Noir goût

About a year ago I picked up a copy of John Marks’ Fangland because it was a staff selection of the good people at Malaprop’s Bookstore in Asheville (www.malaprops.com), and because it looked like a light hearted satire, in which a fictional version of 60 Minutes (called The Hour in the novel) is taken over by vampires. I was expecting a kind of Network News with corpses and fangs.
Corpses it has. Fangs, despite the title, no. And though it’s not without satire, it’s not a comedy. More, Marks seems to think he’s writing a real novel (as a opposed to another vampire book).
Loosely, it’s a retelling of Dracula. The main character is Evangeline Harker, and she stands in for both Jonathan and Mina Harker. There’s also a Renfield character and character’s who can be loosely associated with Seward and Van Helsing. Dracula’s three wives, whose attempt to feed on Jonathan Harker make for that novel’s most genuinely frightening moment also have counterparts in the form of three brothers who are shown vividly but mysteriously; like their sources, they provide a sharp, frightening menace to the novel early on.
Like the novel Dracula, the book is told in a scrapbook epistolary style of diaries, letters, journals, and, because this is set in the 21st century, email (why no blog?). Evangeline is an assistant producer sent to the province of Transylvania in Rumania to interview a man who claims to be the head of a crime syndicate that has operated since the cold war. He turns out to be the novel’s version of Dracula, named Ion Torgu, an odd enough name that I figured it was probably an anagram; best I could do was “noir goût,” which would translate into “dark taste,” a fair description of the character and what he represents.
What Marks borrows especially effectively from Bram Stoker is that he brings the monster onstage early, still trying to act human, than, after Evangeline escapes his clutches, keeps him in the background.
The most effective thing the novel reinvents the vampire without any of the standby clichés. Torgu, for instance, collects burnt, ruined debris, including holy relics. Why is not entirely clear, except that it seems to be the type of thing a vampire would do.
Because it’s difficult to read Stoker’s novel with fresh eyes, most modern readers probably miss how mysterious the nature and extent of Dracula’s powers are throughout that novel, and this, too, is something Marks borrows effectively. Torgu can and does pass his vampirism on to our heroine—but just how is a little mysterious.
Equally mysterious—but not in a good way-- is the reasoning behind why two members of the Hour staff plan an explosion to call attention to Torgu’s evil. Not to kill him, but, apparently, to make people believe he’s trying to kill them. I could not figure out if their thinking was supposed to be infected, or if this was supposed to seem like a heroic, last ditch act.
All of this is set in a studio nearby Ground Zero. Marks makes effective use of that setting, though frankly I wish he’d avoided. The devastation of ground zero is one of the things that has attracted Torgu to NY. But if he’s attracted to mass death, wouldn’t Iraq or parts of Africa have been more interesting to him?
He also has some apparent plan to infect the world with his vampirism through a broadcast, though to what end I’m not certain.
Still, it contains chilling scenes. Everyone who works for the Hour starts to hear place names whiere slaughters have happened being whispered. Evangeline finds that writing starts appearing on her skin as the vampirism takes hold of her. And the most chilling, one of the senior Hour correspondents is seduced by Torgu, and slowly turns into a shade.

Dark Corners: As I Was saying...

As I was saying, Brandon Massey's Dark Corners imports wholesale aspects of Steven King's Salem Lot: a rural town with a tradition limited contact with the outside world, a dark evil related to the town's past, a young man whose move to the town stirs things up, the quick spread of the vampire disease.

Each of these elements is a horror cliche by now.

What works for Steven King that doesn't work quite so well for Massey; King has absolute contempt for the small mindedness of this town. The evil of vampirism reflects the evil within the town itself.

Brandon Massey likes his people and his town, for the most part. Vampirism here does not represent the evil of slavery which brought it on the town; vampirism represents the desire for revenge.

