Since I subjected you to my thoughts on vampires in my last post, I figured that I might as well share my specific thoughts on one of the two vampire-themed novels I mentioned: Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian. Note: mild spoilers follow.

This is quite the ambitious novel: it’s a loose modern retelling of Dracula from the perspective of several generations of historians who are hunting for clues through letters, diaries, and manuscripts. The book’s narrator is the latest in a long string of historians to get obsessed with everybody’s favorite Impaler; and as the plot develops, she of course begins to suspect that Dracula himself is still lurking about causing mischief.

The good:

• Dracula (and vampires in general) are way cooler when they’re portrayed as terrifyingly evil supernatural villains, not angst-ridden, sexually-ambiguous Anne Rice antiheroes. Fortunately, Kostova paints Dracula and his ilk as unabashedly Evil, while avoiding any hint of “I vant to zuck your blood” campiness.
• The story is told largely through the medium of letters and manuscript excerpts from the Middle Ages to the modern day. For the most part, it works, and adds a lot of flavor to the story.
• Lots of cool details about life in early Cold War Eastern Europe. Definitely more interesting than the usual European History sites (Paris, London, etc.).
• Plenty of clever references to Stoker’s Dracula.

The bad:

• An overly sappy Hollywood ending sort of spoils the wonderfully melancholy tone of the book’s first 600 pages. The book almost manages to be a heartbreaking story of love and loss, as the curse of Dracula takes its toll throughout the lives and deaths of several interesting characters, but the ending doesn’t quite work.
• Most of the letters and manuscripts use the same voice and writing style, even when they’re supposed to be different people writing in different decades. It doesn’t kill the story, but it requires some extra suspension of disbelief.
• Perhaps this is just a feature of the Historical Mystery genre, but the plot involved an awful lot of this: Protagonists go to Site A, where they find a clue leading to Site B. They go to Site B, where they find a clue leading to Site C. They go to Site C… etc. etc.

All that said, this was a fun book. It’s not summertime right now–I am, in fact, trapped somewhere in the ice-encrusted depths of Michigan winter–but this would be a perfect summer read. More involved than your typical pop fiction, but not too weighty. With vampires!

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Note: I don’t know where I’m going with this, but I feel like talking about vampires. You’ve been warned.

Call it the Year of the Undead, if you will. Thus far in 2007 I’ve read exactly two novels, and both of them were about vampires: Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, which was quite good, and Tim Powers’ The Stress of Her Regard, which was superb. I did not intentionally set out to read two books about the unquiet dead–I did not realize they had that subject in common until I cracked the covers–but I’m glad I did.

I’ve always found vampires to be fascinating, as far as unholy abominations go. I loved Stoker’s Dracula as a kid; Dracula served for years as the perfect model of the horror-story villain in my mind. He was cruel, vicious, and predatory; he was also patient, intelligent, and exceedingly clever. My favorite horror villains are those that simultaneously play on both existential and visceral fears, and Dracula did just that: on the one hand, he’s an unnatural, spiritually disturbing horror that casts doubt on everything we believe about life, death, and a benevolent God; and on the other hand, he’s a near-unstoppable physical threat that wants to punch holes in your throat with his teeth and suck the lifeblood from your body. (Other horror-story villains that fit this model are the creature from Alien, which I’ve discussed before, and Stephen King’s “It,” which manages to be both an alien cosmic horror and a child-eating evil clown that lives in the sewers.)

Dracula is a great, inhuman threat; he long ago shed what passed for his humanity. Stoker doesn’t do much to humanize Dracula, offering only a few tidbits through which to empathize with the vampire–most notably Dracula’s final smile (of relief, presumably) upon being staked and destroyed. Much has been made of the sexuality of Dracula, and while there’s certainly material in Dracula to fuel that interpretation, I never found it to be terribly interesting. Even if we subject Dracula to a lot of pop-Freudian analysis, the creature that emerges is most analogous to a sexual predator, and thus still belongs firmly in the category of Evil. That’s the way I liked my vampires: unrepentently evil, fated to be taken down in the end by a plucky band of heroes.

