Sympathy and Consent: The problems of vampire love

The vampire is prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence, resembling the passion of love, by particular persons. It will never desist until it has satiated its passion.... In these cases it seems to yearn for something like sympathy and consent. -Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla

"Resembling?"

I remember reading it the first time. I put down the book, stared up, frowning at the ceiling (light green, artex. My adolescent bedroom), rubbing the tattered paper of the spine.

"Resembling?"

After all, I was a Buffy fan, had seen enough of Angel's brooding, heard Spike's immortal line:

I wasn't surprised to find the idea of vampiric obsession, the idea that vampires were capable of strong, even affectionate, emotion towards humans and each other - what bothered me was the line being drawn. "Resembling."

The affection Carmilla has for the narrator is evident, her passion clear - why, then, the reluctance to call it by it's name?

Dracula, too, is charged with an inability to love, and answers, "Yes, I too can love. You yourselves can tell it from the past." What's more, the person accusing him is one his 'wives' - another vampire, suggesting that love is valued by the Undead, that Dracula's lack of it is an aberration. However, context is important; the 'love' to which the wives are refering involves eating the object of their desire. What's more, Dracula counters their criticism by claiming that he had once loved them in the same fashion - three women whom he seems to ignore when he isn't indulging them with a baby-in-a-bag, women he is in the process of abandoning.

The Dracula we see in the novel is alone, almost tragically so.

Vampiric love, then, is one which it is difficult to seperate from appetite, from death. After all, Carmilla talks of love and passion without reservation, but it is clear she means something a lot less sanitary than chocolate boxes and billet doux. She recalls "a cruel love - strange love, that would have taken my life," believes, "Love will have its sacrifices." Even in Buffy (which was my teen-relationship textbook) vampire romance is never healthy - there's Angel's painful impossible love of Buffy; there's  Spike and his glorious, dysfunctional infatuation with Dru; and there's Dru swooning over Angelus, the monster who drove her insane.

Perhaps that's what Le Fanu was getting at - we can recognise the strength of the feeling, its passion, its realness - but ultimately it either fickle, self-serving, or destructive. It is not a wholesome, it offers no support or strength, can only kill one or both parties. Although similar to love in many ways, it cannot be love because, by definition, its focus, its practicioners are perverse.

Transgression, Perversity and Otherness:

Hmmm. Yes.

Hopefully it is news to no-one that vampires are often used as a sexual metaphor. However, the sex they represent is seldom normative, sanctioned sexuality - monogamous, heterosexual, vanilla, and focused on reproduction. Vampires are used to explore Otherness, and one way to do that is to present them as sexually 'transgressive'. This holds true, even at a surface reading: Carmilla is a lesbian, Spike a male submissive, Dracula a bigamous foreigner. If I started to list the gay vampires out there, we would be here all day.

And one of the ways that Othering dehumanises a figure is to present their emotions and reactions as deviant, immature, perverse. Because they are different to us, because they are 'less' than us, their emotions and motivations can never be as real, important, or respectable as the feelings of mainstream groups.

So just an Other cannot be forthright, but rather is shrill or beligerant, what they believe to be love is not really love. It is merely lust, infatuation, obessession. Their relationships are perversions and inverstions of the ones that 'we' practice, the 'real' relationships. When they run against us, their attentions are clinging, embarrasing, unwelcome. Their influence is corrupting by default.

Yes, this fits the metaphor of vampirism rather nicely, doesn't it?

And metaphors are powerful. If these stories show, over and again, that the only 'right' love is male-dominated, heterosexual monogamy, then anything which falls outside of that, which is represented by vampires, is dangerous, evil, corrupt.

And, like many things didactic moralists preach against, it also looks kinda fun.

Take me away from all this death.

"Make me into one too," said the boy. "Please? I want to be one. I want to walk the night with you and fall in love and drink blood. Kill me. Make me into a vampire too. Bite me. Take me with you." - Poppy Z. Brite, Lost Souls

 Oh, who hasn't at least thought about it? About being eternally beautiful, unbreakable, strong?

