All This Vampire Stuff--What's It Mean?

A friend keeps trying to convince me that I should write about vampires. I could, he tells me, write the un-vampire book if I can't stand the thought of writing about vampires, as long as I have vampires in the book.

I refuse. The only novel I've read with vampires is Dracula. Interestingly, if people actually read Dracula instead of watching the movie, they might be surprised. Stoker doesn't celebrate Dracula. Stoker uses the story of Count Dracula to illustrate the fallen nature of men and to make the point that brotherhood is the best shield we have against evil.

I get the feeling that Stoker's message got lost between 1897 and the present world.

What I want to know is, why the current fascination with vampires?


Is the current vampire craze a sign that we've run out of stories and have to resort to telling the same one over and over or that we've used up all the stories, of which there were only seven to begin with, and so have to wrap each small plot in a warehouse full of sensationalism to cover the scarcity of anything really worth reading?

I guess you could argue that nothing has changed. Before Austen, widows desperate to earn a living write cheap romances and Hawthorne complained about penny romances written by women "scribblers" outselling his work.

Every work can't be great or even good, and trends have always dominated. Six extant versions of Taming of the Shrew exist. How many were there in Shakespeare's time? Who knows. So maybe this infatuation with vampires will go away. Or maybe it signals something deeper, this fascination with and celebration of the blood-sucking dead.