Vampires are stalking the best-seller charts this year after a periodic rest in their tombs. With Stephenie Meyer’s debut novel, Twilight (Atom) poised for instant best-sellerdom this month thanks to its chaste yet intensely erotic description of a teenager’s love-affair with a vampire, Darren Shan’s twelve-volume Saga of Darren Shan racing to the big screen with Universal Pictures and Justin Somper’s Vampirates becoming one of the top-selling titles of 2005, vampires have suddenly become the next big thing in the children’s market.

Ever since Bram Stoker published Dracula just over 100 years ago in 1897, vampires have captured the popular imagination. All horror literature and film reflects the deepest preoccupations of a changing culture, but the vampire in particular never dies, becoming increasingly complex and intriguing. Having stated off as a reflection of the fin de siecle fear of contagion and seduction by a foreign man just as Britain was experiencing an influx from Eastern Europe, the vampire became 5th columnist in every sense. The historian Tom Holland, himself the author of three vampire novels remarked presciently in the New Statesman five years ago,

“ Nowadays, it is almost de rigeur for modern vampires to be gay, and many are drug addicts as well, just for good measure. Even as the outward appurtenances of the vampire – the castle, the cape, the crucifix and garlic – have increasingly become the props of a kitsch mass culture, so film-makers and novelists have responded with ever more desperate attempts to shock. Yet these too, by the law of diminishing returns, would seem to spell the end of the vampire’s allure. Or perhaps not – for the vampire, like a virus, has endured by mutating.”

This is exactly what has happened. The vampire as villain followed predictable patterns. Polidori's The Vampyre, the first in the genre, was a portrayal of a Byronic libertine whose appetites lead to the apotheosis of Romantic self-Indulgence; likewise, Bram Stoker's Dracula was an aristocratic nightmare to delight republicans. More recent fiction has portrayed vampires as monstrous materialists. Anne Billson's Suckers had vampires as the incarnation of greedy Eighties Thatcherism, and Anne Rice's Lestat was a fallen angel for whom boredom not the stake was the greatest fear. Poppy Z Brite's Lost Souls were gay Goths, terminally lost and not even as predatory as the kind Buffy fought all through the 1990s. The Noughties vampire has, however, a completely different cast. As Tom Holland predicted, they have mutated and shock by showing us self-denial.

Vampires – at least in children’s literature – have spent the beginning of the Milennium developing both a conscience and a culture. Terry Pratchett’s blood-suckers were one of the first to reform – in the 2003 Monstrous Regiment (Doubleday), his elegant female vampire Maladict drinks coffee rather than blood, and proves a faithful friend to the heroine. But it is Darren Shan’s Vampire Princes (HarperCollins), with their isolationist warrior culture who have completely reformulated the genre.

Shan – the only living author to have enjoyed an encomium from JK Rowling, and the one children most want to see translated into film – had originally planned only three books about his hero’s choice to become a vampire in order to save his best friend Stephen’s life. But by the third novel, he found he was becoming interested in the whole background to his “vampaneze” culture.

“We’re used to Dracula being evil, that’s the norm, but I wanted to explore what might happen if you have to drink blood to survive but don’t lose human emotions. Mine are not nice guys, but rather than the straight division between good and evil I was thinking of warrior cults such as the Masai Mara, the Celts and the Samurai.”

Part of the reason for Shan’s appeal to children of 10+ is that his twelve-volume “autobiographical” saga is really a coming-of-age story about loyalty and friendship. It resonates with the modern fear of terrorist cells, driven by secret beliefs and appetites that could destroy us from within. As a young Irishman, the Troubles were in the back of Shan’s mind when he was creating the Vampaneze – he was, he says, “trying to explore the way you have to talk to people, because if you don’t talk you become a separate culture.”

It is the vampire’s status as the outsider who looks like us which plays to our deepest preoccupations now that Britain and America feel under siege from home-grown terrorists, but it is striking how the new wave of vampire writers are insisting on the vampire’s potential for compassion and even rejection of willing victims. Just as we modify our view of immigrants according to whether we think of them as terrorists or Polish plumbers, so the vampire’s glamour is becoming potentially benign.

