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<\/a>Vampires Are Us: Understanding Our Love Affair with the Immortal Dark Side <\/em>\nby Margot Adler
\nPublished by Weiser Books
\n256 pages
\nPaperback:\u00a0 $15.06
\nKindle:\u00a0 $9.99<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been fascinated with vampires ever since I was rushing home from elementary school to watch Jonathan Frid as Barnabas Collins in the original Dark Shadows<\/em>.\u00a0 From there it was on to the Universal horror classics:\u00a0 Bela Lugosi in Dracula<\/em>, Lon Chaney Jr. in Son of Dracula<\/em>, John Carradine in House of Dracula<\/em>, and what may be the best movie of them all, Gloria Holden in Dracula\u2019s Daughter<\/em>.<\/p>\n If I haven\u2019t seen every vampire movie made in the 20th<\/sup> century I haven\u2019t missed many of them.\u00a0 And I\u2019ve read a lot of vampire books:\u00a0 Bram Stoker\u2019s Dracula<\/em>, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro\u2019s Hotel Transylvania<\/em> and the next dozen or so in the series, Fred Saberhagen\u2019s reimagining of Dracula as a good guy, and Stephen King\u2019s utterly terrifying Salem\u2019s Lot<\/em>.\u00a0 And while it didn\u2019t have the impact on me it had on John Halstead<\/a>, I read Anne Rice\u2019s Interview With the Vampire<\/em> and several more in that series.\u00a0 And that was just in high school \u2013 in the years since the list has grown and grown.<\/p>\n The 1979 version of Dracula<\/em> is not a particularly good film \u2013 the story deviated heavily and needlessly from both the book and from previous films, and director John Badham didn\u2019t do a very good job of telling the story he decided to tell.\u00a0 But for a 17 year old geeky kid struggling to figure out who he was and what he wanted to be, Frank Langella\u2019s Dracula was a dream:\u00a0 the immortality, the power, the wealth, the clothes, the hair \u2013 oh, I wanted his hair!\u00a0 He was, in the words of Anne Rice\u2019s Armand, \u201cbeautiful, powerful, and without regret.\u201d<\/p>\n Is it any wonder I wanted to be him?<\/p>\n Margot Adler, NPR journalist and author of the hugely influential Drawing Down the Moon<\/em> (also published in 1979), has a new book exploring our fascination with vampires: Vampires Are Us: Understanding Our Love Affair with the Immortal Dark Side<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0 Margot began reading vampire novels in 2009 when she picked up the first Twilight<\/em> book (don\u2019t get me started on sparkly vampires!) and ten days later her husband was diagnosed with cancer.\u00a0 He would die after only nine months of treatment.\u00a0 During that time and in the following months, Margot read 270 vampire books.\u00a0 Vampires Are Us<\/em> is the product of all that reading.<\/p>\n Drawing Down the Moon<\/em> is 672 pages and could have been longer.\u00a0 Vampires Are Us<\/em> is a very different book.\u00a0 It\u2019s 256 pages, but only the first 55 are Margot\u2019s ideas about the attraction of vampires.\u00a0 The rest is essentially an annotated bibliography:\u00a0 1-2 paragraph summaries and commentaries on the 270 books she read.\u00a0 I read it on the plane from DFW to San Jose for Pantheacon and it didn\u2019t take the whole flight.<\/p>\n The central theme of Vampires Are Us<\/em> comes from Nina Auerbach\u2019s book Our Vampires, Ourselves<\/em>.\u00a0 Nina wrote \u201cEvery age embraces the vampire it needs.\u201d\u00a0 Vampires are far more than immortality or sex \u2013 they reflect our innermost hopes and fears.<\/p>\n The vampires of legend and lore are nothing you\u2019d want to be \u2013 they resemble the zombies of today far more than our glamorous hero \/ antihero vampires.\u00a0 They reflected the constant presence of death and disease and the fear of the dead returning to take the living with them.<\/p>\n Margot Adler sees six areas where we find the vampires we need:\u00a0 the longing for immortality, the desire for power, the complexities and perversities of politics, feelings of alienation and persecution, the struggle to be moral, and the search for spirituality.<\/p>\n It is in the struggle to be moral that Adler finds our current vampires.\u00a0 Bluntly, she says we<\/em> are the vampires, the Earth is our victim, and oil is the blood to which we are addicted.\u00a0 Like Barnabas or Angel we want to do the right thing, but the urge to feed \u2013 to maintain ourselves and our lifestyles as we are \u2013 is just too strong.<\/p>\n I think her metaphor is accurate, but I\u2019m not sure that explains the current popularity of vampires.<\/p>\n In the afterward to Vampires Are Us<\/em>, Margot Adler says this:<\/p>\n Now that four years have passed, and I have returned to \u201csanity\u201d and actually read a bunch of other books besides vampire novels \u2026 I look back and consider, what did those four years bring me?<\/p>\n The truth is that when you follow something simple to its core, you find it connected to so many things. It\u2019s just like that wonderful quote from the California naturalist and writer John Muir: \u201cWhen we try and pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.\u201d<\/p>\n I started with vampires, but it brought me the world. Whatever you obsess on, I hope that happens for you, too.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n For a long time I was well and truly obsessed with vampires.\u00a0 My outer life was stable and in a certain sense, successful.\u00a0 My inner life was\u2026 not.\u00a0 Vampire books and movies provided a needed distraction, a pleasant fantasy, and at times the welcome companionship of others like me.\u00a0 But it is no surprise that when I began to come to terms with what I really wanted in life and when I began to hear the call of the Gods, my obsession began to fade.\u00a0 Some day I should overlay my vampire timeline with my education and professional timeline and my religious timeline and see what it looks like \u2013 though if I do, it will remain in my private journal.<\/p>\n But I\u2019m still fascinated with vampires.\u00a0 I still watch Bram Stoker\u2019s Dracula<\/em> and Underworld<\/em> every time I stumble onto them on TV.\u00a0 There are a handful of urban fantasy series I read regularly.\u00a0 I\u2019ll be watching the final season of True Blood<\/a><\/em> this summer.<\/p>\n And every now and then, I still wonder what it would be like to be beautiful and powerful and without regret.<\/p>\n<\/a>By the time English vampire fiction began in the 19th<\/sup> century, fears had shifted.\u00a0 Dracula<\/em> (1897) reflected the fear of Eastern European immigrants.\u00a0 Dr. John Polidori\u2019s \u201cThe Vampyre\u201d (which sprung from the same storytelling session that produced Mary Shelley\u2019s Frankenstein<\/em> in 1816) was a thinly veiled attack on his former employer and companion Lord Byron.\u00a0 And both Dracula<\/em> and Sheridan Le Fanu\u2019s Carmilla<\/em> (1872) reflected the Victorian fear of sex and sexuality.<\/p>\n