Sympathy for the vampire is not an uncommon reading, or indeed response to the genre, and the reaction against such sympathy it is always strong, morally guided and didactic.It's well known that the British Board of Film Classification pushed for censorship of Hammer's vampire films because of the sexual element of the biting scenes, especially Mina's almost gleeful acceptance of Dracula's advances.

Even today, there are no shortage of people who seem to want to drag vampirism back into the realms of 'good, clean horror'. But these currents have always been there. The real power of vampirism is neither in its desirability, nor its horror, but in the ambivalence it raises. As the narrator of Carmilla says:

In these mysterious moods, I did not like her. I experienced a strange tumultous excitement that was pleasurable, ever and anon, mingled with a vague sense of fear and disgust. I had no distinct thoughts about her... but I was conscious of a love growing into adoration, and also of abhorrance. - Carmilla

We are aware of the moral failings of vampires, even as we are drawn to them. They may be tragic and lovely, but they cannot be saved.

Something in him ached for that boy. For the sadness in his face, for his eyes yearning to stay young. He wanted to grab Nothing away from his companions and tell him that sometimes, everything could be all right, that pain did not have to come with magic, that childhood never had to end. And yet he wondered whether Nothing had not known all those things when he made his choice.  - Lost Souls

Writers do fascinating gymnastics to navigate this problem, but ultimately, it will always be as Carmilla says, "I live in you; and you would die for me, I love you so." It is a mad love, is amour fou - another thing which is belittled, mocked, denegrated. It is another thing that is often described as not 'really' being love, only 'resembling' it.

But, oh, it is so very real, and so very tempting. It is a love which transgressive, morally ambivalent, one that can bring with it an entire world of pain. And many vampire writers chase so hard after it, trying to bring it to a happy ending. But tidying away its danger, its nastiness, its utter disregard of morality, it is very difficult to maintain its white-hot intensity. If a vampire is prepared to call your father, 'sir' and wait until marriage, passion can hardly be consuming him that badly, right?

Well, maybe. There is such a thing as self-control. And, after all, Le Fanu speaks of an "artful courtship" of longing for "something like sympathy and consent"?

Take me away from all this death!

That "like" again.


The Boundaries of Metaphor, the Limits of Consent:
 

As mentioned above, the sympathy is easy. It's the heart of the vampire's allure, after all. It is precisely that balance of attraction and disgust. The idea that something about you is being admitted that you would never have owned before. It is about a sense of transgression, of non-normativity. It's about self discovery - and the ensuing shame, ambivalence, emergence.

The reinvention of the vampire as a romantic hero comes from that longing, that desire to put away all the weakness and uncertainty, to have your secret desires unfolded, to be lifted up on a love that is actually forever. So, of course it appeals, it is so tempting to leave it at that. 

But consent? Oh, how on earth do do we negotiate the morality of this?

After all, this is not coming out or getting laid. It's not asking your partner to spank you: we are talking about a vampire. This is someone who kills humans in order to live. So, yeah, you might sympathise, but that won't stop you reaching for the stakes and the communian wafer.

Besides, even if it didn't, can a word like consent actually be used in these circusmtances? The watchword of the BDSM community is SSC - safe, sane and consensual - and if consent is the most discussed, it does not exist in isolation. The three are interdependent - without consent and safety, it cannot be sane; without consent and sanity, it is not safe; without safety and sanity you cannot be said to have consented.

Also, legally, certain things are out of bounds, no matter how much you might want someone to do them to you. Being eaten, for example.

How can vampire romance ever be unproblematic?

So people tidy things up. They removed the Otherness of vampires,  stop them being killers, make them just humans with better hair and super-strength. But this overlooks the power of that Otherness, the importance of vampire mythos to groups who have been Othered, told their desires are dirty, immoral, or just worthy of mockery.

Contemporary vampire novels are frequently queer, or kinky, or else the dream relationships of lonely women of various ages*. To love a vampire is to desire to turn outsider status in to the ultimate in-group, to rewrite loneliness and frustration in to endless pleasure, to cast off low self-esteem nd find body confidence, beauty and sexual agency.

