In film and fiction, vampires are bigger than ever. Now,=20 a new author has given the ‘undead’ a vigorous new life,=20 writes Shaun de Waal=20
EXACTLY a century ago, Bram Stoker was hard at work on=20 his novel Dracula, which was to become the prototype for=20 innumerable incarnations, in books and films, of the=20 figure of the vampire.=20
Vampires are bigger than ever now, what with the huge=20 success of Neil Jordan’s film, Interview with the=20 Vampire, based on Anne Rice’s novel. By the end of last=20 year Rice’s book — originally published in 1976 — and=20 its follow-up, The Vampire Lestat (both Warner Books),=20 were strutting up bestseller lists in Britain and the=20 United States. A sequel to the film is surely planned;=20 in the meantime, we’ll get to see Anthony Hopkins play=20 vampire-slayer in The Van Helsing Chronicles, yet=20 another version of Stoker’s novel.=20
The film treatment of Interview with the Vampire=20 languished in Hollywood’s “development hell” for years,=20 until it was picked up by producer David Geffen. In the=20 interim, Rice’s status as a cult horror writer had grown=20 and grown — and Francis Ford Coppola, sniffing the=20 wind, had made his own rather over-wrought remake of=20
Coppola’s movie hit a Nineties nerve, and suddenly the=20 vampire’s new status as an avatar of “haemosexuality”, a=20 metaphor for the age of Aids, was on every cultural=20 critic’s lips. =20
This would not be an immense surprise to Sigmund Freud,=20 who theorised that there was indubitably something=20 sexual about the notion of vampirism: teeth sinking into=20 a white neck, the obsession with body-fluids, the=20 feverish desire to transcend ordinary reality, even=20 mortality. A browse through Vampyres: Lord Byron to=20 Count Dracula (Faber), gives one some idea of how rich=20 an icon the vampire has been for hundreds of years.=20
For Freud, though, as for Stoker and many other authors=20 of early vampire stories, the elegant bloodsucker=20 represents sexuality as danger, the mystifying=20 collocation of Eros and death; the vampire has risen=20 straight from the unconscious. To the repressed=20 Victorian era, carnality was so frightening it needed a=20 narrative that encrypted sex in images of ancient evil,=20 embodied in folkloric figures updated for foggy city=20 streets. =20
The many vampire movies since then have stuck,=20 essentially, to this basic structure, frequently=20 reducing the Transylvanian Count to a parody of leering=20 lechery. When not risible, he (he is usually male) is a=20 creature of pure horror, a simple bogeyman to get a plot=20 moving and chill a few spines. =20
Even comedies like Love at First Bite or The Fearless=20 Vampire-Killers worked as simple inversions of this=20 structure. Only a few recent films — Fright Night and=20 The Lost Boys, for instance — tried to explore in=20 detail the lure of such creatures of the night, and=20 still “the undead” were expected to meet a sticky — or=20 a dusty — end.=20
Anne Rice’s brilliant idea was to turn things around, to=20 tell us the vampire’s story from his point of view, in=20 his voice. In Interview with the Vampire, that’s exactly=20 what we get. And, in The Vampire Lestat, we get it again=20 — only this time it’s another, older vampire. And=20 there’s more in the trilogy’s third volume, The Queen of=20 the Damned.=20
But now there’s a new writer who, it would seem, has=20 taken a careful look at the Rice formula and decided to=20 take it a whole lot further. She glories in the name of=20 Poppy Z Brite, and in her first novel, Lost Souls=20 (Penguin, first published in 1992), she reinjects the=20 vampire story with so much new life that she makes Rice=20 look positively banal.=20
For one thing, Rice can’t write nearly as well as Brite=20 can. Rice may be adept at ideas and plotting, but her=20 novels almost always go on for far too long — the film=20 of Interview improved on her book by leaving half of it=20 out, and to read her non-vampire novels like Cry to=20 Heaven is to feel like one is wrestling with papier- mache. =20
Rice has no prose style to speak of, while Brite’s=20 language has all the tangled luxuriance of a young=20 Truman Capote. Rice has a fondness for lofty=20 abstractions — even, or especially, in her characters’=20 dialogues — and descriptions that rely heavily on the=20 kind of woolly atmosphere-invoking that Edgar Allan Poe=20 employed. Brite, by comparison, revels in every sensual=20 detail, each quiver and pulsation. Where Rice is=20 cerebral, Brite is sensual.=20
The two women’s sense of time and place is different,=20 too. Rice locates her characters in a dreamy, brocaded=20 past (several centuries of it), where they can enact=20 their rather stiff costume drama. Yes, she brings them=20 up to date, to the 1970s at least, but it doesn’t seem=20 much more resonant than Paris 200 years ago. =20
Brite’s folk, on the other hand, inhabit an all-too- contemporary America, whether it be the decaying=20 environs of New Orleans or the haunted hinterland of=20 North Carolina. They listen to David Bowie and read=20 William Burroughs. They know an awful lot about drugs.=20
And when it comes to sex, the juxtaposition of Rice and=20 Brite is fascinating. A key strategy of Rice’s is to=20 displace eroticism on to vampirism, thereby making the=20 latter sexy. And yet, rather like the Victorians whose=20 values she inverts, she is content to gesture toward the=20 realm of generalised “decadence”, and leave it floating=20 in the ambience rather than concretely realised on the=20 page. For Rice and her vampires, the sanguine ecstasy=20 clearly replaces other pleasures of the flesh.=20
Brite, though, insists on having it all. Lost Souls is=20 about sex and drugs and rock’n’roll and vampirism. The=20 carnality she evokes does not substitute blood for=20 semen, but mingles the two, playing them off against=20 each other and making both more powerful. It’s strong=20 stuff, but it sure gets you high.=20
She has triumphantly occupied Rice’s territory, but=20 Brite, it seems, won’t be writing a vampire series. With=20 her second novel, Drawing Blood (Penguin), Brite keeps=20 some of her locales but moves into other spheres. This=20 novel, quite as good as her first, stews together a=20 haunted-house story and a cyber-thriller, to come up=20 with a gumbo entirely her own. Her forthcoming=20 collection of stories, Swamp Foetus, will no doubt serve=20 up some equally bizarre and piquant concoctions.=20