Vampires & Werethings - It's Complicated

By Kerry Schafer

Vampires and Werethings. Meh. Yep, I said it. With a couple of exceptions, I am just not enamored with these creatures. I have yet to read a book where a vampire or werething is one of the main characters. I caught an episode of Buffy once by mistake. I did see Twilight, but in all honesty, the Viking and I laughed most of the way through it and our final analysis was, "if you were a guy who was several hundred years old but looked seventeen, why would you choose such a sullen and unattractive girl to become obsessed over?" (I also had other reactions, but they are ranty in nature and belong in an entirely different post.) Now the necessary disclaimer. I haven't read the books, and therefore have absolutely no right to critique them. Meyers obviously knows what she's about, or the books wouldn't sell the way they do, and so more power to her. They are just not for me. A little over a year ago, my muse, she of the twisted and sadistic sense of humor, pulled a wicked trick on me. I found myself writing a novel about a vampire. Of course, Gerry V. isn't your ordinary vampire. But even if you are over 80 and get turned on the night you were planning to die and aren't exactly happy about your new undead status, you're still a vampire. And, as I soon discovered, where there is one vampire there will be more. Really I shouldn't blame my muse. It began as a joke on Twitter, with me threatening to write a geriatric vampire. Linda Grimes egged me on. I wrote the very first scene and sent it to her. She pushed me to write more. And before I knew it I was half way into a novel. So, really it was her fault. Writing this novel was a little problematic on several levels, one of them being that I knew nothing about vampires. Obviously I needed to do some research. I read Dracula for the first time, and actually very much enjoyed it. I also loved the vampires and werewolves in Discworld, but then I adore everything in Discworld. Most recently I fell in love with Harry Dresden and read the whole series, beginning to end. I even enjoyed the vampires - or at least watching Harry slice, dice, and explode them in a variety of ways. I make an exception for Harry's brother Thomas, who I must admit is pretty awesome. But for the most part I still have a problem with the vampire as a sexy bad boy or girl. These are creatures that suck your blood. They either want to kill you, or turn you into a bloodsucking monster too. Sounds like an abusive relationship gone to nightmare proportions and it just doesn't turn me on. I guess my current stance on vampires and werethings is like that Facebook status for relationships: It's Complicated. I adore Gerry V., and can't wait to get back to work on him as soon as I finish off the current WIP. Today I was joking about writing a Werepenguin into one of my novels. Probably I won't. But you never know.

My What Big Teeth You Have

http://buffy.wikia.com/wiki/Dracula

Vampires. Weres. I know they're popular, and in limited doses, I'm fine with them. I stress 'limited doses' especially in worlds where the vamps and weres coexist. In every case thus far, when vamps and weres live in the same world, the vampires are unquestionably at the top of the food chain and the weres seem curiously neutered. In the animal kingdom, the wolves and big cats know their places in the food chain, that's true, but they're always pushing, always challenging, always chipping away at the edges of their limitations. If they don't, they starve. In all the stories with vampires and weres living in the same world, aren't there massive wars and cross species heirarchy challenges?

One of the main reasons I'm luke-warm on vampires and weres is that they're often nothing more than a stand in for a human alpha hero. Unless there's a specific reason a hero must be a vampire or a weresomething, why not just write the human? The danger of alpha heroes is that <gasp!> they are so not PC. Yet readers love them. So writers disguise them as alien - other. Then we don't have to explain why they're such domineering a-holes. They just can be.

Laughing? Ah, you shouldn't, you kow. You may have noticed that Word Whore Jeffe had a new novella debut this week. She wrote an alpha hero. He's not a vampire. He's not a were. Human. Normal. Very alpha.

Initially, reviewers loathed him with mad passion. They hated him for presuming to know what the heroine needed. Hated him for using her strengths and weaknesses to take her to her limits. *That's* the danger of the alpha hero. Yet how many vampire books have you read where there hero does the exact same things, yet no one hates him because he can't be judged by human standards?

Sapphire does come to a happy ending. The first few reviews may have hated Jeffe's very alpha hero. Readers seem to love him. Sapphire was number one in popularity on the Carina Press site for a week.

Vamping it Up

by Allison Pang

The incubus lingered over a coverless paperback about a French vampire. It was one of those overblown stories that had been really popular about ten years ago, complete with ruffling white shirts, long dark ringlets, and outrageous accents. Even a duster or two, actually. I'd thought it marvelous and horribly sexy when I'd read it, my sixteen-year-old heart near fit to bursting at the idea of some dashing angel of the night feeding from my inner thigh.

The reality had been a whole lot messier. It didn't involve my inner thigh either.