So we write stories where there are 'good' vampires, where they have souls and don't eat humans, and it becomes all about the metaphor. These are good people, just like us, facing unfair discrimination. The fact they must live in secrecy is unjust. The huge taboo surrounding vampire love is misguided.

However, as an idea of 'devaint love reclaimed as permissible', vampirism is a flawed model. To be able to embrace it wholeheartedly involves tidying away the ugliness, the whole vampire bit of vampirism. Female sexual agency isn't actually fatal, and lesbianism is does not cause aneamia. There is a lacuna between the metaphorical truth of vampirism-as-sexuality and its narrative reality. A young queer person may be justified in feeling that coming out will get them treated like a monster - it happens far too often - but they will never become one. Kinky sex (or, honestly, just sex) may feel dangerous, furtive and transgressive - but it should never actually be so.

Vampirism is. Its whole draw is the idea of being wanted so badly by someone that they will devour you. But this isn't a brutal slash and hack job - it is tender, loving, slow. It is romantic, sensuous, arousing.

And it will kill you.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Mine is, arguably, all three. 

Review: Spirit Houses by Die Booth

Alright, alright, let's come clean. This blog is officially on hiatus until August at least, but probably September. There are reasons but they are too dull to go into here.

Instead, I cite the bit of Twitter logic that brings me crawling back for a brief visit - if you like a book by an independent author, review it. A few weeks ago, I was recommended Die Booth's Spirit Houses, and my word, did I like it.

 A romping, almost steam-punk adventure following Manda Connor and her fellow Field Nurses in the D.P.M - the Department of Paranatural Medicine - it does not rely over-much on the apparatus of non-functional gears and eldritch threats, being instead driven by engaging and entertaining characters.
 It is a novel that quickly gives one the impression of being cast into a much larger world, so lush and fully realised are the premise and setting. Booth does not expend excess words upon world-building or set-up, but the detail of vision is constantly revealed by the plot. It's almost disconcerting how thoroughly built and convincing this alternative England is - the mental space it occupies feels more like a beloved film series, or long running television show than a novel. It seems so much bigger than it is; there is so much richness here, I sometimes felt the need to pace myself - although that may just have been the fact that I was screen-reading.

In tone cosy, the narrative and characters had an almost YA feel to them, something enhanced by both the institutional setting of the D.P.M, and the '20s pastiche of the setting - there is no sex, or language stronger than 'damn' - but there is a poise and maturity of theme that is reminiscent of Lanni Taylor. For all the tenderness with which the characters are painted, as a reader you worry about them. They are breakable, things may not turn out okay. And you want for it it turn out okay.

Naturally, it isn't flawless. If you have an issue with head-hopping (which I think is unfairly maligned, but each to their own) this is not the novel for you. Likewise the prose, while generally light and witty with moments of real beauty, sometimes loses itself in descriptors which grate - the characters do a lot of eye rolling. The opening chapters are also somewhat stilted, something not helped by the initial construction of Manda's character and the suggestion of a love-triangle surrounding her. However, Spirit Houses quickly finds its stride, and its protagonist's mixture of naïveté and passion soon create a heroine who is more than a cipher for events, or an idealised reader-insert. Spirit Houses is a novel about identity, about the choices we make and the people that we have to be to make them. 

It is here that Spirit Houses finds its strength. Characters are revenants, werewolves, displaced souls. They make deals with demons, lie, manipulate their friends. But these issues do not define them; they are merely facets of personality, burdens to be borne, actions of necessity. This is a compassionate novel, and is written from a standpoint empathetic with otherness. Characters are outsiders: the slow, hard-working Ray who refuses to take advantage of his privileged background; the brilliant, cold Daniel proving his genius despite the handicap of his working class roots; genial, foppish Alex inciting the ire of the more conventionally masculine and, of course, Manda herself, battling the prejudice she faces at her lycanthropy, desperate for a place in the world.With astute political awareness, Booth weaves these personal struggles into the wider world of the D.P.M, its language of respect and patient consent offering a kinder and more intelligent picture of the integration of the para-natural than I am used to seeing. 

