vamps – Page 2 – Ceridwen Anne

The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

Yesterday, I had a birthday party for my Christmas-born daughter. She received an embarrassment of princess accouterments: crowns, jewels, plastic sparkle shoes, dolls, et&c and whathaveyou. Last week, when I picked her up from my dad’s house, she and my step-mom, Chris, were snuggled together on the couch, watching Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast”. It was the end of the movie when I came in, right before the transformation, and Chris put up her hand, apologized, and said she couldn’t talk until the inevitable magic had been transacted. We watched: monster into man, teapot into Angela Lansbury. Chris flicked her fingers under her eyes in the way that means “I’m not crying” but she was. One of the girl’s gifts yesterday was a Belle doll. Another was a sparkle pony with a hair brush. The girl took the brush from the horse and combed the princess’s hair. After work today, I took out the over-sized Disney Princess activity book we received yesterday. We found the page with Belle and the Beast, and first thing, she blacked out all the eyes. This may sound creepy, and it is I guess, but this is the first thing most kids her age will do. I took down this book and began reading.

An antidote, but not exactly. The Bloody Chamberis the kind of collection that gets described as a “feminist reimagining”, which is accurate on some levels, but I think can imply that Carter is enacting a series of simple reversals: women as aggressors, boys locked in towers. There are reversals, but not the ones you expect or for which you have prepared. They have a sameness to them that doesn’t lend to the gulping down I did, yet again, but it works, in its own way. I started with the stories that deal with Beauty & her Beast, as they were foremost on my mind: “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride”. This is not a collection that is a novel in disguise; they are short stories whole and complete. This is more like an album, in a sense that will most likely be lost sometime soon: a collection of pieces that riff on a theme. The Lyon tale is almost traditional in its telling: the father, the rose, the pact with the beast, the forgetting and return, the transformation that has you flicking your eyes with all of the wish-fulfillment, bright and romantic. But then comes “The Tiger Bride”, which inverts a central metaphor disturbingly, rising to a climax that made all of my hair stand on end. I don’t mean this metaphorically – even knowing the end, which I did, my body responded with the uncanny mammalian reaction that can mean several things at once: fear, pleasure, pain. Ah. Oh God. I am covered in fur.

There’s something hot-house about the prose. It’s fragile, breakable, spun from glass. It’s intentionally unreal, like Rappaccini’s Daughter who was raised on poison; beautiful, deadly. These are not stories that aspire to airless heroic beauty – although you many gasp from the lace and blood and satin – they also have a earthy, almost obscene sensibility. “The Snow Child” is a dagger of a tale, epigrammatic. It strips the fairy tale down to its Oedipal basics, almost strips out the story from the story, and you’re left with blood on snow and a rended black wing.

I think one of the failures of many modern fairy tales is that they take place in la-la land, long ago and far away, in the faux-medieval forest. With notable exceptions, such as “The Werewolf”, Carter’s stories occur in identifiable times and places. “The Lady of the House of Love” – simply one of my favorite short stories EVER – interrogates Progress and Rationalism & investigates horror in the age of the machine gun. In the year before the first world war, a young Englishman – a rational virgin – peddles into a Romanian town filled with ghosts and the last, inbred vampire daughter of Nosferatu. About his bicycle:

“To ride a bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fears, since the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion…Voltaire himself might have invented the bicycle, since it contributes so much to man’s welfare and nothing at all to its bane. Beneficial to the health, it emits no harmful fumes and permits only decorous speeds. How can a bicycle ever be an implement of harm?” (p97)

Maybe you can see where this is going. The vampire speaks to personal, domestic fears, and how those fears intersect with larger, societal moralities. (Ftw, Stephenie Meyer.) The vampire is also the symbol of the aristocracy: inbred, parasitic, but with a strange intimacy. The boy rides in on his bicycle, and only sees the vampire in the most rational terms: what wonders a sanatorium will do! And the boy, well-meaning, blind, & sweet as he is, doesn’t realize that his bike is the symbol of the devastation to come, that the greatest force for democracy has been the machine gun. We ceased to fear the aristocrat when we realized he could only kill us one at a time, family by family; we could kill each other so much faster and more efficiently once decadent individualism was subsumed into a machine. The vampire may be inhuman, but inhumanity has finer gradations like anything else, and the trenches are a scarier monster altogether, or scary precisely because they aren’t a monster.

There’s more going on in this story, much more, but that’s what I’ve got for now. I mentioned one of Carter’s wolf stories, three of which end the book. A scant two pages long, “The Werewolf” is a mastery of narrative voice: Carter creates a place, then she relates a folklore, then she tells a story in that folklore. The story is about girls and crones, the old woman stripped and stoned to death, the young woman who prospers from a folklore that will turn her out once she crosses the dangerous boundary into age. “The Company of Wolves” doesn’t work as well as the other two. Carter falls into lecturing for the first half, but by the end has worked into glorious perversity: Grandma’s bones wrapped in her own clothes, her hair unburned in the fireplace layered over with the girl’s discarded, burning clothes, the girl and the wolf in a house surrounded by baying wolves, consummating and consuming. In the 80s, Neil Jordan & Angela Carter turned these wolf stories into a movie, which is a fiasco, but a really compelling fiasco. Cheesy sets, a poorly done framing device, almost perversely miscast: Angela Lansbury (again!) is the wrong kind of old woman for Carter’s tales; Stephen Rea is cool, but he makes a really shitty huntsman/wolf. But I can see why they did it; Carter’s stories have a concreteness to them, a vision.