This is a great idea. I wish he'd have done more with it. Instead, the theme he siezes upon is the father / son dynamic. David Works it out with his father, Kyle fails to work it out with his father, and Kahlil very effectively works it out with his. There's something to it: the wanton siring of vampires by vampires is an image of fathers wantonly siring sons.

Too earnest.

Where I really fell off the boat, though, was with the handling of Nia James and the romantic subplot. In a subplot unrelated to the main plot, Nia is being pursued by an abusive man from her past, Colin Morgan. Nia, who can repeatedly shoot a friend turned vampire until he's incapacitated, lets Colin get away AFTER he has captured and abused her Grandmother.

Here I see an author manipulating his plot to make certain plot points. It just doesn't work.

What I would have liked: Diallo is compelling. I wish his son had been equally so. I wish we were made to feel that his thirst for revenge, and that he were almost right to have it.

He leaves himself room for a sequal, which I expect to see. I hope Lisha, Kyles mommy, shows up and turns out to be unextectedly complex and not at all squishy good, and that Kyle intends to do evil but gets sidetracked into being less than evil. After he eats David Hunter. That's what I hope.

Society of S: A Vampire Novel with Teeth (sans fangs)

Ever notice how little horror there is in most horror novels? Stephen King and Anne Rice both can creep me out, but Rice does it with the eroticism of her blood drinking scenes, and King does it by patiently launching me into the familiar, and but then reminding me of how frightening the familiar really is. At his best –Hearts in Atlantis, Carrie– it’s the familiar world (the sheer anger between Bobby and his single mother) that is most frightening.

Susan Hubbard’s Society of S is not a horror novel, though it is a vampire novel. Instead, it is a coming of age story, of a girl who also happens to be a vampire.

Every teenager at some point must have felt that she is a monster, or that members of her family are. What if it were true? This novel is a contemporary search for personal identity. Ariella Montero is a post-modern teenager who comes to suspect that her father may be a vampire;–but if he is, what does that make her? Like any contemporary teenager, she turns to the internet for answers, which of course open up new questions.
Ari’s relationship with her father is at the heart of the first part of this novel, and it’s a relationship that has been imagined fully and uniquely, so we get the sense of sitting in on someone’s living room. It is fun to listen in on Ariella and her father discussing the greats, as for instance Ariella goes from dismissing Poe to seeing depth in his writing, and then coming to believe that Poe himself may have been a vampire.

The writing throughout is terse, but suggestive of a wider world, like some of the best young adult fiction. (This is a compliment. Good YA writing is usually terse but emotionally resonant, suggestive of detail rather than fully described. There is none of the "fat" I have learned to expect in vampire novels. Every novel I’ve read by King or Rice would have profited from an editor willing to consign half of it to the eternal hellfire of delete.)

After her best (and only) friend is killed and reanimated as a vampire (who her father sends back to the grave), Ari leaves home in shock and heads south in search of her mother, who seems to have been the free spirit her father is not. When she has to defend herself on the road, she does so in a way that ends any question about her true nature.

The "Society of S" turns out to refer to one particular group of vampires, Sanguinists, who believe in living in harmony with humans. Her father is one such, and he lives on a blood substitute while he works on a biotech solution that will ease the craving. Tut the narrative suggests that there are many other sects, each with a different view of the proper moral and ethical codes for dealing with humans and other blood suckers, including those who, like the vamps in Blade, believe that humans should be grown as chattel. Ari’s father has been working for a company trying to find a biotech solution to the need for blood; her mother, when she shows up, has been searching for a naturalpathic direction. There is a lot of territory available a follow up, and maybe two or three after that.

The father-daughter relationship suggests comparison to Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian. That’s unfortunate. I came away from each chapter of Kostova’s compelling novel thinking, "Wow, this writer had a really good liberal arts education!" It’s a fully re-imagined tour-de-force reworking of the Dracula story. S has no such ambition. The novels it reminded me of more were Octavia Butler’s last novel, Fledgling and Charlaine Harris’s first Stookie Stackhouse novel, Dead until Dark, in that it’s the story of slowly awakening to a sense of self-in-the-world. This is the novel of a young person discovering herself for the first time, and I enjoyed discovering it with her.