I would hold this book up against Glen Duncan's brash and unconvincing The Last Werewolf as an example of what existence on the fringes of acceptability really looks like - not bloodbaths and 'gut-wrenching' last stands against cartoon villains as part of the great journey of the Virile White Man™ - but as the slow weight of judgement, the fight for dignity and health, for a normal life.

Well worth your time.

From Resistance to Weakness: problems of gender in vampire fiction, part 2

This is the second part in a series of blog posts about late 19th and early 20th Century vampire fiction. The first can be found here.

From Flora to Lucy, resistance to weakness:

While the vampires in early vampire fiction are encoded as effeminate, they find their sustenance, their reproduction, in the weakness, the leakiness, of women. True, not all women succumb. Much of the point of Varney, the Vampyre – if that particular book has a point¹ – is that most young women of virtue will not be won over by a well dressed stranger with a charming tongue. Even the narrator of Carmilla, half-seduced, draws back from her vampire-lover's overt declaration of romantic love.

It is only in The Vampyre that we see women as wholly, irrevocably flawed, that we see this effeminacy an innate characteristic that even the most 'feminine' possess: "Remember your oath, and know, if not my bride today, your sister is dishonoured. Women are frail!"

Towards the end of the 19^th Century, and beginning of the 20^th the frail nature of femininity, its tendency towards effeminacy - become the crux of the vampire narrative. Damn these women, after all, with their bodies that don't give clear signals, their endless 'potential' that only serves to tempt upstanding men! Damn the way the fall out all over the place, their ... fleshy appendages, their wandering wombs, refusal to be contained by our discourses of virtue, of femininity.

Okay, maybe not that thin

And as the female victims fail to remain in their divinely ordained place, so the male vampires cease to be contained by the their skins. From the sang froid of Ruthven, the skeletally thin Varney with his flat, tin coloured eyes, we move the Von Klatka (1860) and Dracula (1897) – no longer serpentine agents of seduction but undeniable lumps of carnal flesh.

Beginning their stories withered, thin, even desiccated, the blood they drink destroys their masculinity. Their cheeks and lips are rouged by it, their mouths become fuller, more sensual. They grow lethargic, glutted and glutinous, getting something of Carmilla's languor with nothing of her cool attractiveness. Yet, despite becoming less male, less 'human', despite becoming more of the body, despite slipping back into their grave-dirt and ruins and shrouds, all of a sudden, women are no longer able to resist them.

Female sexuality as deviant by default:

Franziska, of The Mysterious Stranger would “rather be tyrannized over, and kept a little under” than “loved in such a wearisome manner.” The suitor whom she thus insults is the quiet, kind and cultured Franz, a man who 'serves' her in very much the way traditional Christian rhetoric suggests that Christ serves the Church. She, of course, refuses to submit to his affections. Yet despite her scorn, Franz is the perfect Enlightenment man, a being of the head rather than the body, a creature of reason, not of instinct. It is ironic, therefore, that she levels at him the charge of effiminacy because he does not present something that appeals to her sexuality. Each evidence of his 'true' masculinity is seen as a flaw. Because Franz is rational, she finds him wearisome, because Franz is prudent, she believes him cowardly, because Franz is chivalrous, she thinks him lacking in spirit. Of course, from the moment she meets Azzo Von Klatka - ugly, rude, animalistic - she is utterly taken with him.

“Women, eh?” we're supposed to say, reading from the script of 'Nice Guys' everywhere, “Look at everything I've done for her and she runs off with that jerk.” But then, that's women for you, isn't it? Irrational. Dangerous. Sexually deviant. They sleep with lepers, you know?

The women of Dracula don't fare much better. Oh, the don't seek out the vampire with quite Franziska's single-mindedness, but there is something of duplicity implied about them. Of course, with their 'man-brains' they do not want the vampire to attack them, but in their 'woman-hearts?' Why, Mina even states, “I was bewildered and, strangely enough, I did not want to hinder him.”

How do we explain this?

Well, in what is probably the novel's finest double entendre, Dracula announces that the men “should have kept their energies for use closer to home.”