I avoided reading Anne Rice’s vampire novels for quite some time, knowing that they did away with the vampire-as-villain tradition and replaced it with undead who were angst-ridden, sexually ambiguous, and more or less sympathetic. When I finally got around to reading Interview with a Vampire, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. Interview, at least as I read it, retained (with lots of purple prose) the existential horror of the vampire condition but struggled with whether or not the vampire’s loss of humanity was a free choice or an inevitability. The vampire Lestat argues that the vampire’s undead state removes him from the reach of any moral limitations, whether they’re imposed by God or constructed by human society. The novel’s protagonist, the vampire Louis, feels the pull of this nihilistic philosophy but fights to retain his humanity. The idea that Lestat might be right–that vampires, removed from the possibility of grace, have no reason not to fully embrace their predatory instincts–lurks menacingly behind the story at every turn.

This is, behind the sometimes gratuitous and lurid surface of the story, the stuff of an old-fashioned morality play, and I found that it fit rather well with my vision of Dracula as an inhuman Evil. Dracula was a being who embraced the power of his vampiric state at the cost of his humanity and conscience. A vampire that refused to renounce his humanity would be, in a sense, not a true vampire at all, but a human being cursed with a particularly dreadful fate–not a villain.

Unfortunately, Anne Rice’s sympathies seemed to lie more with the nihilistic vampire Lestat and less with the tortured vampire Louis. The sequel to Interview stars Lestat, who is actually revealed to be a world-famous goth-rock star; I’ve never made it through this novel despite at least three attempts to finish it. My feelings about this were best expressed years ago by a Mars Hill Audio interviewee (I unfortunately forget his name) who remarked that without the backdrop of moral struggle, Rice’s vampires stopped being interesting characters and became ridiculous parodies of themselves: “superheroes with fangs,” I think may have been the phrase he used. At this point, we’ve moved well beyond the (intriguing, to me) stark morality of the traditional vampire and into some sort of post-modern silliness, and it’s here that I lose interest. In the end, I decided that while Rice’s take on vampires was a somewhat intriguing one, I really preferred the more black-and-white Evil Undead in the Stoker tradition.

Both of the books I mentioned above–The Historian and The Stress of Her Regard–feature vampires (or vampire-like creatures, in the case of Her Regard) that draw more heavily from the old-school Stoker-esque Dracula than from Rice’s morally-free undead. The Historian is the most straightforward about this, as it’s actually a book about Dracula. Her Regard features stranger and more complicated vampires, but they’re definitely alien and evil, at least by any human standard. To which I say: bring on the garlic, crucifixes, and wooden stakes! Those old-fashioned morally Evil vampires always were the most interesting kind, and I’m glad to see them cropping up after a decade or two of morally ambiguous undead.

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I’m having a bit too much fun with LibraryThing’s UnSuggester, which analyzes your book preferences and recommends books that you probably wouldn’t like. From the main page:

Bring on the guilty reading pleasures!

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I thoroughly enjoy stories set in the post-apocalyptic genre. Whether it’s nuclear MAD, alien invasion, killer plagues, or any one of the many other likely triggers of the End of the World, I enjoy watching the End unfold. Plucky bands of survivalists, roving mutant beasts, radiation-blanketed wastelands–it’s all good.

And so it was that I was pleased recently to stumble across a behemoth 1980s post-apocalyptic epic that I’d somehow managed to miss–Robert McCammon’s Swan Song, a nearly 1000-page beast of a novel charting a classic Good vs. Evil struggle in the radioactive wastelands of post-WWIII America. McCammon is one of those authors who is done a severe injustice by the propensity of his publisher to adorn his novels with the sorts of cheesy-horror cover illustrations that you roll your eyes at in passing on your way through the Horror section of the bookstore. I’d previously read one novel of his–Boy’s Life, which I enjoyed and have mentioned here before.

I plunked down a few bucks for a charmingly-tattered used copy of Swan Song. I started reading it on the car ride home from the bookstore, and I finished at 2:30 am this morning.

