Kiss Me With Those Red Lips

Kiss Me With Those Red Lips. A Little Lower This Time.

01/22/2007

My first thought after beginning Live Girls was that it really comes as no surprise that someone has finally equated vampirism with fellatio. In fact, I’d say I was surprised it took so long.

My second thought, after noticing the copyright date (1987), was that it must have taken a brave soul to actually write about vampires inhabiting a strip club/sex club back in the Reagan heydays, when snorting coke added life, greed was good, but sex was still dirty and repressed.

Unfortunately, my final thought after finishing this reissue of an early Garton novel was that it is destined to be remembered, if it is remembered at all, as the blowjob vampire book. When all is said and done, Live Girls is a rather forgettable story—even given its shocking and original premise.

The novel follows the escapades of Davey Owens, Casey Thorne, and Walter Benedek, to whom readers are introduced separately in the first three chapters. Owen, the protagonist, has a dead end job as an editor for a publication house. However, he is harangued continually by his supervisor for “thinking outside the box.” Eventually, he discovers that the reason he has not advanced in all his years is because he has not slept with the boss. Granted, it may be poetic justice to see a male character in this predicament, that is were it not for the misogynistic portrayal of the supervisor. Thorne is the female colleague who is interested in Owens. She sees him as a lovable loser, a man who just cannot understand what is good for him, a man who often ends up in abusive relationships for this very reason. Benedek is a newspaper reporter whose sister and niece are killed by a vampire who just happened to be his brother-in-law, Vernon Macy.

We find out Macy has been frequenting a New York club named Live Girls, where once one is approved to go inside, he is taken to a window where he can watch an exotic dancer, place his penis through what amounts to a glory hole, and receive the ultimate blowjob. Problem is that the guys who have found this little secret also find themselves bleeding from their penises, becoming lethargic, and seriously jonesing for the next time they can visit one particular dancer named Anya. Davey, like Macy, is drawn into this club, and his transformation into Anya’s sex slave and fledgling vampire makes up the bulk of the novel.

Predictably, once he has his powers, Davey begins to terminate the existence of all the characters (his supervisor, a fellow employee who is a jerk, his ex’s new abusive boyfriend, etc.) who have made his life miserable. This type of formulaic melodrama only serves to elongate the reader’s boredom with Davey’s transformation. I never did like those horror texts, be they in literature or film, where one could pick out the victims from the onset based on personality traits (i.e., girls who whine or whimper, arrogant ladies’ men, comic relief characters, etc.), and this novel falls into that category much too readily. Of course, the flip side of that coin is that these hackneyed story lines are always predictable in that readers know immediately who won’t be killed. In this case, our hero and his romantic interest miraculously defeat the vampires; Davey’s soul is saved; Benedek gets the story he needed. They all live happily ever after.

And ultimately, that is the problem with too many horror titles. It has never ceased to amaze me that an author can go through great pains to create a truly horrifying, virtually unstoppable monster—only to find some overly simplified method of killing off said monster(s), just so that the good guys can win again. What is even worse is those horror texts where not only does the aforementioned silliness occur, but the final scene we have of the principles is one in which they are smiling, God’s in his heaven, and all is right with the world. How this constitutes a good scare, or even a disquieting foray into the human condition, in anyone’s book, is beyond me.