He blew the dust off the pages, snorting softly when he read the title. I'd always thought Moira had an absolutely craptacular taste in books. From the looks of it, he agreed. My opinion of him rose a notch.

"It has a happy ending, you know," I said.

His brow furrowed, lips pursed at me, before his attention flicked back to the book. "Does it?"

"All the good romances do."

"There are no happy endings. And vampires are over-rated, bloodsucking tools."

Obviously a tongue-in-cheek scene from the opening pages of A Brush of Darkness. I don't really write vampires, although they're technically part of the world and my main character, Abby, does have an encounter with one at some point in her past. But at the time when I was writing the original draft, vampires and werewolves were everywhere in paranormal and urban fantasy, which is why I decided to run with an incubus for my"hero." (Incidentally, I do have a werewolf character as well, although he's mostly secondary, and I never really talk about either werewolf OR vampire lore in the books. At the moment, neither are particularly important to the story, but it's nice to have a base mythology that I don't have to explain. I simply write vampire or werewolf and people get exactly what I mean.)

Still, I've always had a soft spot for the vamps, and even the werewolves to a certain extent. (I adored The Howling when I was a kid - along with An American Werewolf in London - both were vaguely campy, but so very well done, both in matters of lore and special effects.)

Actually, now that I think of it, I'm probably a bit of a sucker when it comes to the vamp/werewolf motif in general - even when you mix them up together (a la Underworld). Although, I must confess I've never read Twilight. I've caught a few bits of the movies on TV here and there, but that's about it. Otherwise, I look back on the movies of the day and it was all Buffy, Angel, Interview with the Vampire, The Lost Boys, Fright Night...on and on.)

Still, for all that vamps and weres have seen such a resurgence within popular culture within the last several years, they've been around in mythology and human history for a very long time. Clearly, as far as "monsters" go, they fulfill some sort of need in our collective psyche - whether that's horror or repressed sexuality, or just the idea of being able to "tame the savage beast" within our relationships and our lives.

Or...not.

Sometimes, vamps are just an excuse for porn.
(I did a little piece on this bit of wtfkery on my blog yesterday...including a few clips from youtube. Soooo cheeseball, even for porn, but I'm all about cheeseball, so there you go.)

And incidentally, in reference to the French vampire bit above, I've had a few people ask me if I was making fun of Anne Rice or LKH or numerous other authors....and no, I wasn't. Not directly.  French vampires are a bit of their own trope, so I was sorta poking at that in general, but I was also poking fun at myself.  My friend Staci and I had a couple of characters from a PbP a while back - I wrote an emotionally constipated angel...and she wrote the French vampire. While we never actually wrote a book about them, we do have snippets of their torrid love affair floating around on our hard drives (and you'll get another look at the inside of the above mentioned book in A Sliver of Shadow). It's all about inside jokes with me (and I apologized rather profusely for slandering his name in the acknowledgments as well.)

Wrapping this up with another reminder that there's still time to enter the contest for a copy of Jeffe's Sapphire!

Sapphire Fangs

by KAK 

In case you haven’t noticed, this week is release week for Monday Whore Jeffe Kennedy’s latest erotica novella, “Sapphire.”

If you haven’t entered the contest to win a digital copy, then hop back to yesterday’s post and leave a comment.

Jeffe, sweet Jeffe, dared me to interlace her contemporary erotica tale with the weekly topic of Vamps & Weres. I’m not certain that she completely understands the depth of my love for the Leeches & Lycans. ~evil laugh~

Let the spoofing begin:

Sapphire Fang:

The successful Mistress of the Bay Sanguinarium, M. Tastie Hangingfang is on track with her ten-century plan. Too bad her personal life consists of holding Sires accountable for their fledglings and cleaning up after they’ve screwed up. Enter the seductive werewolf Hotdamn Furliss. They have a tense yet cordial working relationship, but everything changes on a slayer hunt when he handcuffs her to the rail of a yacht just before dawn and makes her to howl at the moon.

Tastie writes the adventure off as too much bloodlust, until Hotdamn challenges her to the Harvest Moon hunt. She agrees to meet up with him. And follow his rules. They share a night of exquisite intimacy, brimming with both pain and pleasure. Afterwards, fearful her clan will smell the Dark Blood Exchange, Tastie goes to ground.

Hotdamn is determined to prove Tastie longs for the wild abandon of the predator only he can release within her – and the lust she feels is for more than just his blood. How can he make her see that he wants her, and not just the Vampire Mistress? 

Happy Pre-Halloween! 

If you'd like to buy the actual story of Taylor and Adam -- click here to head to Amazon.


If you'd like to buy Jeffe's post-apocalyptic Vampire story -- click here to head to Amazon.