Though I enjoyed this novel, I wasn’t going to blog about it at first, because I didn’t see the connection to the Post-Human. At its core, as I said above, "it is a coming of age story, of a girl... vampire."

Think about that.

The coming of age plot is a quintessentially humanistic plot. But of a vampire? And what about having to survive on a biotech solution? Or viewing humanity as farm animals? These are questions of posthumanity, of rethinking the nature of "human nature," of relying on prosthetic blood, of facing questions of extended life verging on immortality. I was involved by the "humanity" of the writing –a young person learning about art, herself, and society-- that I overlooked these themes.

Having seen them, I now want to see how the writer will develop the "can’t we all get along?" questions that come up when it becomes clear that Ari and her family were separated by and are united against social forces about human/vampire. (Note: In an interview at Burried. com, the author said that she was already working on the sequel, which would develop darker political themes. I’ll be watching.)

Only slightly about Sookie Stackhouse...

I’ve read five of the Sookie Stackhouse Southern Vampire Mystery series, so there must be a lot in them I find compelling and likeable and there is. If I mainly wanted to comment on them in this post, I would point out that Shreveport and the surrounding area is 40%+ African-American, but that none of the major recurring characters in the series are. Off the top of my head, the most important African American character I can think of is the black man whose death in the second book, Dead in Dallas, gets going one of the two major plot lines (having to do with a private sex club). I would acknowledge that this represents the segregated reality of the rural south, in which neighborhood bars, such as Merlottes, tend to cater primarily to either a white or a black clientelle, but that the segregation is not all that complete. I would also acknowledge that white writers often have to tread carefully, because of the abysmal history American letters have in imagining the Africanistic resident, but that I think her novels would be richer if she would give it an earnest try.

I have no intention of stopping there, however. Give me a moment to get my cyberpodium out of my flash drive.

In the best and worst tradition of literary criticism, I’m going to throw out discussion of everything I like about the Sookie Stackhouse books–Sookie herself, her struggle with the hypermasculine subcultures that thrive in the rural south, the character Sam, and the dry, wry wit that infuses these novels–to focus a sec to look at a marginal consideration in her novels: race.

Right off the bat, I feel two immediate responses forming:

1. One is the sort of roll my eyes "there you go again" response. Geez, not everything is about race. It’s easy to complain about what a writer doesn’t do. No writer can do everything, especially while working in a genre related field. Why not look at what she does do?
2. But she does deal with figures of race, but she denaturalizes them. There are vampires, fairies, werecritters, and less common other supernaturals, who form coalitions and subcultures very much analogous to race.

From a critical perspective, the second is more compelling, since an argument that says "for once, would you just focus on the positive?" is unproductive. That is not to say it’s more or less correct. It is important to note, though, that the two arguments are mutually exclusive. If I want to argue that she deals inventively with race, why should I as a reader want to excuse the lack of a fully realized Africanistic presence in the day to day world? Why can’t the novels do both?

I think this points to a problem with current discussions on race. Let me draw this out for a moment, and then explain how it relates to the post-human.

Race and Humanism: A Digression
Race, as such, is in part a creation of the humanistic enterprise. To understand this, look at Thomas Jefferson, a founder of American humanism (he edited a version of the New Testament to cut all the miracles out of it, making less a religious than a humanist document). What does EVERYONE know about Jefferson these days?

1. He wrote the declaration of Indepence, which gave voice to the spirit of liberty that would find a home in the abolitionist movement: "All men are created equal..."
2. He kept slaves, believed in Negro inferiority, and tried to prove it in his Notes on the State of Virginia.

How can both things be true? Because the same spirit that wanted to improve humanity also saw it as important to recognize gradations of difference in quality between human communities. Humanism is in part a project of social hygiene.