As often as these stories get soaked in bleach by Disney and repackaged for sale, the fairy tales themselves have an essential danger that can’t be scrubbed out. You can wash the blood off the floor, but it catches inevitably in the drain. (As a side-note, I think this is why Disney’s “The Princess and the Frog” doesn’t work & mostly bored my kids: they strayed waaaaaay too far from the central motifs. No spoiled princess, no pact that ends with the girl having to share her bed with a reptile, no violence integral to the story – in many versions, the frog becomes a man after the girl has thrown him against the wall in disgust and anger. There was violence in the Disney movie, but it was parenthetical, and banter is a poor substitute for real conflict.) Fairy tales also get re-purposed by children, with no parental intervention: Beauty’s eyes blacked out, doll and beast submitting to the same brushing. Carter’s stories aren’t definitive, but then no fairy story is, related from mouth to mouth, like a kiss or contagion, the kind of thing thing that raises the hair on your arms even while you snuggle in the intimacy of motherhood. Sweet dreams, kids.

Addendum:

As much as I like the new Penguin editions with their flash art on the cover, listed above, I am positively freaking out about the Folio Society’s new illustrated edition of The Bloody Chamber. Christmas is coming up again; think of me.

Breaking Dawn: Narrative Tension Goes Fsssst

I read Twilight more or less on a dare, mostly so I could swirl my chardonnay and get my schadenfreude on. While I can certainly snob out about how horribly Twilight is written on so many levels, I was surprised by how uncomfortable it made me. Meyer captured itchy, awkward adolescence with such an evocative squirm, and then she relieved that adolescent discomfort with a monstrous romantic bliss. I can see why so many people responded to this, even though I was still too busy breathing into a bag having flashbacks to middle school to relax and and get swept up in the romance. When she’s good, she’s good because she is not in control of her subject, not able to stop the outpouring of discomfort and terror underlying the domestic bliss that is a woman’s expected relief, and while Twilight ends with a certain romantic harmony, Meyer doesn’t perfect the ending. All impediments to Bella and Edward are not swept away, and they don’t fade out to domestic harmony.

If you think about it, that’s fascinating. I think if Meyer had been a seasoned writer, following the rules of mass market romance – and yes, I know that Twilight isn’t mass market romance, but it does share some commonalities – she would have written a series of books shifting to other points of view, working out other romances within the Forksverse. Edward’s coven would have been all unattached, the tribe would be introduced, and they would have hooked up pair by pair: Mike with Alice, Jacob with Rosalie, that one chick with Jasper. Edward and Bella and then the later couples would cameo in epilogues and picnics with their babies, doling out advice to the new lovers while they writhed in romantic incompleteness until they didn’t, and then the sparkle ending could have been repeated ad infinitum. But Meyer is not that kind of writer; her strengths, such as they are, reside in her uncalculating evocation of…I’m struggling here…the terrors and pleasures of American femininity? The inherent conflict between the self protagonist and traditional gender roles? Some shit like that.

Fascinating or no, I had zero interest in reading any more Twilight books after the first. But because Twilight talk is pretty much what fuels the Goodreads engine – although this is changing a bit, thank heavens – I’ve followed roughly 89 kajillion conversations about the series, spoilered myself on the plots of each book, and spent more words on books I haven’t read than is wise. I’ve wanted to read Breaking Dawn bad for a while, because I’ve been assured that Breaking Dawn is where the wheels come off, where Meyer’s unexamined domestic panic goes insane and burns the house down. Those assurances were not wrong. I’ve been hamstrung by my disinterest in plowing through nearly a thousand pages of love triangles, cheesy stand-ins for the Catholic church, and racist, Rousseauian garbage about how Native Americans are in touch with their inner furry beastie to get to this book. (Also, Edward is not Heathcliff, he’s Linton, and I’m not sure I can handle watching Meyer act out that mistake in Eclipse.) Anyway, point being, thank god for movies, because I got good and drunk and watched the movies of the middle two books with Elizabeth, who explained the stuff that they missed, and I was good and ready to read this.

I can see why they split Breaking Dawninto two movies, because it is two books. One is a shockingly naked expression of procreative terror, an effective horror novel which is effective because it is so completely, so thoroughly, so devastatingly unconscious. The other is a boring, mechanical attempt to cauterize the previous blood-letting, an act of wish fulfillment so severe it almost negates the power of the previous installment. The wish is to unsee the terror of the previous entry, but whoo boy, there is no unseeing that. Before reading this, I tried to think of novels that detail the process of pregnancy and childbirth, and I mean embody, not just use as grist from some guy’s mid-life/Oedipal crisis, or mention as the conclusion to the novel. I blanked for a long time, but eventually I came up with two: Beloved, Toni Morrison‘s ghost story of slavery, and Barrayar, Lois McMaster Bujold‘s court intrigue of the domestic. I find it interesting that the pregnancies in these fictions are all metonymous in some way, dissociated. From Beloved, I have a vivid image of Sethe’s water breaking in an unstoppable stream of piss, while her daughter-ghost rises in her high-necked white dress, or from Barrayar, Cordelia helping a woman deliver a baby during a battle, while her own swims in a tank, his fragile bones breaking. But neither of these births are normal by any stretch: disembodied, metaphorical, political, even while they have a fierce physicality that I can remember years later.

