{"id":11135,"date":"2018-02-25T13:53:54","date_gmt":"2018-02-25T17:53:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/?p=11135"},"modified":"2018-02-26T15:06:53","modified_gmt":"2018-02-26T19:06:53","slug":"forgive-father-sinned-two-hundred-years-since-last-confession","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2018\/02\/forgive-father-sinned-two-hundred-years-since-last-confession.html","title":{"rendered":"Forgive Me, Father, For I Have Sinned. It’s Been Two Hundred Years Since My Last Confession…"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

I stayed up \u2019til 1:30 this morning to finish Gabriel Blanchard\u2019s Victorian vampire novel, Death\u2019s Dream Kingdom<\/em><\/a>. It\u2019s the first book in a trilogy and WHERE IS THE SECOND BOOK GABRIEL???? WRITE FASTER GABRIEL!!!<\/p>\n

On its surface this is a very conventional vampire novel done right\u2013all the trimmings, the dead aestheticism and the vampire politicking and the killer sunlight and the claws. But the book also uses its creepy creatures to portray shame and religious despair (and hope) with rare intensity.<\/p>\n

The story so far is fairly simple: A young lady from a good old recusant family starts to traffic in spiritualism (DO NOT DO THIS) and gets vamped. She\u2019s thrust into a world full of vampiric political intrigue, where a revolutionary egalitarian movement is brewing and an extraordinarily awful Christian heretical sect is forcing conversion among the undead. As she learns to control her new psychic powers, etc etc, she also discovers that the devout Catholic who, when she lived, was her fiance, has for years been a \u201ccourtesan\u201d or willing human food source for vampires\u2013and he\u2019s partly responsible for her undeath. But then it turns out that there might<\/em> be a cure for her condition\u2026..<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a sleek black book, from Clickworks Press, and the font, I have to say, is especially nice, easy to read but just dripping with serifs. There are scores of artworks: Psyche Revived by Cupid\u2019s Kiss<\/em>, The Holy Communion of St Teresa of Avila or of Jesus<\/em>, Don Giovanni<\/em>. Blanchard never forgets to describe the architecture, the gowns, all the elaborate sensuality of this dead destructive world. (Gosh that stuff is fun.) There are plot-relevant references to the Middle English Alliterative Revival<\/a> and the Pilgrimage of Grace<\/a>. There\u2019s an appendix for phrases in foreign languages. All the Latin and the quotations from creepy poets would start to feel pretentious\u2013okay, now and then it does feel pretentious\u2013if the quotations weren\u2019t so well-chosen. He jams Tertullian and Hegel into a two-page span and it actually deepens the book\u2019s characterization and themes! There\u2019s an especially sordid use of Augustine and some very poignant bits of the Little Office of the Virgin Mary. There are sharp little one-liners (\u201cShe had been murdered in cold blood to round out a dinner party\u201d). I think most vampire-book authors want to write this way but Blanchard is better at it than any of the others I\u2019ve tried.<\/p>\n

The writing style is flamboyantly old-fashioned. This is fun when it means \u201csilvern\u201d and \u201cfaeces\u201d; more jarring when it means \u201cHindoo\u201d and \u201cMahometan.\u201d There\u2019s a point to the occasional nasty references to Jews and \u201cn\u2014\u2013 slaves\u201d: The vampires, every single one of them, including the supposed egalitarians and those attempting to maintain genuine Christian religion, are upper-class predators. I did fear that the book would treat antique racial attitudes as just another piece of decor, but in the end I thought it was a harsh, intrusive (and rarely-used) way to distance us from characters whose wealth and power might otherwise become too seductive.<\/p>\n

There are some flaws. The prose in the first fifty pages can be rough: Blanchard uses \u201cleonine\u201d four times there. Oh man, there\u2019s a point where the dialogue tag is, \u201cWilliam mentally versified.\u201d For shame! The action scenes usually take place in a kind of fugue state, where the reader has to piece together what\u2019s happened once the fight is over. That\u2019s especially unsatisfying when the characters fighting are humans, not vampires who might be expected to have a different form of consciousness. The explanation of the human mind is weirdly individualistic and modern, with no place for e.g. habit, an especially strange omission in a book about vampires<\/em>. (That might be the result of an unreliable narrator, though, since we get this explanation of how the mind works from one of the vampires.)<\/p>\n

The biggest flaw is related to one of the book\u2019s biggest strengths. Our heroine Marie\u2019s fiance, the courtesan William, spends the first half of the book as its most emotionally-complex character by far, and then becomes basically a flawless prince-charming. He\u2019s very sweet and I was rooting for those two crazy kids. But he\u2019s a sincere Catholic, reporting all his liaisons with the undead in the confessional, and the courtesan of a high-ranking vampire: humiliated, treated as someone else\u2019s property, ashamed before his beloved, yet also experiencing what Blanchard describes as the thrill<\/em> of being hunted and fed on. I wish we saw that thrill, what drew him to the night life and what he gets out of it. How did it start for him? What will he miss, if he manages to escape? Death\u2019s Dream Kingdom<\/em> is very much Marie\u2019s story and not his, but he\u2019s such a great character that I really wanted Blanchard to keep him dirtier.<\/p>\n

The book\u2019s other strength is the steely sincerity of its religion. Vampires are burned by Bibles and blessed objects; prayers sear their mouths. Two of the main vampires were faithful Catholics in life, and we see their reactions to the realization that obedience has become both physically agonizing and seemingly pointless. I\u2019d never before considered vampires as a fantasy of being subhuman\u2013a metaphorical representation of the feeling that faith and obedience are simply unavailable to you. The scene where we see the prayers of the heretical vampire cult is especially horrifying, as their belief is a kind of weaponized despair. It\u2019s a painful scene and will be particularly hard to get through for anyone who has felt that they are genuinely less than other people, damned and deserving it and unable to escape\u2013for anyone who has tried to understand who God might be if that is true. There\u2019s a deep despair hanging over this novel. But it\u2019s not seduced by that despair\u2013despair is the enemy.<\/p>\n

There are plenty of delights in Kingdom<\/em>, starting with the framing device that the book is Marie\u2019s own diary, edited with the help of researchers like \u201cJacob Cinnamome (PhD Prohibited Mss, St Isaac Lebowitz Coll)\u201d and \u201cFr Forrest Saint-Etienne (PhD Paradoxical History, Miskatonic Univ).\u201d But Blanchard never forgets what he\u2019s writing about: the Four Last Things<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I stayed up \u2019til 1:30 this morning to finish Gabriel Blanchard\u2019s Victorian vampire novel, Death\u2019s Dream Kingdom. It\u2019s the first book in a trilogy and WHERE IS THE SECOND BOOK GABRIEL???? WRITE FASTER GABRIEL!!! On its surface this is a very conventional vampire novel done right\u2013all the trimmings, the dead aestheticism and the vampire politicking […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":11147,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,7],"tags":[328,11,119,34,334],"class_list":["post-11135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art","category-mackerel-snapping","tag-gabriel-blanchard","tag-his-banner-over-me-was-love","tag-horror","tag-humiliation","tag-is-this-the-decadence"],"yoast_head":"\nForgive Me, Father, For I Have Sinned. 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