I enjoyed it greatly, and so I’ll talk about it a bit. Swan Song came out a couple years after Stephen King’s The Stand (another 1000-page post-apocalyptic epic from the 80s) and bears quite a few similarities to King’s book; McCammon acknowledges the clear influence, but maintains that his story is a unique one. (I think he’s right.)

The setup is a classic post-apocalyptic scenario: Cold War tension culminates in a civilization-destroying nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States. The first 100 or so pages of Swan Song introduce us to the assorted characters who will survive (through luck or providence), and who will soon become the heroes and villains of the post-apocalyptic world. In “the first shall be last” fashion, McCammon chooses some unlikely Heroes to survive the nukes and save the world from evil: an insane homeless woman, a washed-out show wrestler, and the young daughter of a “trailer trash” stripper. Those destined to become Villains hail from the opposite end of society: a respected retired military officer and a middle-class teenage boy who’s creepily obsessed with a video game he’s creating.

McCammon really hits his stride once the nukes hit and the various characters of the story begin their wanderings across blasted North America. There’s a really tense and brutal fight for survival in the depths of a Moria-style wrecked survivalist bunker where the colonel and teenage kid (Colonel Macklin and Roland, respectively) found refuge when the bombs hit; McCammon charts their degeneration from civilized humans to survival-obsessed monsters well. The heroes, meanwhile, begin to slowly converge on each other, running into a slew of inspired post-apocalyptic dangers along the way–mutated animals, a band of insane-asylum refugees roving across the Midwest, nuclear winter, the ruins of New York, and many others. And as they wander, they become aware that Something Else is roaming the wasteland as well–a clearly supernatural and thoroughly evil shapechanger who preys on the survivors, sowing death and despair wherever he travels. The Man with the Scarlet Eye (as he’s known) bears obvious similarities to The Stand‘s Randall Flagg–a demonic being of unclear origins who’s up to no good. His counter is a girl named Swan (the trailer-trash daughter), who has the supernatural ability to heal and restore the land. Macklin and Roland assemble a Mad Max-style army of armored vehicles and begin rampaging across the Midwest; the Good Guys eventually meet up and begin to organize the survivors; and the Man with the Scarlet Eye sets out to kill Swan through human agents.

The stage is set for a Good vs. Evil showdown, and that’s exactly what happens. For all the horror of its setting, Swan Song plays out like a classic fantasy or fairy tale–the Good are really good, the Bad Guys are really bad, and you just know that the heroes will pull through against impossible odds in the end. (If you’re having trouble figuring out who the Bad Guys are, McCammon helps you out a few hundreds pages in by having one of the villains don an actual WW2 Nazi uniform, if that gives you an idea of the sort of moral drama we’re dealing with.)

So yeah, it’s a very fun story. Some parts were more interesting than others–the pace bogs down a bit in the third quarter of the novel as McCammon sets the stage for the final showdown–but overall it kept me turning the pages. By using nukes to destroy the world (instead of a plague, as King did), McCammon is able to play with a lot of vintage post-apocalyptic tropes; everything from full-scale battles between heavily-armed factions to two-headed mutant beasts to a band of feral gone-native teenage boys crops up at some point. And the final confrontation is pretty good, although at least one Big Plot Revelation is clear to the reader several hundred pages before it actually happens. The book’s main weakness, in my mind, is McCammon’s tendency to get melodramatic and overly sentimental at points, especially once all the Good Guys meet up and start building their Happy Friendly Community of Goodness. Some scenes are so transparently and artificially set up for maximum emotional punch that they lose their impact. And an awful lot of the friendly people (NPCs, if you will) encountered by the Good Guys seem to be repetitive and annoying variations of the same Gruff But Lovable Down-Home Country Folk template.

But who can complain too much about the minor weaknesses of a novel that gets so much right? Swan Song won’t be displacing Tolstoy anytime soon, but it’s a fun and fast-moving story that’s worth reading if you’re a fan of the genre. It’s put me in the mood to dig out a few other good post-apocalyptic tales and give them a re-read. If you’ve got any recommendations on that front, let me know; otherwise, just keep watching the skies and keep your powder dry.