The dissociation in Breaking Dawncomes from the fact that the point of view shifts to Jacob for the whole of Bella’s pregnancy. The book starts with the Swan-Cullen wedding, a dreary obvious affair with requisite reference to clothing. The newly minted Cullens then whisk to Brazil to a desert island, and a series of sexual encounters that feel like S&M literature written under the Hays Code. I found them alternately hilarious and unsettling: a bedroom filled with white downy feathers after Edward has pillow-bitten his way through the grind; Bella waking covered in bruises that she can’t remember receiving, and begging a remorseful Edward into doing it again. She gets knocked up – pun intended – on the first try, though doesn’t realize it for nigh on 100 pages of snorkeling, eating eggs, and trying on lingerie. We’re in kill-me-now territory, for this reader. But they eventually figure it out, Edward making a tight-lipped phone call to Carlisle, his father/doctor, and Bella going completely fucking insane with baby fever.

Here’s where the point of view shift happens, and it’s breathtaking to behold. I try to avoid speculating about authorial motivation, but I think it’s obvious that Meyer is bound up in Bella, at the very least as a wish-fulfillment vehicle, if not a full-blown author proxy. (Breaking Dawndoes goes full Mary Sue in the last half though – more on that later.) And Meyer, for a variety of reasons, can’t have her stand-in express the terror and discomfort of pregnancy, the doubt and fear, the sheer towering life-and-death of it all, so she turns to another who can. Jacob performs his task admirably, giving voice to thoughts that by all rights Bella should be having, would be having, if she weren’t silenced by her standing as idealized womanhood. The pregnancy is breakneck, almost literally, a week of gestation collapsed into a day. Bella grows hollow-eyed, starved of nutrition by her fetal parasite, her ribs cracking by the sudden ballooning of her body, sipping blood out of a styrofoam cup with a lid and straw. In one awful scene, her pelvis snaps.

Holy fuck. I’ve had some babies, and I was harrowed by these descriptions. While I found much of pregnancy novel, and enjoyable in its novelty in some regards – when else can I experience being kicked in the bladder from within my own body? – pregnancy was also uncomfortable and scary, on both physical and existential levels. My son gave me an umbilical hernia, which necessitated surgery; I am riddled with stretch marks; I had never once experienced heartburn before my nascent kids pushed my stomach into my throat. (What is this sensation I am feeling?? My heart it burns! Oh, so that’s heartburn. Sucks.) And I had it easy compared to some of the horror stories I’ve heard from friends, bedridden with a variety of leaking, potentially lethal pregnancy-induced conditions. I’ve been dithering for the last half hour, trying to figure how to say this out loud, this unspeakable truth, but I believe that every pregnant woman, regardless of her politics or her beliefs, thinks to herself at some point, this thing inside me has no right to kill me. I resent that I may have to choose between my life and another’s. I resent that I am expected to love someone more than myself, sight unseen. I love myself. I choose me.

Phew. I’m feeling a little gross after writing that, but there it is. Bella doesn’t say anything like this, and Jacob twists and howls, saying it for her. I thank the starry heavens that we make it through Bella’s pregnancy in another character’s head, because she is freakishly placid and resigned. Bella is surrounded by unwomen – the barren, the childless – who protect Bella’s wishes to go through this unwise, fatal pregnancy because they don’t care about her at all, they only care about the baby. The sterile werewolf who hates Bella and Jacob, Rosalie who has been opposed to Bella’s transformation into a vampire on the grounds that Bella will not be able to have children, these women give voice to the conundrum that they are giving Bella what she needs to become a woman, in this traditionalist mindset, but that the woman is disposable in that act of creation. Good gravy, think about it, it’s so fucking sick and perfect that it kills me a little.

At the end of Jacob’s pov section, Bella goes into labor, such as it is. Honestly, I have never read anything scarier in my life, the placenta detaching, Carlisle, the doctor, conveniently off set. This is a mutant, remember, encased in a placental sac so hard that it can only be gotten through with teeth, the infant’s teeth. It is a shower of blood, one that had me flashing back to my own deliveries, and not in a good way. This following bit is gross and overshare: I had repressed this memory, but after 42 hours of labor, and a nail-biting finish where I nearly bled to death, I remember being wheeled out after all the stitches and happy conclusions (in that neither I nor my son were dead) and seeing the river of blood and fluid on the floor, leading to a drain. I remember lying in bed, two mornings before, after waking up to my water silently breaking, and thinking, holy shit, there is no way out of this now. I have to experience the next 12 hours – this was hope talking, though I didn’t know it – and there is absolutely nothing I can do to stop it. It was the moment before the roller coaster went down the hill, and I didn’t know if there were tracks at the end, and that was panic, pure panic.

The birthing sequence is told twice, once from Jacob’s pov, and once from Bella’s, and it’s fascinating to compare. Jacob is angry and horrified, like you are when you are a rational human watching a mutant baby eat its way out of a woman you love. Bella’s perspective is batshit insanity. I went back and re-read this part today, after I finished, because I have this horrible image of Bella’s child smiling at her with a full set of teeth – seriously, close your eyes and imagine an infant with a full set of teeth, smiling – shudder, shudder – and I couldn’t remember whether Bella noted this, or Jacob. It was Bella, and that image fills her with joy. I’m running out of expletives, but holy cussed godamn fucking shit. I’m losing the capacity to talk about this coherently, because this is so fucking bananas.

So. Baby born, who is flawless and perfect. Bella transformed into vampire, now flawless and perfect. From here on out, the plot could not be more boring, more impossible, more unnecessary. There’s some thing with the Voltari making a power play for the baby or something – seriously, I’m not detailing the plot because it makes so little sense. I barked out some laughs when Bella and Edward go at it like marble rabbits every night when the baby goes to sleep – haha, such an accurate depiction of new parenthood. I completely lost my shit when, after roughly seven hundred new characters are introduced, Jacob says something to the effect of: how am I going to keep all these people straight?! Next to his statement is a little asterisk.*

*See page 756 is written below, and I am sent back to an index – hahahahahaha – that is a list of characters complete with helpful little strike-throughs for the characters who have died in previous books – hahahahaha. Holy shit, woman, have a little more faith in your writing.