Stephenie Meyer, author of Twilight says, “I think the attraction vampires hold for us humans has to do with their dual natures. Obviously, we all enjoy being scared—you only have to look at the success of the horror industry to see that. Of all the monsters we dream up to frighten ourselves, most of them (zombies, witches, werewolves, blobs, swamp creatures, etc.) are traditionally ugly, repulsive things. They are the opposite of the things we want ourselves to be, and we run from them. The exception to that is the vampire. Yes, vampires will kill you, but they also have attributes we envy: they are beautiful, they are forever young, they are intelligent and well-spoken, they often wear tuxedos and live in castles. We want what they have, even as we fear what they want. There is more potential to the vampire story with that conflict than there is when the monster is just a gruesome force of destruction.”

Her story, recounted in hypnotic, dreamy prose perfectly encapsulates the teenager’s feeling of sexual tension and alienation. Bella Swan, the narrator of Twilight, is already half-way to the vampire world when she moves to rainy Seattle to live with her father. Pale, eccentric, clever and virginal she is drawn to a quartet of remarkably beautiful “siblings” at her new high school, adopted by a doctor and his wife. All of them are vampires sworn to abstinence, feeding only on animals or criminals. Edward, with whom she falls passionately in love, thirsts for her blood but can’t consummate their relationship if she remains human; their passion becomes even more dangerous when it becomes apparent that Bella is being hunted down by a posse of very different vampires.

To Meyer the vampire is not, as in Anne Rice’s famous Interview with a Vampire or even the Buffy TV series, a figure of evil glamour against which the virginal heroine must pit her virtue. Her vampires possess supernatural strength and telepathic abilities, but garlic, crucifixes and sunlight don’t affect them at all. Immortal and beautiful as angels, their real problems stem from loneliness and a refined sensibility.
“ I guess that vampires stand for the choice between the worldly and the heavenly—the pull of these things we want (immortality, riches, beauty) versus the idea of choosing good over evil. Is it worth it to be evil, if you can get everything you want?”

Justin Somper also addresses this problem in his romping Vampirates sequence, Demons of the Ocean and the forthcoming Tide of Terror (Simon & Schuster). His twin brother and sister, adrift on the open sea after running away from an orphanage, are picked up by vampire pirates, or vampirates. At first Grace, the heroine, doesn’t realise why she must stay indoors and away from the crew; the discovery that some humans are being kept on board to be bled like cattle comes as a flesh-crawling shock. But then she discovers that the pirates who have her brother are worse.

“Bearing in mind current events, I’m interested in the idea that we really don’t know who our enemy is – that enemy is all a question of perspective, often derived from lack of information or misinformation and the construction of scapegoats," Somper observes. "In VAMPIRATES, the twins have grown up hearing a shanty which sets up the vampirates as being the ultimate evil – “if pirates are danger and vampires are death” – but when my heroine Grace comes into contact with the vampirates, she finds that this information may be unreliable. The vampirate captain and his comrades are indeed capable of compassion. They are essentially peace-loving and have retreated from conflict and the condemnation of society. To Grace, the pirate world is more abhorrent than that of the vampires."

Vampires may seem to be strong meat for the children's market, yet almost all classic children's literature from picture books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar onwards plays with the concept of appetite, as both pleasure and the source of all evil. Appetite for food, or life, or another person all intermingle in the person of the vampire; the Millennial Vampire could be seen as, like most of us, simply exercising sophisticated consumer choice in turning against human flesh for the free-range and cruelty-free.

"As much as you might play around with elements of the vampire myth, you can’t get away from the central idea that vampires crave blood, " Somper agrees. "In VAMPIRATES, some of the vampires have imposed controls on this need and found ways to meet it without harming others. But other vampires think such control is a denial of their true self, constructing a whole new vampirate society, based on yielding entirely to your appetite."

Chaste, self-denying, humane and civilised the new vampire might seem to be in danger of becoming too anodyne an anti-hero to last. Yet the one thing the vampire does not hunger for, in any incarnation, is revenge. By playing on our deepest hopes rather than our deepest fears, Dracula's descendents may yet prove to have a stake in our own hearts rather than the other way about.

ends

The Times, January 2006