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| Actor Jack Palance as Dracula |
Vampires
are always a fascination. They become popular and then people get tired of the
films and books. In the 1930s you had the Dracula films. They faded after a
while. Then, years later, Twilight came
along. Despite its immense popularity, especially with the young, a lot of
writers hooted and jeered both at the films and at the books. (I only saw one of
the films and read one of the books and thought they were, really, not that
bad.) But vampires bounce back. Not surprising, since they are the undead! You
can't kill vampires, and the genre seems undying as well!
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| One of Buffy's many vampire enemies |
At
that time in my writing career I had not done a vampire story. I decided to
give it a shot, maybe because Buffy was
still on TV and Twilight was all the
rage and because of the fascination vampires pose. For example, what would it be
like to live forever if the prices of doing so was to kill people so you could
renew your eternal life? A vampire character in one of my later stories laments to her
mortal boyfriend, "How can God let something like this [becoming a
vampire] happen to us and then hold us responsible for it?" Maybe this is
a question we ask whether we believe in divinity or not. How can we be morally
responsible when we weren't asked to be born, don't understand why we do
unethical things, and feel we're doing wrong but can't help it? These questions
are perpetual. Maybe that's why the vampire myth is so popular. They cope with
these questions as a point of their very existence.
And
there is the question of ethics. Are vampires completely evil? The old ones,
like Dracula, were. They were evil creatures driven by a desire for blood and
had no good traits whatsoever. The novel Dracula
and my favorite vampire movies, Taste the
Blood of Dracula and the made-for-TV movie of Dracula with Jack Palance
playing the lead role, presented this sort of vampire: evil, driven, with no redeeming virtues
whatsoever. But soon Ann Rice's Interview
With a Vampire came along and we saw conflicted, anguished, morally
ambiguous but not evil vampires. The same was true for some of the characters
in Buffy. These things play into my
first vampire story, "Prima Noctis."
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| Heston in The War Lord |
Prima Noctis means "first
night" and refers to the idea that a nobleman in medieval times had the right to
take a peasant girl's virginity to "begin her life." This custom is essential to the
plot of an old movie called The War Lord with
Charlton Heston; if you saw Braveheart,
it is a part of that film as well. Now, I must play myth-buster here. Prima noctis is completely fictitious.
Never happened, not in the Middle Ages or anytime. It is something modern people
made up. Ancient kings used to accuse other kings of it, usually to get their
people up in arms and on their side when an invasion threatened them: "If these people conquer us, they will
take your virgin daughters on their wedding night!" they would say. But it
was an untruth. Still, it makes for good stories.
In
my story, an English noble named Berwyk rules an area of Scotland and has instituted
prima noctis. The Scots respond by
not getting married. After three years with no weddings, however, the people
tell them there will be a marriage and he will take his privilege. They have a great feast. The young people are married, but Berwyk notices a lot of the
Scots are wearing necklaces of garlic (a local custom he had not noticed, he
thinks). And the married couple look a bit a pale, as if they had not been out
in the sun. The wedding takes place at moonrise. His servant-woman/mistress
warns him about the Scots: “They have one foot in the
world and one in the kingdom of darkness. They dance with the dead and kiss the
very Devil’s ass.” Berwyk laughs at her
When
he takes the woman up to his chamber, he quickly finds out she is a vampire. She
bears her fangs and, he sees, her vampire bridegroom has gotten into the house
and killed and feasted on the blood of Amaryllis, the serving woman who tried
to warn him. The Scots have set him up.
Berwyk
knows about vampires and flees to his room, where he has, on the wall, a
crucifix and a picture of the Virgin. Vampires will flee from the cross and
from other holy objects. To his horror, those items are gone from his bed
chamber where he hoped to enjoy the body of the woman married that day. The
Scots have sneaked into his room and removed them, leaving him at the mercy of
the vampire couple. He fights them, but his weapons are useless. The bride he
had hoped to "swyve" ends up not with hymeneal blood on her body but
with his as she kills him and drains his vital life. Prima noctis turns out to be something the English knight never
dreamed it would be.
Ethics
come into play in this story. Vampires are evil, but in this case they are
doing good by serving as the instruments of justice. Are right and wrong so
easy to define? Vampire tales, at least the newer ones, suggest they are not.
In the yin and yang of the universe, there is a bit of evil in good and a bit
of good in evil.
The
story appeared in a journal called Infinite
Windows, closed down now, with no archive.
If
you want to read one of my vampire stories, I would suggest The Angel from the Dead from the (also shut down) journal Roar and Thunder. This journal maintains an archive and you can read the story there. I'll have a new vampire novel, Sinfonia: First Notes on the Lute, coming out next year.
For a Christmas stocking stuffer I would suggest ShadowCity. A dark world, an unwilling savior, an old lover who follows her in and gets caught up in unbelievable danger, and a maenad who is a slave fight the darkness, which has grown to dangerous levels. In a dark world, the light within is all you have.
For additional titles, see
my Writer's Page. 
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