It’s like Meyer squeezed out this horrible truth, and then panicked, canonizing Bella and stripping out all the narrative danger, all the reality. We don’t really hear again from Jacob or the wolves, which is incredibly frustrating, because obviously Sam and Jacob make up at the end, but all of that occurs off-stage. And there are a bunch of new wolves??? And they are not really werewolves, we learn in an infodump?? Everyone recedes into a prop for the perfect child, one that makes everyone instantly love her. Meyer spent all her truth on the trauma of childbirth, and once we’re back in Bella’s head, she can’t express the impolite notion that infants can be difficult to love. I do believe in a certain amount of parental instinct – we wouldn’t make it far as a species without it – but for most new mothers, we are struggling with exhaustion, blood loss, and a dizzying hormonal stew when our babies are at their neediest: screaming, feeding, pooping on a loony schedule. Teeth or not, they do not smile for weeks, and while that first smile is intensely satisfying – I can still remember the first time the boy laughed, and that was sheer joy transmitted by sound – the weeks before are managing an uncommunicative alien who has consumed your life.

Oh shit though! How could I forget the imprinting?? Sweet zombie Jebus. Jacob does express this impolite anger at the child at the end of his section, stalking down to murder the infant for what she has done to Bella. It is the cheapest, grossest cop-out ever that his anger is magicked away by some sort of gross sexual soul mating. (I know I’ve used gross twice in that sentence; sue me.) I’m way ZOMG about the idea of imprinting – this is what I get for not reading the previous books, where they explain why only guys imprint, and why imprinting isn’t the most kinked idea ever. Edward’s convenient mind-reading keeps telling us that Jacob only has pure thoughts for his infant bride, but come on. I suspect that Meyer pulled this stunt to give poor, rejected Jacob a consolation prize, and to keep him from running out of there. One of the last chapter speeches is about the power of family, and how family is choice and a bunch of other garbage. Jacob would never choose to stay with this family Meyer has constructed without magical duress. But with imprinting, now the cult can be complete! (And, though these thoughts lack coherence, I think there might be something in this imprinting business that is about sexual competition between mothers and daughters, and the uncomfortable reality that all children grow to become sexual beings. The imprinting puts a tight leash – pun intended – on the child’s inevitable adolescent sexuality. Best mother ever!)

Bella goes full Mary Sue in the end, even her trademark clumsiness erased, her beauty perfected, her talents blooming into story-destroying weapons. She’s so good at everything that she makes conflict impossible. I was sorely disappointed by the big “battle” with the Voltori, who succumb to her perfect motherhood in the most boring episode of Vampire Matlock ever. Which is super funny, because Alice’s clairvoyance is obviously the real reason that any of that worked out, but that’s the trouble with clairvoyant characters – they really know how to spoil a plot. I spent a fair amount of time laughing when Alice bails, and everyone is like, nooooes! That must mean we are dooooooomed!! Because, you know, there’s no other good reason for a clairvoyant to head out on some super secret mission when there’s a big throw-down on the horizon. Certainly she won’t arrive at the perfect moment with some major trump card. That’s not more likely at all. But Alice’s decampment serves as grist for the emo mill, and without all the hand-wringing brought on by her leaving, there would be almost no emotional drama – clearly fake as it is – to the any of the boring, perfect proceedings leading up to the end.

Much as the last section bored me to tears, at least when it wasn’t grossing me out, I was zero to the bone on the last page. Bella and Edward’s forever and evers to one another, the vision of this family locked into an unchanging perfect stasis, unable to sleep or dream, fundamentally cut off from the larger world, this hit me like a ton of ice. Good god, who wants this? Who aspires to shed every single vestige of their humanity in the attainment of domestic perfection? And having gotten there, who thinks this perfection is anything but a horrible nightmare? Edward was right at the first: an existence of unchanging perfection is no life at all. Throughout this book, the people in Bella’s life disappear on by one: only a brief mention of her school friends at the wedding, then silence, her mother considered and then discarded again, her father brought in in the most ancillary way possible, the concerns of lives of the werewolves dropped after Jacob is neutered. Breaking Dawnis a chilling portrait of the most self-serving narcissism, that old Freudian saw about procreation as immortality turned monstrous in its perfection. I just went and tucked my kids into bed, and I feel fiercely in this moment how transitory their childhoods are, how precious it is that they grow and change, what a gift it is that we fight, and even that we inevitably die. It’s quite a feat Meyer performed here, making me cozy up to my death while I tuck my kids in. Grief is the left hand of happiness, to misquote my beloved Ursula K Le Guin, and I hold my children with both hands. Anything else is as dishonest as it is awkward.

Pete: Drinker of Blood: Who’s Got Your Belly?

I was recently telling a friend of mine about Pete, Drinker of Bloodby Scott S. Phillips – a friend who isn’t really big on genre fiction – describing the lovable schlub of a vampire who is our Pete, how he’s the antithesis of cool or fancy or popular, kinda stuck in the 70s classic rock milieu that existed when he turned. (I’ve been joking with my man about how my brain keeps calling this “Pee-Drinker of Blood,” which doesn’t really work grammatically, but the brain wants what it wants. Like Bear Grylls.) And my friend was like, you know? That’s actually really clever.

