I disagree with the simple "make them
repulsive and yucky" argument. Vampires can be scariest when they deal in
ambivalence and paranoia. Repulsiveness just turns them into straightforward
monsters where you know where you stand and what you're supposed to run away
from. Ok, monsters and running-away can be scary too. But I think the
human/monster, desire/disgust, fear/curiosity type ambivalences are where the
vampire figure really comes into its own. But you need to make those contrasts
really bite, not like those drippy Twilight emos. The vampires in "True
Blood" are agreeably scary. They can be nice, they can be refined, they
can even be love-lorn -- but they are still powerful, unhuman, and capable of
great harm. The vampires in "Being Human" are similarly portrayed,
and so they work. Vampires go through phases. Before Stoker they were walking
corpses driven by the need for blood, and Stoker humanised them and we all know
what happened over the next 130 years. And it's not like Meyer was the first
person to make cuddly vampires: “The Count from Sesame Street”, Count “Ducula”
and the terrible 80s TV show The Littlest Vampire… do I need to say more? We
don't need King to tell us how to make them scary again, it'll happen on their
own, they're too much of a use trope not to. Besides, I don't mind vampires
being nice to look at if they're also capable of murdering you and not really
giving a shit. The vampires in “True Blood” are sufficiently violent and
amoral, but unfortunately people often associate the series with Twilight
because it's become popular at the same sort of time. The two couldn't really
be much further apart. The literary (as opposed to folkloric) vampire has been
fatally attractive since Polidori's Lord Ruthven (based on Byron), Gautier's
Clarimonde, and Lefanu's Carmilla. At least Mitch in Being Human holds up the
Byronic and dangerous tradition. While also being cute and funny, he's capable
of picnicing on a train-carriage of commuters, when on a Bonnie-and-Clyde
vengeance kick with the deliciously naughty Daisy. Vampires are inevitably
sexy: they're all about oral fixation, eros-thanatos complexes, a neat twist on
Transubstantiation, and often an effective Queer metaphor. Meyer's attempt to
recruit them for her 'no sex before marriage' Mor(m)on family values is utterly
misguided…Vampires also should be able to move around in daylight, but weaker.
The disintegration in sunlight was invented to show off the special effects in
Nosferatu. (They don't sparkle, either!)
I suppose it would be nice to get back to
really traditional vampires, but zombies have filled that niche so I think
we're stuck with pretty vampires. I'm not going to complain about it though ;)
I remember having read somewhere Sam Mendes was
planning to do a movie based on the Garth Ennis epic, "Preacher". One
of the main characters in it is the vampire Cassidy, and King would recognize
him instantly as an Irish correlation of "The Walking Dude". He's
charming and gleefully amoral, one of the best characters around. One of the
most hilarious parts of Ennis' story is when Cassidy encounters some Anne Rice
type vampires in New Orleans. Cassidy is unimpressed with pale, swooning poets
who want to be vampires, and ends up giving them lessons in what vampirism is
really all about. Not for the faint hearted.
“‘Salem’s Lot” is one of the biggies for me. “'Salem's
Lot”, “Revival”,
and “The
Stand” are the King novels that I have read over and over, for pure
pleasure. I don’t much like other early ones, like “The Shining” and “The Dead
Zone” and “Night Shift”; they just don't quite work for me in the same way. His
later work is also spotty--I haven't even read all of it--but “Bag of Bones”
was probably the best of the bunch. When I'm looking for a common denominator
of my two favourites, what I see most clearly is that I love it when King
assembles a team, a gang of friends, who work together to battle the forces of
evil. I really enjoy the way that King depicts how friendships can form and
grow and be solidified, and how different pairs of friends in a larger gang of
pals typically have their own individual dynamics.
“'Salem's Lot” has a central pivot point in Ben
Mears, but part of the joy of “The
Stand” and “IT” is that the gangs of friends are even more balanced. Yes,
Stu is probably the central pivot of “The Stand”, just as Stuttering Bill is
probably at the center of “IT”--but the rest of the friendship circles in each
of those novels are given the texture and time to also be legitimate leading
characters. I've always been a Haystack man, for example, when reading “IT”, in
part since I never was a chubby kid. “'Salem's Lot” also establishes the King
formula of the slow build, followed by a long and intense action phase; it
works because the build-up gives the reader the time to know the characters and
the setting, and to develop some relationships and fondness and context, which
gives action sequences and scares weight and consequence. Also, the pay-off for
King is long and involved--it isn't like a two hundred page build-up followed
by forty pages of excitement--he rewards the readers' patience for the first
half of a novel by making the entire second half action-packed, as he does in “'Salem's
Lot” (and in “IT” and “The
Stand” the action-packed segments are even heftier).