Yes, “While they played their wits against me... I was countermining them. And you, their best beloved one, are now to me flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood... You shall be avenged in turn, for not one of them but shall minister to your needs.”

Who wouldn't want that?

Put simply, guys, while you're too busy being macho men, your girlfriend will be getting her kicks by sucking off some backwoods freakshow with hairy palms.² If there was ever an exercise in heterosexual male paranoia...

The message of Dracula, of The Mysterious Stranger is that women, however good, however pure, are not to be trusted. They are the flaw by which these entities are able sneak into your circle, they will be turned against you by their inexplicable lusts. Oh, of course, they might be the sweetest, kindest, most sensible of women; they may be the most feminine creatures you can imagine, but when push comes to shove, it is that effeminacy that will show through. Effeminacy is nature, it seems, femininity is the construct of society.

It isn't even the vampire's fault, you know, the narratives are pretty clear on that: these women will not want to hinder him.

Male desire, feminine perversity:

Men, of course, fine upstanding, mindful creatures that they are, don't find themselves drawn to such revolting beasts as Dracula or Von Klatka. No. The female vampires that seduce them are much more alluring. Oh, evil, sure, but there is enough there for the attraction to be understandable, even natural, in some measure.

Just as Carmilla is beautiful, forward and unsettling, Harriet Brandt (1897) is “slight and lissome” and desperately improper, Sarah (1900) has a face that is “beautiful in spite of its horror”. The women in Dracula are of “intolerable, tingling sweetness”, they have a “deliberate voluptuousness” which is both “thrilling and repulsive.” It's no wonder the men are attracted to them really – they have all manner of female wiles with which to ensnare him. They do it through that time honoured means, through an appeal to his base nature, through exciting his... flesh³.

Your classic vamp.

The important thing to remember is that men aren't weird about it. These girls are hot. The desire of the heroes is understandable, given the circumstances. It is sinful, yes, but it is straight-forward rather than duplicitous and self-deceiving. Men are drawn in by these women's deliberate wiles, not led astray by their own, faulty natures.

And these vampire women are studies in effeminacy, too. They are not soft, they are not retiring. If anything they suffocate, they engulf. Gone is Carmilla's light, tripping intensity. Dracula's 'brides', Lucy Westernra and Countess Sarah are seductive, voluptuous. Harriet, more sympathetic, is eager, girlish, hungry for attention, for love, and it is this neediness that smothers those she adores.

The fear against them is simple: these women want. They grasp, they summon. Oh, yes, they are pretty, they are alluring, but to allow these women in, to allow one's lust for them to arise, is to to be seduced, to be made unclean, to be bitten. This, indeed, is a feature of Victorian vampire fiction: one need not, as in the modern myth, 'consent'. One does not need to does not need to drink of the vampire's blood to be turned. In order to be corrupted, all that is needed is to yield to that seduction, to allow oneself to succumb to that bite.

If the men forget their virility, their upstanding virtue and yield, if they show a moment of feminine softness, let themselves be governed by their bodies rather than their minds, then these tempters in such pleasing array will slide in and make leaky vessels of the menfolk, too. Gone will be good sense, intelligence, honest chivalry, worthwhile pursuits. They will be degraded, become decadent, indolent, hysterical, effete. Masculinity will fly out of the window. They will become, in short, effeminate.

But the cause of this is not some inherent flaw of masculinity. Oh, no. The blame is upon these damnable women for desiring, for wanting, for – as the phrase goes – 'asking for it.'

Essentially, you have the classic double bind: it is always the woman's fault.

Vampire women symbolise the lust which will capture a man if his energies are not properly spent. While it is better to marry than to burn, it's better still to be out doing masculine, homosocial things and leaving that wife at home. Sexuality might be a natural drive, but getting so hung up on it, y'know, actually spending time with your missus? That's unhealthy.

Women, of course, are another matter. If you do leave the wife at home, the bizarre perversity of her nature will mean she is not content sitting alone and practicing short-hand – or whatever it is these girls get up to. No. She will allow entrance to a vampire, that weird looking cove who really is repellent in all ways. Yes, the vampire man, that's who she wants, the one who symbolises all that energy that women just cannot expend healthily, all that eternally possible sexuality that cannot be trusted in anyway. Look, when it happens to the ladies, it isn't like you nearly getting bitten that time, no. This is perverse.

