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Stephen HumphreyStephen Humphrey is a freelance writer and journalist who has lived in Toronto since 1994...
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Canadian horror (2), Evolve, horror (4), Nancy Kilpatrick (2), vampiresIt’s hard to find vampire content this side of Sesame Street that doesn’t have something to do with sex.
Take the recent, racy cover of Rolling Stone featuring the unclad, blood-spattered cast of HBO’s True Blood, arranged like they’re about to commence a standing three-way.
Or take dark fantasy writers Claude Lalumiére and Gemma Files, who feel they can do little more than summarize their vampire stories with a mixed crowd milling around the bookstore where they’re launching the vampire fiction anthology, Evolve.
Files’ synopsis of “When I’m Armouring My Belly” resembles an adult content warning more than a plot description. She sums up her story as “fairly porny”.
“I thought maybe there was a part I could read that was maybe less porny than the rest,” she says. “But no.”
Files’ story chronicles the day of a present day “Renfield” – a mortal who works for and enables the undead, hoping for a piece of immortality. Files refers to the bug-eating thrall of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but her protagonist is more masochistic groupie than gibbering lackey.
Her vampires are not so much haughty remote, cape-wearing lords but cruel hipsters that resemble the fangless social vampires of real life.
Such analogs are the point of Evolve, its editor explains. Veteran vampire fiction writer Nancy Kilpatrick pressed its all-Canadian cast of authors to imagine how vampires would occupy the 21st century.
She feels the book’s 24 contributors stepped up to the challenge.
“They all managed to come up with something that worked,” she relates. “I’m pretty amazed.”
Evolve began with a high-class editor’s problem.
In 2009 Kilpatrick co-edited Tesseracts 13, a supernaturally-themed installment of the flagship Canadian spec fiction anthology. When that collection’s focus narrowed to human-faced, psychological horror, seven excellent vampire stories became homeless.
The problem was solved when Tesseracts publishers, Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy, green-lighted a vampire book.
Evolve’s authors moved their creatures into cramped apartments, picket-fenced suburban homes and high-rise condos with hot and cold running humans, where they agonized over jobs, mortgages and what to tell the neighbours.
Several of them were unmistakeably middle class.
None of this surprised Kilpatrick, who’s been watching vampire trends since childhood.
“Times change,” she says. “[These days] people are living in a world where they have a car and a television and a washer. People are writing about what they know.”
What people know theses days is urban life. Whether Evolve’s vampires play school sports, throw dinner soirées or play guitar with demonic skill, they live in cities, rubbing shoulders and fangs with urban folk.
Popular novels, film and TV now also like to mainstream their vamps. Consider the civic-minded Eric Northman of Charlaine Harris’ (and HBO’s) True Blood and eternal schoolboy Edward Cullen of Stephanie Meyer’s optioned-out Twilight saga.
Kilpatrick, who claims “there are some movies I’ve missed. But not many,” has kept an eye on these new franchises and their long-toothed heartthrobs.
Both franchises beg the question just how much vampires can integrate before they cease being monsters.
True Blood deftly manages to explore human themes like desire, addiction, exploitation and prejudice with raunchy humour and otherworldly menace.
Twilight, however, with its epic following of young women (and dedicated cougars) features rather more nice dates than monster fights.
Does such mainstreaming risk defanging vampires in fiction?
Yes and no, Kilpatrick says.
“Edward has been described as the good boyfriend, the one who you hope you’ll meet,” she says. “There is a danger with taking things this way.”
Nonetheless, she feels the archetype of the predator that preys on humans will never completely lose its bite.
“We’re looking at something that’s embedded in the human psyche,” she maintains.
Evolve features no less than three mixed marriages, but even those are fraught with dangers.
Also, while several of the book’s stories appeal for understanding of different and undead, things end badly, often as not for those taken in by a vampire’s seductively human facade.
“You should never trust a vampire, bottom line, no matter how nice and friendly they are, because they are vampires,” Kilpatrick says. “This is not a being that you want to take into your heart and mind fully.”
Kilpatrick and her publishers do, however, hope that Evolve will entice at least some hearts and minds across the border, since the book now has U.S. distribution.
Another anthology is in the works, Kilpatrick says, which may add some bi-national muscle to Canadian talent.
The vampire, says American-born Kilpatrick, has legs in all countries.
“The vampire has been there always in every culture of the world,” she says. “I don’t think that we’re every going to see the end of that.”