And it is pretty clever, and I hadn’t really noticed. Vampires in the modern vernacular tend to be these aristocratic fancypantses, whose long life is synonymous with compound interest and vast holdings, the long con of wealth in its longest form. The vamps in urban fantasy or its kissing cousin, paranormal romance – which is UF with sex scenes, as far as I’m concerned – tend to be these tragic, fopsy folk, mired in apologetic noblesse oblige, who get thrown a bang by wide-eyed waitresses and students for being soooo soorrry that they raped and murdered their way into wealth and long life. Let me pull my sexy sadface long enough for the ladies to drop trou.

Which can be awesome, don’t get me wrong. I kinda love the parts in Buffy when Angel gets all emo about how evil he was as Angelus, eating rats all soulful-like. (I might love it more when they flashback to when he was Angelus, because Boreanaz’s really bad Irish accent plus the serious television-budget minimalism of the “gradeur” makes for an unintentionally funny mix.) Nobody really writes blue collar comedies anymore – I think the last one of note was Roseanne, though I don’t really follow sit-coms – but they are especially thin on the ground in UF/PNR. A case could be made for the Sookie books, what with the fangbangers and all the folksiness of Sookie’s Wal*Mart fashions, but that’s not really a comedy, right? Certainly not intentionally, the inherent funniness of banana clips factoring into a love scene with a straight face notwithstanding.

So, Pete’s a hopeless dork long before he became a vampire, and a hopeless dork for decades after. He’s plugging along in a hopeless job, in a hopeless apartment, with hopeless and moldering interests. And I’m making this sound like a drag, but it’s so not. Pete is finally working up to hitting on a cheerful waitress when the dude who turned him comes back to town with fell and dire purpose. Apparently, killing regular folk isn’t working anymore, so Pete’s sire has to pee-drink the blood of vampires to stay alive. (Or undead, whatever.) Pete’s gotta get the band back together, which means heading to Club Emoglobin (seriously, best vamp club name ever) to deal with the dickweeds who constitute the sire vamp’s gets. Which doesn’t go that well.

Here’s where the really great class commentary comes in, because there are all of these beautiful, hilarious, bathetic character sketches for hipsters vampires who have self-styled with the douchiest of names, things like Lord Greystoke, only that’s not really one of them. You know what I mean, because I’m not looking it up. Pete woos his lady and does some goat-sucking, drives around in a tragic, classic car, and generally is the kind of dude who has a lot of band tee-shirts and heart. He manages to get a lot of people wearing way too much velvet to go kick some sire ass, and it’s wonderful and simple and ordinary how he comes into his gross new powers and love and stuff. I just want to rub Pete on his belly. Who’s got your belly, Pete?

I was writing along with the installments as Pete, Drinker of Bloodwas coming out as a serial novel – though I understand that the individual parts are coming down now that this is completed and edited for minor continuity errors and the like. Gotta say, I’m jazzed I don’t have to do that anymore, because, boy, does that get spoilerful after about the fourth. Anyway, here’s my disclosure: Scott is a friend, and my man did the layout for the final cover. (And all of the covers for the serializations are collected in the final draft, which is pretty adorable.) Pete, Drinker of Blood is an awesome, hilarious, funny bit of splatterstick horror-comedy, and I just had a blast reading it out over the last whatever months. Halloween is a-coming in. Maybe this’ll do you right.

Pete, Drinker of Blood, Part 1

Sometimes I get the impression the universe is messing with me. A couple months ago, I was invited to a group which has as its mandate reading serialized novels – like Dickens or wait, holy cats, Madame Bovary was serialized? (so sayeth wiki) – in the manner they were originally published and consumed. I did my thing where I joined, lurked a bit, thought about serial fiction for a while, and then decided the whole thing was too much like work for me. Now, I’m not calling you weird, Serial Reading Cats, I just lack the patience to read a million page Dickens novel, let alone to take 4987 weeks to get through one. (I know. I am a total philistine when it comes to Dickens, and I’m very sorry for it.) (And I know you’re reading other stuff too.)

But I think the exercise of trying to experience a completed work of art as originally experienced is worthy, if maybe a little doomed. My main experience with serial fiction is television, of course. (Comics are another heavily serialized contemporary form, but I almost always come at them well after the serial arc has been completed.) Though this is changing as the Internets and on-demand media fracture viewerships and toss a barrage of media at us so we’re always bound to miss a continuing series as it unfolds, some of my funnest watching experiences have happened in ongoing serial television. The X-Files was a Friday night destination for me, as was Star Trek, Buffy, BSG, and a bunch of other stuff that will only make me look even more nerdy than I have already freely admitted to. Half of the joy was the addictive buzz of turning down the lights, watching like a maniac, and then squealing like an idiot when the drama was enacted and then set up for the next week. There’s no cheating there. I’ve certainly gulped down series after the fact – Deadwood, Carnivale, even re-watches of Buffy or Firefly (whose on-air experience was seriously screwed in the first place, airing out of order) – but there’s something very different about consuming something that is understood to be finished (if not completed) as it happens versus after the fact. That the wait isn’t really enforced, that the conversation doesn’t have the same unknowing…

Dangit, it sounds like I’m totally bagging this group, and I’m not – I’m just bloviating out loud. The joys of consuming serial art while it’s being produced are social, on another level – these were fictions being consumed by other people too, and the week before the next fix would be punctuated by conversations with other viewers, chopping it up, predicting, nerding out, complaining. That group could function that way for those involved, and that is the beauty of the Internet. (The AVClub’s TV Club does some interesting articles as its critics re-watch series television.) My main serial television right now is Walking Dead, and it’s almost a sport for me to bitch about everyone and everything on that show – good lawd, the dialogue! the “characters”! – only to tune in the next week to see if Walking Dead can pull off another sublime action sequence in among all the godamn stupid whining. And then they do! And then I bitch and praise to everyone who will listen. I didn’t even watch much Sopranos, but I’ve gone to the homes of the HBO’d to eat junk food and watch along with the screaming fans, because it was totally fun.