Hysterical lot, the females, aren't they?

If they're not utterly overpowered by those wandering wombs, a woman has a very definite place in vampire fiction. That place is... er... not doing whatever it is that she is doing. 

Part Three: Won't Somebody think of the Children

1Questionable, I'll warrant.

2Physically impossible to make someone drink from your chest in that position. Just sayin'.

3No giggling at the back there.

The Vampire as a Leaky Vessel: problems of gender in vampire fiction, part 1

This is the first in a series of blog posts that will update weekly, addressing late 19th and early 20th Century vampire fiction:

So, I'm not entirely sure where I first encountered the expression, “the female body is a leaky vessel”, but I know it was at some point during my BA. I was reading one of those books I used to get to peruse – the ones with titles like, Queering the Middle Ages¹. Anyway, I liked the phrase. It stuck with me all through the writing, reading and note-taking I did on archetypes in folk ballads and the legality and theology behind pre-1750 marriage, simply because that is a brilliant way of looking at the whole squeamish, misogynist mess surrounding bodies in our culture. The female body is leaky.

For we have, do we not, a dichotomy in the dominant social discourse? A myth of two genders who fall under that generic term of 'mankind'. Two genders, one of which does it all properly, and another which doesn't exactly play ball, which is – not to put too fine a point on it – faulty. After all, women don't have a discreet pattern of arousal. They don't have nice, neat interaction with the reproductive process, an inoffensive little flap of tissue that hangs down, and – in theory - only makes its presence felt, only making a mess when it is called upon to do its duty. If the male member realises that it is not wanted, it can – at least theoretically – make its retreat. After the business is done, it need only wash itself and we are back to square one, back to the unperturbed, normative, sexless body of inert masculinity.

Without that pattern of arousal, while the female body can never be considered entirely sexual, it is also never - socially, politically, or even physically – inert. In terms of sexuality, the female body is leaky.

If it were not enough that women can't have a man's proud, upstanding organ, not enough that their bodies have – potentially – limitless ability for sexual performance², women menstruate. If you have unprotected sex with them, women drip. And after that there is pregnancy with all its discharge, morning sickness, blocked sinuses, swelling middles and stress incontinence. There is labour with all the blood, faeces, vomit, amniotic fluid and 'show' – that nightmare combination of sneeze and nosebleed which makes its presence felt through jellied lumps sliding from woman's vulva just as she enters active labour. (Consider this a public service announcement for all expectant mothers. No-one ever tells you about 'show'.)

I apologise to any gentlemen who are now running for the smelling salts, but suffice to say all this unspeakable mess doesn't even take us to the baby, which (covered in meconium or otherwise), flops out, followed by a blue-white sinew of umblilical cord and a chunk of bloody yech that is the after birth. When that's all done, then comes the lactating: tits like Catwoman's, and the superpower of being able to shoot milk across a room, ruining five bras in half an hour.

Honestly, if you're beginning to sympathise with some of the more paranoid ramblings I encountered during my degree, I can see your point. You may sympathise with that old moderate, St Jerome, who got his head in such a twist over the idea of pregnant women that he had the urge to punch them in the bump.³ Or you may feel there was some grounding in the medical treatise that claimed women's menstruation was how they rid themselves of the impurities they got from congress with lepers.

Lovely.

Also, what?

We went pretty quickly from 'ugh, girl cooties' to 'fornicating with lepers'. What with the moral and social stigma attached Hansen's disease and extra-marital sex in that period, that's a pretty extreme explanation for a routine process of ejecting useless tissue.

But that's just it, isn't it? This discourse of leaky women who drip and bleed and gush plays very easily into a belief that women are leaky in their moral, as well as physical selves. After all, to the medieval imagination, women, were the agents of the fall. In the dichotomy of heaven/earth, king/state, head/body, women were very much supposed to occupy the latter position in each balance. This rhetoric is remarkably pervasive. Go to the right places, you'll still hear it today: “Just as Jesus is the head of the church, so the man is...”

