? Yes, because I count as Texas writers any who were born, lived, or worked
in the state. Even those who later forsook it. And although born in New
Orleans, she moved to Texas with her family at age 16. The family lived in
Richardson, Texas, a Dallas suburb, where Anne attended Richardson High School
and met her future husband, Stan Rice, in journalism class where they were both
students.
Anne also attended college briefly in Texas, and she and
Stan were married in the town of Denton before moving to San Francisco.
Now that Rice's Texas bonafides are established, on to
the novel that made her famous, and which probably could not have been written
in Texas at the time.
Decades after its 1976 appearance, Interview
now seems prescient. No longer dated and dreary, Rice made vampires cool. They were rich, they lived in mansions, socialized, and dressed
elegantly. They loved, they squabbled, they even have children, of sorts.
People wanted to be them.
And often, they were gay.
I initially resisted the lure of Rice’s vampires. What kind
of repression insists on bloodletting as a metaphor for sex? The notion of a
child as vampire seemed like an especially creepy form of kiddie porn. And the
limited diet? No way I could sympathize with the renunciation of chocolate,
even to secure immortality.
Finally, I delved into Interview, finishing on a suitably dark and
stormy night. A freak storm had cut electrical power to my Dallas neighborhood,
setting the scene for the physical darkness of the year 1791 when Louis, in
despairing guilt over his brother’s suicide, meets the vampire Lestat in a dark
alley.
Lestat drains Louis nearly to death, but stops short of physical death,
changing Louis into a vampire instead, for the mundane purpose of bleeding him of his money. Many great love affairs have had equally prosaic
beginnings.
Although Interview seemed full of coded homoeroticism, it was still early
days for gay pride. Rice (or perhaps her editors) stated explicitly that love
between vampires can never be physical. The only physical sensuality of a
vampire’s life must lie in killing.
It would take the decade of the 1980’s, with its plague of AIDS, to open more
frank conversations about connections between sex and blood and death. And to
turn Rice’s book from a cult classic to a media phenomenon.
Learning as I did that Rice modeled child vampire Claudia after her dead
daughter Michele helped make the passages more palatable. Claudia in the book
is only five, a good bit younger than her postulated age in the Interview movie. She’s
also the same age as Michele when she died of leukemia, significantly, a
disease of the blood, shortly before Rice wrote her ground-breaking book. And, of course, went on to write many more.
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| Image by Jerry from Pixabay |
While Rice left Texas, returning only briefly to marry,
Harris got to Texas late and stayed. Her
second Southern Vampire novel was Living Dead in Dallas, and she
has officially been a Texas resident for nearly a decade.
A Touch of Dead is Harris’s compilation of short
stories starring her most famous character, telepathic wise-cracking Southern
barmaid, Sookie Stackhouse.
Whether ruminating on the difficulties of doing a
post-mortem on a murdered fairy (their bodies disintegrate rapidly after death)
to the purported return of Dracula at his own birthday party, to the greed of
witches trying to corner the local supply of good luck – and more--Sookie is
never without an opinion.
It's a quick and easy read, understandable to even the novice
reader of the Southern Vampire phenomenon.