So, anyway, how the world is messing with me: Scott S. Phillips – who is a friend, in interests of full disclosure – sent me this opening bit of a serial novel he’s just put out. I spent some time checking for cameras, because, seriously, that’s creepy that I’d been thinking about the serial format in contemporary media, and then bang! Here it is. And, based on somewhat limited research by moi, it seems like the serial novel is having a comeback in teh age of teh Internet. It makes sense: bit-sized bits that are easily and cheaply downloadable, which can function as their own advertisement, or let you know without a full commitment that you don’t want any more of that. Instead of putting all your eggs in one basket, and then watching that basket, the writer can sell some eggs and keep laying. And then you can scramble them and…forget it, this metaphor officially does not work. You dig what I’m saying though, right?

Pete, Drinker of Blood begins the story of the titular Pete, a sad-sack vampire who is schlubbing his way through a less than glamorous LA. The principles are established: Pete, the bartender he’s smitten with, and the badass vamp who is likely the antagonist of this story. The pace is good: bang! slowly revealing character and world-building, then bang! I’m admittedly biased, but I love the way Phillips tells stories, the way he turns idiom halfway so it’s surprising, the tragicomic defeatism of his main character. Pete’s obviously not in with the cool crowd, the Anne Riceian dudes in leather pants, who frequent a bar call the Emoglobin (hee!). He’s like a rat-eating Angel, before he got cool again and found Buffy, only he’s never ever been cool in the first place. There’s uneaten hamburgers and classic rock, and an interlude with a tiny model windshield. I guess I don’t want to say more for fear of spoilers, which is a little silly because it’s not like I can spoil something that isn’t even completed. But, you know.

And now the long wait until next month…

Sunshine: Not Talking about that Other Vampire Book for Teens

I’ve been falling behind on my reviewing, and as a consequence, my memory begins to drift and the shape of the thing looses focus. Add in the fact I felt kind of bowled over by the torrential first person narrator in this one, and a few weeks after my read, I have this clear, loud image of Sunshine, the character, still ringing in my mind, and a series of afterimages burnt on my eyes, and not such a good grasp on connectives and plot. So.

I don’t think I’ve read an opening as good as the one in Sunshine by Robin McKinley for a long while. It starts with a lot of chat and gossip, laying out this relationship of that, origins, trivia. I’m just snuggling down for a sprawling family drama, and then McKinley his me with it: this is a profoundly alternate future, after a magical world war that decimated much of the world’s population. She never backstories this too much, which I count as a strength, not just because I bore easily when world-building builds the world too worldbuildily, but also because I felt it made sense for the narrator to have a hazy sense of history. The Vietnam War was going on when I was born, and I couldn’t give anything but the sketchiest of timelines for the conflict itself, but I could identify aspects of the culture now that could be traced back to not just the conflict itself, but the secondary social conflicts going on in the US at the time. And that’s the way Sunshine talks about the magical wars, not with a series of dates of skirmishes, but as the starting point for world view and cultural expressions. I mean, this is a little dorky, but I really enjoyed the really concrete ways that Sunshine talked about neighborhood activism, civic boundaries, hell, even building codes.

Then another hit when Sunshine – her real name is Rae, thank heavens – is abducted by ghoulish vampires and left like livestock with another captive vampire who appears to be starving. It’s a hideous, claustrophobic situation, made better by the fact that none of these vamps, not even the captive with whom she comes to an understanding of mutual necessity, is anything but an inhuman monster. I’m not a huge fan of vampires in contemporary fiction, I think because the whole sex/death thing tends to be weighted too far to the sex side of the equation. One time when I was living in the dorms, and my only source of DVDs was a small town public library – gather round, children, and hear how I walked uphill both ways – I checked out the creaky old 1932 film Vampyr. The titular vampire – it’s in German, hence the emo spelling – is a ghoul, an old woman who crawls out of her grave and murders. When they put her down, it’s bloody and messy, not a discrete spray of ash or some cheery fire. You’ve gotta get your hands in it, death. These vamps are more like that ghoulish woman than they are like certain neutered sparklers I can think of. (Oh, hai, I’m ur one Twilight reference in this review, cuz I think they may be obligatory.)

I’m not going to get into the latter plot too much, partially because the mechanics of it are mostly gone to me, but Sunshine spends the rest of the book in a profound state of shock and trauma, babbling out her ordinary existence almost like a ward against death and its embodiments. She’s a talker, Rae, as a narrator, often spending hundreds of words on her job, her baking, the minutia of arranging her bandages. But especially the baking. It was a little frustrating at first for me, and likely it will annoy lots of readers, but eventually I learned to stop worrying and love the baking. For one thing, I just like when characters work at real jobs. And all the politics and hierarchy of a family, within a kitchen, within a restaurant, within a community were a smart way to convey this world to me. But then I also liked the way her voluminous chatter was a sign of her near-death trauma and her working through it through life and it’s mundanity.

I know there’s other stuff I wanted to say, but I can’t think of it now. I’ll just end with some stray thoughts:

I liked that Sunshine has a boyfriend, even though she has this weird, glancingly sexual connection with the vampire. I liked that she and her boyfriend had a relationship full of silence and lacuna, but that it was still real in its own, soundless way. The scene where she and her boyfriend make love in the sunlight was one that stuck with me, partially because it was so fragile and unsaid.

