One of the first things I did after reading Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series was to locate my copy of Thomas Preskett’s Varney the Vampire. Meyer’s saga has been hailed as the bestselling vampire series of this decade; Preskett’s 220-chapter-long book was the bestselling vampire series of the 1840s.
For all its length, so appealing to the Victorian taste for three-volume novels, Varney the Vampire moves along briskly. By the end of page three, Varney has claimed his first victim: “The glassy, horrible eyes of the figure ran over that angelic form with a hideous satisfaction — horrible profanation. He drags her head to the bed’s edge. He forces it back by the long hair still entwined in his grasp. With a plunge he seizes her neck in his fang-like teeth — a gush of blood, and a hideous sucking noise follows. The girl has swooned, and the vampire is at his hideous repast!”
Now here’s Meyer, with her vampire hero Edward Cullen, who is “devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful”, declaring his love for the human Bella Swan: “Before you, Bella, my life was like a moonless night. Very dark, but there were stars — points of light and reason... And then you shot across my sky like a meteor. Suddenly everything was on fire; there was brilliance, there was beauty. When you were gone, when the meteor had fallen over the horizon, everything went black. Nothing had changed, but my eyes were blinded by the light. I couldn’t see the stars anymore. And there was no more reason for anything.” During the course of this four-volume teen-lit saga (there’s a fifth on the way), Edward Cullen often gnashes his teeth, but never sinks them into Bella’s neck.
Meyer’s saga is best described as what happens when vampire fiction meets Mills & Boon in high school. Cullen’s biggest problem is diet control, or how to master the art of not snacking on your girlfriend; Bella Swan must grapple with vampire politics and with the necessity of becoming a vampire herself, since she ages like all humans and Edward doesn’t.
Varney was the classic vampire of myth and legend: a serial killer who tires of his immortality and the relentless need to feed off his prey. Bram Stoker wrote Dracula about fifty years after Varney the Vampire, and like Varney, his protagonist was meant to be a figure of terror, a permanently hungry predator whose thirst for blood could never be slaked.
So how did we get from the 18th century figure of the vampire as ruthless, if tormented, predator, to the 21st century version of the vampire as high-minded prince of the prom? Many would credit Anne Rice with creating the figure of the vampire as the emotionally sensitive, exquisitely beautiful and angst-ridden modern hero in the 1970s. Before Rice, though, there was Marilyn Ross, who wrote a series of books featuring the moody Barnabas Collins, who doesn’t always like being a vampire and uses time travel to try and find the vanished love of his life. And the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer made monsters, ghouls and a succession of deadly but inept vampires an inescapable part of the American school landscape.
Though Meyer’s books are an easy and even addictive read, especially for teenagers, I’m not sure I approve of the very 21st century insistence that all monsters must be sensitive, angst-ridden creatures who must grapple with deeply existential questions. Edward Cullen does his best to be a vampire who observes the basic decencies — he’ll eat wildlife, but not humans, which is a bit like having the main character in Jaws turn vegetarian.
I know I’ll be standing in line with all the rest of the Twilight fans to buy Midnight Sun, the fifth volume in Meyer’s series. It’s fun watching Edward and Bella figure out the intricacies of vampire sex (a lot of heavy petting but no serious action for a long, long while in case the vampire’s other appetites go out of control), vampire-human birth and cross-species marriages.
I like the fact that Bella Swan’s other suitor is a werewolf with his own brand of searching questions about his nature. But allow me my moment of nostalgia, a wistful pang for the days when werewolves were merciless killers who howled at the moon and when vampires were the strutting bad boys of Gothic literature. What big teeth Dracula had back then.
