The Evolution of Vampires in Writing: The Reflection We Always Need
Vampires have always existed as reflections of both our fears and desires—an irony for monsters that don’t show up in mirrors. But it’s because of their constant evolution and metaphorical flexibility that vampire stories just can’t be killed.
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Before vampires were vampires, they were stories of any number of demons, witches, and monsters that consumed human blood in order to sustain their own monstrousness. In pre-modern medicine times, death was often sudden and usually inexplicable. Thus it was that, across cultures and continents, vampire-like monsters stalked the shadows waiting to drain us.
Stories were traded and shared as warnings. Some of the advice was practical (don’t go out alone at night), some less so (don’t sleep with women with bird feet), but all the tales and rituals associated with protection were efforts to carve out some semblance of control in a world that denied it.
Official vampire frenzy hit in the 1700s in Europe. Vampires were being blamed for a series of deaths. This led to bodies being exhumed to check for decay, corpses being staked or buried in elaborate ways to prevent their escape, and even the ritualistic digging up and blessing of remains years later. Eventually the Austrian Empress put an end to it by having her own physician investigate and declare it all nonsense, but not before people figured out how to make a profit off people’s fears that the restless dead might come back for them.
As the unexplainable became the more-or-less explainable in terms of health and sickness and death, vampires and vampire stories continued to shift, too. They became less about the struggle between life and death and more about the dangers of existing outside the bounds of religion and acceptable society. There’s a reason Bram Stoker’s titular Dracula can’t abide Christian symbolism, and that his attacks have so much in common with sex and desire. Xenophobia, too, came into play, with Dracula, the suspicious foreigner bringing the plague of his own vampirism to the shores of England, held back only by a noble band of Christian men.
What’s also notable in so many of the traditional vampire stories (and well into modern ones) is that female vampiric creatures almost always included an element of seduction or preying specifically on children. It was a way of blaming unnatural women for men’s sexual misconduct or for demonizing any woman who fell outside of traditional roles. If a woman can’t have children, she therefore becomes monstrous and eats them, instead. If a woman can’t have a husband of her own, she preys on other women’s husbands. Vampires shifted from purely reflecting fear of death to fearing deviance—anyone who fell outside the bounds of local social and religious mores could come back to destroy everything.
My favorite classic vampire story, Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, leans into homoeroticism and the idea that the vampire Carmilla might lead an innocent girl into unknown sexual deviance. Again, we come back to the threat of the unknown. But even more so than in Dracula, Carmilla exposes the allure of vampirism. Laura, the object of Carmilla’s desires, is intrigued and drawn to her. Carmilla’s intensity, while alarming, is also intoxicating. In the end, it turns into a typical vampire tale with a dramatic staking, but watching Laura grow closer to Carmilla and wondering if maybe she wouldn’t be happier as a vampire, after all, is a delicious precursor of vampire tales to come.
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The 20th century and beyond brought a renaissance of vampire storytelling. From true horror like I Am Legend and Salem’s Lot, to the seductively soapy Interview with the Vampire and the Sookie Stackhouse novels, to genre-bending masterpieces like Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Certain Dark Things, vampires broke free of their traditional roots. No longer merely agents of death, the monsters were rooted in desire, lust, and freedom—but always with consequences.
In my own book, Lucy Undying: A Dracula Novel, I couldn’t get past the infantilization and then vilification of Lucy Westenra in Dracula. When the “noble” men around Lucy try to save her from Dracula’s attacks, they do so without ever giving her information on what’s happening to her—nothing about either the cause of her mysterious maladies, or the numerous medical procedures they perform on her without consent. Lucy has no agency. And when the men end up failing her and she dies, they choose when her undead life must end, too, because it’s what they’ve decided she would have wanted.
Much as I love Dracula, its views of morality, sexual autonomy, and women’s roles in society are nearly as monstrous as Dracula himself. Every vampire story is, in a way, a conversation with all the stories that have already been told about them. Mine is just a more direct conversation with an existing book.
It’s an exciting time to be a fan—longtime or brand new—of books with bite. From the extremely courtly and courteous vampires of the Twilight Saga to the extremely not those things vampires of Jay Kristoff’s Empire of the Vampire, there’s a vampire story for everyone. Vampires as monsters? Vampires of El Norte, by Isabel Cañas. Cozy vampire romances? Jenna Levine’s My Roommate Is a Vampire or Ally Hazelwood’s Bride. Vampire fantasy? Rin Chupeco’s Silver Under Nightfall or Debora Harkness’s A Discovery of Witches. YA vampires? Enroll in Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy.
This fall also brings new books I can’t wait for, like Haley Piper’s All the Hearts You Eat featuring small town dread and guilt, Rachel Harrison’s quirky friendship romance So Thirsty, Julie C. Dao’s Now Comes the Mist starring Lucy Westenra in a lush historical setting, and Tigest Girma’s Immortal Dark, combining vampires with the dark academia trend. Next year, we have V.E. Schwab’s Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil to look forward to.
In this newest wave of vampire storytelling, it’s most thrilling to see that so many new voices are getting their turn to decide what, exactly, they see reflected back at them when they look at a vampire. After all, vampires change alongside us with every generation. We continue to evolve our stories around them as we evolve in our ideas of what is and isn’t monstrous.
So here’s to the vampires of old and all their moral baggage, and the vampires of today biting back. Crack open a spine and invite a new type of vampire in.
Check out Kiersten White’s Lucy Undying here:
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