Children’s Literature

We Wish You a Morbid Christmas

Posted by sarahlthomson on Dec 22, 2011 in Children's Literature | 0 comments

Here is a little holiday tidbit for you. It’s not to do with vampires, precisely, but it has ghosts and death in it, so I figure it’ll fit right in.

“Old Marley was as dead as a doornail. Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it.” –Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

Well, Charles, I can now tell you why doornails are dead. A nail that is driven entirely through a piece of wood (so that the pointed end sticks out) and then has that pointed end hammered down to hold the nail in place, is called “dead.” In the old days, hinges were always put on door with dead nails, to hold them extra firmly since they got so much use. There you go. Doornails are dead.

Happy holidays to all!

The Dawn Is Coming

Posted by sarahlthomson on Nov 14, 2011 in Book: Mercy: The Last NE Vampire, Children's Literature | 1 comment

So, the movie of Breaking Dawn is out this Friday, which inspires me to offer a few thoughts on the topic: Why are vampires so sexy?

They’re not.

I realize I’m in the minority here, although how much of a minority, I’m not sure. I do know that I tend to introduce the topic of Mercy to people by saying, “I have a new book out; it’s a vampire story; it’s not a romance,” (with that last part spoken very quickly). I see my listeners’ eyes glaze over but then brighten as they process the fact that my vampires do not sparkle, stalk teenage girls, or moon over their human love interests/meals. Now, I’ve got nothing against a good paranormal romance if that’s your thing, but lately it seems like everyone assumes anybody with fangs must be Mr. Darcy in disguise.

It’s Bram Stoker’s fault. Nobody thought vampires were sexy or even handsome before Dracula. All that repressed Victorian sexuality came boiling over (even more rabidly in the movies than the books, although it’s there in the book, too, right under the surface), and biting virginal young woman became a metaphor for deflowering them. All well and good, it made for a great story, but–

–BUT–

–it was fiction.

There was a time when people did not see vampires as fiction. They saw them as fact. Rare, odd, not something to be spoken of openly, but real. The vampires of folklore, the vampires that people truly believed in–vampires like Mercy Brown–were not seductive, alluring, or wickedly attractive. People did not want to have sex with them. They wanted to kill them, many times over if possible. They wanted to destroy them. They were scared to death of them.

That was the vampire tradition I wanted to get in touch with when I was writing Mercy.

I respect Bram Stoker, I like Dracula, but I think it’s time to shake off his deathgrip (as it were) on the vampire theme. Vampires, after all, are about death much more than they are about sex. The central vampire question isn’t “Are you dying to have sex with me?” It’s “How scared are you of dying? What would you do to live forever?”