Meliysa Euyoboglu (2015) The Image of the Vampire in ‘Interview With a Vampire’ and ‘Salem’s Lot’.

I read this essay because I was writing a vampire story called Rust and Dust. I might even finish it. Not with a stake through the heart, but a seat at the table and fingers hovering over the keyboard as Ben Mears, the protagonist does in Salem’s Lot, before his home town Jerusalem's Lot is invaded by a strange Eastern European man, who unleashes a holocaust of vampires. Mears through happenstance has to save his town and America from those bloodsuckers. Mears is a writer, as many of Stephen King’s protagonists tend to be. A classical good versus evil with the tropes associated with the vampires from Gothic fiction.

Ann Rice’s Interview with a Vampire is a sympathetic and personal account of the undead. When faith is shattered then comes blood. Rice wrote it after the death of her daughter. The protagonist offers a first-person account and asks existential questions. Christian crosses and churches do not faze him. Louis claims to quite like crosses as ornamentation.

LeStat who brought him into the vampire life because he could no longer face near eternity alone is described as ‘extraordinary and like a biblical angel’. People are drawn to them not just because they have been glamoured but because they are young, rich and glamourous. They might be undead but they’ve got a lot of things the living crave more than life.

Rice describes their alienation and grief as being a theme, which is mirrored by outsiders, looking in. ‘Louis wants meaning,’ she said. ‘We all want meaning’.

Taking the young Parisian orphan, Claudia, into their vampire family was an attempt to keep Le Stat and Louis together. She was an ungrateful and voracious child. In her world, in Rice’s world, ‘all the rules of good and evil are defunct’.  

In Ben Mear’s world they remain intact. He’s no antihero. He’s a man called to duty who hooks up with beauty queen girlfriend, Susan, to defeat evil before it spreads and colonises other small towns like theirs.

When Susan becomes infected she’s evil. The rules don’t change. She need to be staked out. The supernatural forces arraigned against Mears makes it unlikely a small everyman like him can win. He too is likely to become undead. And yet, he fights on.

Like Achilles held by the ankle and dipped into the River Styx so that none could hurt him, vampires can be put to rest. So the rest  of us can get on with it.

I’ve read both books and seen both film versions. Interview with a Vampire with Tom Cruise. Can anyone describe that as scary?  Not me.

Yet, ironically, good old David Soul of Starsky and Hutch, with his number 1 hit, ‘Don’t Give Up on Me Baby,’ had me shitting myself when he played Ben Mears hunting and being hunted by vampires in Jerusalem Lot.  

Notes.      

Virgil.

Sometimes is just takes a long walk through the darkness, a long walk through the darkest shadows and corners of your soul to realise those are part of you as well, that you’ve created through your life and thoughts those parts within yourself and while you can choose to fear them and end them, they will require your attention one day, they will need your care and acceptance before you can clean them away and turn the lights on.

Unblemished Bhikkhu Sajato

The Buddha’s chief disciples, Sarraputa and Moggalana, use the similes of a tarnished bowl to illustrate the blemishes of the mind and conduct. They emphasise the crucial thing is not so much whether there are blemishes, but whether we are aware of them.

Alan Watts.

We’ve run into a cultural situation where we’ve confused the symbol with the physical reality; the money with the wealth; and the menu with the dinner. And we’re starving on eating menus.

Byronic vision.

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