I enjoyed the descriptions of the vampire’s home, which was so cliche and overwrought. It was a clever nod to the vampire conventions, one that Con, the vampire, shrugs about. Yes, well, that’s what created me, and I won’t tear it down, but that’s not what I am.

The magic in this book works so well for me, because it it was humdrum and daily. The abandoned charms were especially nice, shuttering in the glovebox.

The ending? Ah, the ending. No spoilers, but it is open and unfinished, in a way, hand in hand, and out into the darkness. It would be more than nice if McKinley revisited this world, though I do not think she will. I’ll just comfort myself by imagining good things, and that’s a kind of completeness in itself. In a book about adolescence’s end, the leap is as important as the landing.

The Twilight of Girlhood

Two things happened in my household, shortly after I started reading it, that seem germane to a discussion of this book. First, I was in the kitchen, dealing with the endless in-and-out of the dishwasher, and I became aware of a small, soft, wet noise coming from the back bathroom. This made my mom-ears perk up, and I went back to find my daughter, who is about 2 ½, tearing off strips of toilet paper, wadding them neatly, throwing them into the toilet, and then flushing. She looked up at me with her deceptively cherubic face and said, “Here Mum, this is for you.” She held out a tp wad. I tossed it in, and flushed, and then we went to find less futile pursuits. Second, in the same back bathroom, my dog was in there diving for tootsie rolls in the cat-box. The litter tray has one of those detachable tops, with an opening in the front so the cat can go in there and do her business without sending litter all over the freaking room, theoretically. The dog, in her lust to eat cat shit, got her head stuck in the opening and the topper thing lodged on her neck. She freaked out, the way only largish dogs in smallish bathrooms with a litter topper on her head can freak out, and there was all manner of howling, skittering and general mayhem, until I went in and rescued her from herself.

I’ve been known to let my metaphors run away from me, but let’s see if I can pull this off. We all have stuff that we do that’s stupid, futile or disgusting, or all of these things at once: eating cat shit, flushing wads of toilet paper down the toilet, smoking cigarettes, polka, embroidery, reading Twilight, etc. There’s nothing wrong with these pursuits, exactly (although I would give consuming feces a miss if you aren’t a border collie) but to the non-enthusiast, they seem inexplicable. But that’s the thing: eating cat shit is a source of pure, whole body pleasure for my dog; that, barking at kids on bikes and sleeping on the couch. While I may grumble at the mess and unintended comedy these activities generate, I really can’t criticize her joie de vivre. So, reading Twilight was like eating cat shit for me, but I mean this in an understanding way. You may not love smoking. The thought of the smoke hitting your lungs and the buzzing sensation you get in your fingertips may turn your stomach, but man if just typing these words doesn’t make me want to go out on the back porch and pound down a heater.

So I get it, I get the whole Twilight thing, on some level. But then there’s the girl thing. I’m not exactly the intended audience for Twilight, because I’m not a teenage girl. But I keep having to account for my not reading Twilight, as I will now have to account for disliking Twilight, because I live in a community of women who were once girls, because I was once a girl. I’m fascinated by how many women I know who love this book, women I love and respect, women who are not laughable, stupid or thoughtless. They may express chagrin or embarrassment, as though they just were busted for smoking on the back porch, but they love it just the same. Hating on Twilight, for guys, is easy, because it doesn’t betray their essential guyness; in fact, probably the opposite. (Yes, yes, girls are gross, now back to the clubhouse!) Hating on Twilight, as a woman, is essentially a betrayal of girlness, an erasure of that awkward adolescence many of us share. One can easily, oh so easily, enumerate the literary failings of this book. One can easily, oh so easily, parse the religious messages and sexual politics into something monstrous and ugly. This is all fine; go for it; I will be on the sidelines with pom-poms. But what I keep coming back to is the true, earnest and deeply felt pleasure this book provokes in so many women. Pleasure that is real and not deserving of scorn.

That community of women thing is what sent to reading Twilight in the first place. My sister was reading Twilight at the urgings of one of her co-workers. She has had an uneasy relationship with this other women, which had recently been patched up into something resembling friendliness. In their water-cooler conversations, the co-worker began extolling the merits of Meyer’s book, and pushed it into my sister’s hands. She knew what she was in for – how could she not given total cultural saturation at this point – but found herself unwilling and unable to actually finish reading the book. How was she going to explain this to the co-worker? We all know (or maybe we don’t) how quickly this sort of thing can get personal. It gets especially personal with books of this nature, that slip into the female hind-brain and coil around our unspoken (unspeakable?) drives and desires.

One of the reasons I hated this book (and I mean that word emotionally, not critically, if you know what I mean) was that Meyer was far far too damn evocative of the strange alienated horror that is adolescence. Bella is never easy; there are very few unqualified pleasures for her; every single action, especially the ones that occur within the bewildering sucking chest wound that is her social scene, is considered for its effect on everyone else, her status, her placement in the group, her precarious self esteem. It gave me vivid and lingering flashbacks, and not in a wheee-I-see-trails kind of way, but in the countless shaming episodes way. The only real source of pleasure for her is her time with Edward. And while it’s probably not original to point this out, Edward is the externalization of her desire, an embodiment of the girl-fic wish fulfillment of both desire and fear, the shaming female libido that goes bump in the night. He can’t read her mind because he’s an extension of her mind. Which brings me to the creamy ironic center of this review. On some levels, this book is a morality tale about female pleasure, and I was unable to take much pleasure in that. Gods, but I love me some irony though, so it the book evoked entirely unintended pleasures.