To put this another way, the basis for racism and the opposition to it share a cultural ancestry. Now lets flashforward to the future. Two responses to the historical and continuing discourse on race in America.
1. Race is a myth, with no biological reality. We would all do well to ignore it.
2. Race is a social reality, silently embedded, throughout most of American history, in the concept of "American." We need to discuss race, because avoiding discussions of race devalues the experience of black Americans. (W.E.B. Dubois said it well a century ago, talking about growing up in a majority white culture: "One always feels this twoness, two warring souls, black and American, in one dark body...")
Deny the first, you open the door to fascism. Deny the second, you get policies whose effect (sometimes by design) is to limit economic and educational mobility to black people (I’m thinking of the June 2007 Supreme Court cases which seem to disallow considerations of race in the college admission process.)

Class: A Digression Digresses
In practical, political terms, one response (one I hope most colleges will be using) is to focus less on race than on class. If the goal is economic mobility, than we consider factors such as high performance in a low performing school, and relative performance compared against families of similar income levels. Offer help to enough poor people, and a disproportionate percent of the people helped are going to be African American. As a strategic response, I completely support this.

But what does this move signify? We are at the end of a 400 year period which sought to "naturalize" race lines. At the same time, class alignment has always been downplayed. In these terms, a coming together of diverse groups along shared class interests is a "cyborgian" construction.

Pointing out the shared affinity of folks along class lines is always interesting in American culture, in part because class is less visible in America than, for instance, race or gender. But I am unwilling to replace one kind of essentialism with another. But to "naturalize" it would to an extent to "essentialize" it.

(By the way, even assuming that colleges follow this route, I'll await some evidence that the students who are so recruited recognized in each other a sense of shared class interest. )

Enter the Cyborg.
I’ve covered this before on this blog. but Donna Haraway’s pre-eminent example of the social cyborg was the definition "Women of Color," one which cut across class and race lines to identify a common interest in reforming American institutions to be more inclusive.

Enter the Posthuman.
The human being is defined in humanistic discourse by his organic unity, his reflective nature, his progressive maturity. I could support this by citing Matthew Arnold and F. R. Leavis, but believe me, that would get tedious. –Maybe another day.
The posthuman is artificial, inorganic; he or she or it interupts the organic unity of the social body or social text.
Sookie Stackhouse is Posthuman
in her "freakish" abilities to violate the unity of other individuals; she is not a self-contained, unified entity; parts of those around her "leak" into her.
Vampires are Posthuman
at leasst in the Sookie Stackhouse novels, and most contemporary vampire novels, for mostly the same reasons as Sookie is. (Dracula is not post-human; he’s just an aristocratic monster.)

Here’s the point (and I do have one)....

The Posthuman (as I’m using it) is not utopian or essentialist. It is improvisatory, and provisional. It respects the idea of science and progress, but is as likely to lead to error, because it has no stranglehold on the truth. It allows for the recognition of class, sex, and race distinctions, devalues rigid alignment along these lines. This is a perspective we need to discuss race intelligently these days.

Therefore...
The Sookie Stackhouse series is not leading the way towards the posthuman, but it is participating in the evolution of same. Assuming a posthuman perspective (which believe me, does NOT come naturally to me) gives me a way of seeing what I like, and why, though I like Harris’ figures of race (vampirism, lycanthropy, etc.), I want more.

Sookie Stackhouse and the Post-human thing.

I’ve become a big fan of the Sookie Stackhouse Southern Vampire Mystery series written by Charlaine Harris; I’ve read five of them, including the most recent All Together Dead I appreciate the down-homeliness of them. They are set in small town Louisiana (Shreveport is the nearby big town they talk about, and NewOrleans is the nearby big city most of the characters have been to). At the center of the novels is Sookie herself, a young, idealistic telepath who works in a bar, Merlotts. Bright but uneducated, she has the mixture of primness and sexual longing, self-sufficiency and boyfriend-centicity, curiosity and lack of education that seems very familiar. Whether or not I know anyone very much like Sookie in these respects, Harris makes me believe I do, because Sookie is real. Her brother Jason, a sulky, headstrong, adult stuck in adolescence (he goes through brief meaningless affairs throughout most of the novels, then abruptly marries at the start of All Together Dead) also has a mixture of traits which make him familiar.