God created mankind in his image. He created women in his image, as well. He just created them a bit different, a bit more bodily, a bit more earthy, a bit, well, leakier. So it stands to reason, doesn't it, that if something is bodily rather than spiritual, animal rather than civilised, 'faulty' rather that 'normative', it is simultaneously less male, less human. Indeed, it becomes female.

I promised you vampires, didn't I?

There are lots of ways this nasty little myth wriggles itself into our culture. There are lots of ways it played out in the medieval discourse that I'm not going into here. What's interesting me right at this minute is the way my passion number one (perceptions of gender, sexuality and marriage, particularly in the medieval and early modern period) has a curious intersection with what is probably passion number three.

Namely, vampires.

Yes, that's it. Sorry it took me so long.

What this is really all about is a vague trend I have noticed from reading far, far too many vampire novels: the later the narrative, the more likely it is that male vampires will be portrayed as attractive, as desirable, as sympathetic. A female vampire not only retains a more or less steady attractiveness over time, but is in fact far less likely to occur the later the narrative.

The folkloric vampire and its liminal state:

We don't really see vampires as bodily any more. No, don't start listing all the gruesome vampire films you've seen – if you're reading this, you're probably an expert and therefore don't count. Instead, go and ask an average seven year old what a vampire looks like. Because in this, post-Dracula world, most people's first impression of a vampire is essentially a smoothed down version of Bela Lugosi – male, adult, white.

We all know what a vampire looks like

The image is cartoonish in its ubiquity. It is a Hallowe'en caricature: smooth skin and slick hair. Its colour come in bold blocks and contrasts: white shirt, black jacket; white skin, red eyes; black cloak, red lining. Even the much maligned Robert Patterson/Edward Cullen look feeds into this photo-shopped perception of vampirism: hair in such rigid spikes it looks carved that way, skin with something of a lacquered finish, eyes a bright amber under manga-distinct brows. Vampires these days are not physical, they do not smear themselves across our consciousness. They are complete, discreet, self-contained. They have the same studied passivity of religious icons.

Vampires didn't used to be like that. They didn't even, in the words of a thousand internet warriors,used to be 'bad-ass'. No. Vampires used to be leaky.

They are spirits, characters, identities that cannot be contained within the useful boxes that society and morality would teach us. They are death leaking into life, sexual desire seeping into the virginal bed. They are a combination of hysterical grief and lust. The folkloric ghouls, squeezing bloated from their graves, dripping blood from rotting maws, crawling back to infect those they beloved with the miasma of death and they are leaky in the extreme. If it is better to marry than to burn, traditional vampires reminded people of the destructive power of desire which had no respect for the proper sacraments, for holy days, for the fact that marriage lasts only until death. Like corruption, like the pox, the vampires trickle in to any crack left in the vessel – any invitation, any little flaw in your armour of hygiene and righteousness.

Yes, newsflash, vampires are about sex. No, not only about sex, of course, but it plays a major part. They are about morality, about corruption, about disease. They are about damnation and sin. They were created in a culture that saw no clear distinction between spiritual, moral and physical cleanliness. What better way to reject one's spiritual nature than to remain on earth in physical form? What better way to spread damnation than to crawl from your grave and corrupt your spouse, your children, your family - those connected to them through bodily means.

As much as from medical ignorance, from fear of illness, the myth of the vampire arises from fears of intimacy, of the way an 'earthly' bond can override the moral strictures of community and faith. It has its foundation in the obsessive attachment that strictures of religion and custom are intended to contain. Vampires were unreasonable, unreasoning in their appetites. They put human interaction before the law of God.

In the head/body, male/female dichotomy, these are female flaws, female traits. Whatever their gender, vampires were codified as female, as the the body, and as such, they leak.

Dance of the Undead: Why I don't like zombies and why that doesn't matter

The tide, thank Gods, has finally turned. Twice, twice! in the last two days, my twitter feed has revealed to me people disparaging zombies and the zombie genre. It's overdone! Give it a rest! Too mainstream!

Yippee!