Never is this more apparent than in the scene in which Bella is menaced by some would-be rapists. She’s been mooning all day about Edward, which in very concrete terms gets her cut off from her female companions and their consumerist escapades. She ends up surrounded by threatening male desire, which she has provoked by her dreaming thoughtlessness. Edward appears, the sort of flip side of this desire, and rescues her. When I was working on my Feminist Merit Badge, there was much talk about the virgin/whore thing, and then also romance novels and other mass-produced fantasies for women. Too much of this kind of talk can make me really really tired, but I’ll try to keep it brief, for all our sakes. Although I don’t think I’ve heard about a boy version of the madonna/slut thing, I think one is at work here, as one is at work in many female wish-fulfillment exercises. Men are conjured, neutered and domesticated, and that process of domestication both justifies and condemns female desire. Bella simply cannot help herself: her mooning attraction to Edward gets externalized into her scent, which makes him unable to help himself, makes him an animal, reminds us she’s an animal, a sort of endless mirroring. That scent also ribbons through the air, cartoon-like, bringing horribly unlikely rapists wafting in by their noses. Desire is a dangerous thing, girls. Here’s a Ken doll for you, his smooth, cold, inhuman man-parts stamped carefully into place.

I’m bringing up Ken deliberately. In her Goodreads review, Elizabeth describes this book as a Barbie doll, which pretty much nails the whole thing for me. Barbie is the embodied consumer. She teaches girls how to accessorize their lives: boys, friends, dresses, houses, all neatly displayed in little consumable packages. Barbie teaches the values of consumerism, of consumption, while simultaneously being completely immune to its effects. Barbie cannot get old, fat, or overdose on heroin. She is the bulimic model of perfection. By many yardsticks, one could say that Edward is an anorexic. A vegetarian vampire is a contradiction in terms. While not personally a sufferer of an eating disorder, I have a number of very close people in my life that I’ve watched go through that mangle. I get it too: I was demographically ripe for this sort of thing: a white, middle-class overachiever. The anorexic, as it has been explained to me by people I love, craves control over the uncontrollable, over her needs and ambitions. That Edward cannot or will not eat is especially troubling when he’s viewed as Bella’s externalized desire. It’s a closed loop: food equals death, desire equals death. Bella can’t see Edward in a mirror (in a dream) because he’s not really there; he’s wasted away. That the book ends with Bella begging Edward to “change” her – this is not a spoiler, everyone in the world could see this one coming – means that she is begging for death, the way any girl who expresses desire is begging for death.

I’d like to finish with a craft project, if you don’t mind. Please, warm up your glue guns. There’s a paper store near my house that hosts classes every month, and I keep thinking about attending the one about altered books. I’m not entirely clear on the idea, but it seems you take old books, and cut-and-paste alternate text and pictures as commentary or whatever. I haven’t done this yet for three reasons: a) lazy b) somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of cutting up books, even in the service of making cool, new books c) don’t want to be caught dead anywhere near something that even remotely has a chance of being associated with scrap-booking, even kinda sorta. I can’t emphasize this last one enough.

This is my idea for the altered book of Twilight. If I weren’t a squeamish girl, I’d march right down to Sex World in the warehouse district, and I’d buy up a bunch of pornography. Not just any pornography, but pornography with people with normal body hair having enthusiastic sex, cheerful happy sex. (Does such a thing exist?) No smoothies allowed, no shaved, pre-adolescent vaginas, but big furry bushes and armpit hair a la the 70s edition of The Joy of Sex. This would get pasted over every description of Edward’s cold and marble-like skin, because Stephenie Meyer’s ossification of the human body bums me out.

I’d toss in photos of Michelangelo’s David and Christ on the Cross, just to show how the nude male body has been depicted over time. (Women can certainly complain about the female nude, but since the rise of Christianity in the West, the most predominate male nude is Jesus’ broken body on the Cross. The primary visual representation of the male body is one of torture.) In would go some stills of the pretty blond-haired girl who has just devoured her bickering parents in Romero’s Night of the Living Dead because zombies freak me the hell out the way vampires never did. Also, because in the ongoing conversation I’ve had about this book with my sister, which ended in the double dog dare that I read it, she expressed bewilderment as to how anyone could love a dead thing. Quote she: “Vampires are just high-functioning zombies.” More than the crap prose, the endless adverbs, the discouragingly accurate portrayal of adolescent discomfort, this may have done the book in for me. Zombies man, brrr.

I’d put in wads of tp, to represent for my daughter, who some day may find this book appealing. But also for another reason: I recently had occasion to be in one of the local high schools, not the one I graduated from. I went into the bathroom, had some good times reading the graffiti: various people are bitches, etc. Then I looked up, and the ceiling was dotted with wads of dried tp, stuck to the ceiling after some industrious young women had spent what I know from personal experience is a very long time getting those suckers to stick. Throw too soft, and they won’t even hit the ceiling. Throw too hard, and they’ll bounce back. You’ve got to get them wet enough to stick, but not so wet they just fall apart. Stupid, futile and possibly disgusting, but emblematic of times spend with other girls doing the useless and possibly damaging things that made adolescence so enjoyable. I think I’ll do without the cat shit. I’d douse the book in the cologne my first boyfriend wore, that, the smell of cigarettes and leather jackets. Mmmm, smell-o-vision. Then, I’d cover it with the brown paper bag covers we all put over our text-books in school to protect the actual covers. I’d draw all manner of doodles, phone numbers, one liners, hearts and bunnies all over the outside. Finally, I would affix a picture of Spider Jerusalem on the title page, and dot it with pink nail-polish blobs in a heart shape around the picture. Then I’d put the book away and try very hard never to think of it again.