As an telepath working in a bar, Sookie has a less than idealized view of her fellow man. When she meets the vampire Bill Compton, she finds that she can’t read the minds of vampires, and that alone provides reason for her to fall for him. A civil war veteran who became a vampire shortly after the war, her attraction to him is initially explained because she finds his silent mind to be such a relief, but it seems to be more than that: here at last is a man whose inner life isn’t completely open to her, who she can wonder about and even fantasize about Bill’s local "sheriff," Eric, a centuries old viking warrior who still looks like a young man. They both are subjects of the Queen of Louisiana.

The way the two are developed in the early books, we’re invited to like Bill and distrust Eric, and for the most part I do. It has bothered me over the course of the series to see Eric playing a larger role in the novels and in Sookie’s life than Bill, but I understand the reasons why, I think. Bill was created against type, as a down to earth southern guy who happens to be a vampire. Take away all that brooding from Anne Rice’s Louis (a ridiculous thought, I know, but bear with me), and you’d have someone close to Bill, in that his take on the world is essentially humanistic. Such characters are hard to develop over the course of a series. Eric, by contrast, is a Nordic Lestat, someone who has a sense of honor about dealing with humans, but whose view of the world is basically vampire-centric.

Nonetheless, at their core, these novels are the bildungsroman of a twenty-something woman discovering herself and the world. Sookie time and again resists the lure of the vampire world, hates it even, but keeps getting drawn into it.

The southern setting works for this series in part because Harris slowly unfolds meaningful analogs between her "supes" (as vampires, werewolves, werepanthers, and fairies are collectively know) and the social landscape of the south. Aren’t the old vampires, with their pomp, self-importance, and fierce defense of the same, more than a bit like the old money which still controls much of the land, and remains ridiculously caste-conscious in its worldview?
The weres, with their pack mentality, are based loosely on biker culture; they have their own bars, their own packs, tight social rules, and once a month, they go roaming together.

For my specific concerns, looking at the "post-human,"there are several interesting things. By focusing on these alternative forms of social definition, her vampires and weres provide a mirror which implicitly (though never directly) calls into question the usefulness and universality of the existing class, race divisions in the south–this against a social setting that has spilled untold money and blood toward the end of presenting its stratifications as right and good and natural. –This ain’t nothing.

Then there’s the case of Sookie herself. Early in the series, she sees her telepathy as a kind of disability; that’s the force it has had in her life (in terms of her inability to enjoy easy socialization) and in the way people treat her. She’s considered a bit of a freak. Even as she learns to control it, he power of telepathy moves her away from mainstream society and deeper into small, rigid subcultures with their own rules and mores, none of whom fully welcome her. This is interesting stuff.

The character Quinn is a late addition who has played a major role in the last two novels, and though he’s an interesting character, he’s a bit too much like a traditional romantic hero in a romance novel. Strong, assertive, physically perfect, Quinn is a were with a dark past as (we learn in All Together Dead) a gladiator of sorts in games the supes used to sponsor.
Creating a character who offers an alternative to the Bill / Sookie / Eric triangle (her boss and a few others have also expressed interest), that’s good. But, jimini!, did she have to create a part for Fabio?
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Speaking of which, the Southern Vampire series is being adapted as "True Blood" for cable by Alan Ball, the man behind "Six-Feet Under." I’ll follow on DVD. Already cast is Anna Paquin as Sookie. She is probably best known as Rogue from the X-Men movies, but in fact, thought she is still in her twenties, she has been an Oscar Winner for half her life, thanks to a supporting part in "The Piano."