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I happen to be quite fond of Halloween, and each year as October 31 approaches I try to single out a few appropriately spooky books, games, and movies to enjoy. This year I sort of missed the seasonal opportunity and didn’t settle on any truly good scary movies. No good terrifying game surfaced, despite my initial plans to revisit the very creepy Undying; and when Michele and I ventured out to rent a scary Halloween movie, even that went awry–the movie we chose was the unfortunate Dragonfly, which was about as scary as… uh… something that isn’t scary at all.

But I figure it’s never too late to try to get into the spirit of Halloween, even if the dread night of terror has technically passed me by. So I’ve started re-reading Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, which stands out as one of the few horror novels that has actually managed to creep me out fairly badly. I remember very few of the details from my initial reading of it years ago in college, but I vividly recall getting quite spooked reading it alone in the apartment late one night while my roommates were out on dates with girls or something.

The decision of which Halloween Book to read this year wasn’t easy. My initial instinct was to read some classic scary short stories (such beasts ranking among my favorite type of literature) but I was in the mood for something a bit more involved this time around. The choice boiled down to two books: Stephen King’s It or Straub’s Ghost Story. Both books are considered Andy Bookshelf Classics. But I opted to go with Straub, since his work gives off a somewhat classier Hawthorne-esque vibe that fits my mood at the moment. If I’m feeling ambitious after Ghost Story, I’ll take Mr. King up on those 1,000+ pages of It. We shall see.

I’m still a bit disappointed that I missed Halloween; reading an epic tale of terror and damnation as Thanksgiving and Christmas approach seems a little wrong somehow. At least Walpurgisnacht is only about a half-year away. I’ll be better prepared when it rolls around.

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Kender fans, rejoice! If you just can’t get enough of the world’s most annoying halfling, and you’ve got the cash, you can now treat yourself to a leather-bound, gilt-edged compilation of the Dragonlance trilogy.

OK, I’m smirking at it. But hey, if Dragonlance floats your boat, go for it–I’ve certainly spent more money on less significant cultural artifacts. But personally, I’m not sure if it really feels right to move the Dragonlance novels out of the comfortably cheap, read-’em-in-an-afternoon Elmore-illustrated paperback format into this sort of artificial sophistication.

If I sound like a literary snob, I really don’t mean to. I mean, I wanted to be Raistlin the Brooding Angst-Ridden Archmage With Godlike Powers just as much as any other teenage male, and those Dragonlance novels are right here on the bookshelf next to me. But this reminds me of the day a few years ago I stumbled across The Annotated Dragonlance Chronicles at the bookstore. Annotated? The Dragonlance trilogy? Annotated editions are for, like, James Joyce and the Bible and stuff. What exactly are they… annotating?

So then: up for a little literary challenge today? I dare you to provide a scholarly annotation for the following excerpt from Dragons of Autumn Twilight:

The slug, sensing success, slithered forward, dragging its pulsating gray body through the door. Goldmoon cast a fearful glance at the huge monster, then ran to Tanis. Riverwind stood over them, protectively.

“Get away!” Tanis said through clenched teeth.

Goldmoon grasped his injured hand in her own, praying to the goddess. Riverwind fit an arrow to his bow and shot at the slug. The arrow struck the creature in the neck, doing little damage, but distracting its attention from Tanis […]

Raistlin ran to Fizban’s side. “Now is the time for the casting of the fireball, Old One,” he panted.

Have at it!

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Why, you ask, is Hawthorne ranked among the greatest of American writers? Because he finds room in his prose for quotes like this:

“Where is it, then?” asked Hilda. “I never peeped into it.”
“Wait, and it will open for you,” replied her friend. “The chasm was merely one of the orifices of that pit of blackness that lies beneath us, everywhere. The firmest substance of human happiness is but a thin crust spread over it, with just reality enough to bear up the illusive stage scenery amid which we tread.”

From The Marble Faun. Simply glorious.

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