I'll be honest with you: I've never had much time for zombies. If we're going to have revenants emerging grisly from their tombs, I prefer them to be incorporeal. If we're going to have monsters ravening for the flesh of the living, I prefer them to be equipped witty conversation and reasonable dress sense. Between friends, I'm a ghost girl, I'm (and I'm sure this will be a surprise to everyone) a vampire girl.

Zombies. I just don't like 'em.

What? You need reasons from me?

Okay. I think my first reason is the type of surface narrative zombies seem to engender: post-apocalyptic worlds, scratching faceless hordes, heroic (or anti-heroic) types marching round the place toting huge-arsed guns. It's food supplies and water filtration and constant, knife-edged danger. That's... well, that's okay, I suppose. It's not really my scene. I don't, in my escapist moments, imagine myself as some kind of tooled up commando, fighting for survival in a ghost world. I am not hard-bitten and taciturn, I am loquacious and somewhat effete.I know that there are vampire narratives like this, and I don't read those much, either.

Then, there's the second reason. Zombies are, actually, that little bit too scary for me. Perhaps it's just paranoia, but the idea of some huge population disaster that leaves us scrabbling around in the ruins of our civilisation seems just a mite too plausible. As, for that matter, does a worldview that sees a significant chunk of the population as faceless, needlessly destructive, and possible to be killed with a clean conscience. This is the kind of world I dread leaving to my children. I have nightmares about zombies. That this counts as a point against zombies troubles me, but it brings us to reason number three.

Zombies just aren't any fun.

Even the worst, most hackneyed vampire narratives are entertaining to me, whereas bad zombie narratives are just dull. Even good zombie stories only serve to make me jumpy, and while maybe that's part of what they are supposed to do, I just don't get off on that, thank you very much.

Thing is, the function of literature, should always be, to some small extent, to give your reader their jollies. Sure, hurt them; don't pull your punches, kick 'em while they're down, give them nightmares so bad they sleep with the light on for weeks*, or make them feel so sick that they can't eat for three days;** but while you're at it, throw them a fucking bone, won't you?

We escape, we fantasise, we fancy dress. We flinch from crucifixes.

Which brings us to four: from the little I've seen, zombie narratives seem to be more about the survivors. You didn't get bit so you acclimatise yourself to grief, to killing the monsters who wear the faces of your loved ones. You survive at all costs and maybe you lose. You try to live with yourself, with others, with terror, with grief. It is humans put in extremis - the zombies are more of an environmental hazard. And, again, this is too much like life. Vampires stories, ghost stories - these are far more concerned with the monster and that is where my interest lies, especially if we're given a ton of that pesky moral grey.

But... but... but... All this is personal taste. I'm convinced there is some brilliant zombie fiction out there, inspired, intelligent, gripping stuff. There is also a lot of enjoyable dross, and reading is something we do for pleasure, right? Zombie fans, go out and enjoy yourself, gorge yourself on the current glut.

Don't mind me, I'll be lurking with a well thumbed copy of Dracula.

So why the "yippie"?

Well, here's the thing: for the past five years I've heard one heck of a lot of "Vampires, oh God, that is so mainstream and overdone... Zombies, now they're hardcore." I've heard Goths (Goths, for Pete's sake) talk about how vampires have become 'stale' and how they are really pushing the envelope with 'zombie chic' (also, actually, zombie chic? WTF?) and been roundly mocked and condemned for my continuing allegiance to the children of the night.

My point is this: zombies, vampires, ghosts - they are all mainstream, they always have been. One comes to prominence for a bit and everyone jumps on the gravy train until the non-core fanbase get fed up and the wheel turns again. Vamps have had their turn, zombies, take a bow and slip back beneath the ground for a bit. It won't be for long.

So why the "yippie"?

Because you notice the third article on that list?

Come on, Montague Rhodes James!

*or too afraid to turn the light on because then they can see it coming for them...
** I'm looking at you, H.P Lovecraft

Incidentally, if you are a zombie fan, even after my reasons as to why you shouldn't be, check out the Science Museum's Zombie Lab: http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/Home/visitmuseum/events/festivals/zombies.aspx