Vampires don’t sparkle!

Twilight Saga author Stephenie Meyer

<flame suit on>

Disclosure the first: I did read Twilight but not any of the sequels, nor did I see the movie.

Disclosure the second: As the title of this post proclaims, I’m not terribly keen on the idea of sparkling vampires, so much so that my wife bought me a T-shirt for my birthday last year. However, I do recognize Mrs. Meyer’s right to create sparkly vampires, no matter how much I might dislike the concept.

Yeah, I know, I know. Why am I even bothering to rail against the best-selling author of the new millennium? Stephenie Meyer has a following any writer would envy (me included). But this isn’t a sour grapes post. Really. Cross my heart and hope not to die and come back as a sparkly baseball-playing vampire.

I’m not going to criticize the gushy romance of Twilight. Mrs. Meyer is writing for a pretty specific target audience, and I am very much not part of that group, just as I am not the target audience for romance novels or books on crocheting. It would be stupid and presumptuous of me to criticize Meyer for not writing a book that would appeal more to me. I’m sure my books probably wouldn’t appeal to her (as they don’t for a lot of people), and I’m okay with that. Taking her to task for writing a romance — which is what she set out to do — would be the same as criticizing a book about how to bake caramel apples for not having robots and particle beam weapons in it.

But I do have a small issue with her attitude toward vampires. She can do with them what she wants in her books. Hell, the vampire myth is so long in the tooth right now (pun intended) that I’m okay with shaking things up a bit. Intermittent reinvention of the vampire mythos is what has allowed it to remain around for so long in the first place.Dan Simmons did a great job with Children of the Night, and more recently Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan made the vampire a true monster again with The Strain. Ann Rice’s classic Interview with the Vampire was what started the ball rolling on this modern crop of hip, angst-ridden vamps who feel lonely and misunderstood. In fact, Interview with the Vampire led in a fairly direct line to the sparkly vampires of Twilight.

But if you’re going to reinvent something, at least know the history of what you’re reinventing. That’s where I have a beef with Stephenie Meyer. By her own admission, she knows nothing about the vampires that came before her.

Exhibit A: An interview she did with Entertainment Weekly:

Unless you’re a 12-year-old girl, you might be surprised to learn that the world’s most popular vampire novelist since Anne Rice is actually a 33-year-old Mormon mother of three who doesn’t watch R-rated movies or read horror novels. ”I just know I’m too much of a wuss for Stephen King’s books,” admits Stephenie Meyer.

Salem’s Lot is one of the best vampires novels of all time. Yes, it’s gory and violent and shocking (and not all of that from the vampires — those small-town folks in Maine can get pretty nasty all on their own). I guess I’ll give her a pass on not reading King while still encouraging her to step outside of her comfort zone and tackle one book that will make her squirm.

Have you read Bram Stoker’s Dracula?
No, but it’s on the list. I should’ve read that one a long time ago, but right now I can’t read any vampire novels. I tried, after I wrote Twilight, to read The Historian, because it was the big thing that summer. But I can’t read other people’s vampires. If it’s too close [to my writing], I get upset; if it’s too far away, I get upset. It just makes me very neurotic.

She hasn’t read Dracula?! DRACULA?! Words escape me. And The Historian is a pretty good read. (I’ll give her some props for saying Dracula is on her reading list.)

Is it true you’ve never seen a vampire movie?
I’ve seen little pieces of Interview with a Vampire when it was on TV, but I kind of always go YUCK! I don’t watch R-rated movies, so that really cuts down on a lot of the horror. And I think I’ve seen a couple of pieces of The Lost Boys, which my husband liked, and he wanted me to watch it once, but I was like, It’s creepy!

Okay, she’s a Mormon, so I won’t get on her too much for not wanting to watch R-rated movies. But she needs to have some understanding of the rich and varied history of vampires, at least in book form. To claim complete ignorance of a genre of literature that she’s inherited (for better or worse) does a disservice not only to those that came before but to herself as a writer. She chose to write about “creepy” and “icky” vampires. No one put a nail gun to her temple and said, “Write me a sparkling vampire story or else!”

That choice isn’t a free lunch. It comes with an obligation to understand what those who came before her have done with this enduring genre, if only so she can decide where to be different and what to keep the same.

Please, Mrs. Meyer. Even if you never write another vampire book again, you owe it to yourself — and your readers — to read a few of the classics. They’re good. They won’t — or shouldn’t — make you neurotic. Read them for the great stories they are. You’ll enjoy them, and have some fun in the process.