Two Portraits of the Vampire as a Young Woman by June Pulliam
Jefferson, Jemiah. Voice of the Blood. New York: Leisure, 2001. 283 p.
Mosiman, Billie Sue. Red Moon Rising. New York: DAW, 2001. 320 p.
When Bram Stoker created Dracula, the hirsute count with halitosis, he never dreamed that readers would ultimately find the monster more sympathetic, more fascinating, than the Count's tedious pursuers. Numerous retellings of the Dracula story attest to this fact. In later versions, the Count is attractive and sympathetic, and in an age that values youth sufficiently to foster a booming cosmetic surgery industry, the undead life is more appealing than appalling. Thus the vampire in general has been transformed from the fifthly fiend of traditional lore to a glamorous celebrity whose need for human blood is a small price to pay for living large. Of course, vampire literature doesn't always follow this neat little formula, but overall, tales of nosferatu have gone from emphasizing the need to stop them, to following the exploits of those who wish to join the exclusive ranks of the undead. Some vampires regret their choices (or lack thereof), while others are glad to have joined this elite fraternity of ghouls. Jemiah Jefferson's Voice of the Blood and Billie Sue Mosiman's Red Moon Rising are both coming of age novels of sorts, about the individual's transformation from life to undeath. Each novel's central character is a young woman on the cusp of her transformation, learning how to deal with her new vampiric powers and the awesome responsibility that comes with eternal life. As neophyte vampires, both women must learn the particular mythology or set of rules that governs their worlds. Most appropriately, before her transformation, each woman is a student, albeit studying a mere mortal curriculum.
Red Moon Rising has an interesting premise--people that we rational, scientific humans believe are suffering from porphyria are actually individuals genetically predisposed to become vampires. And these vampires aren't undead nosferatu, but rather, super-mortals who need human blood to maintain their extreme longevity and preternatural recuperative powers. This connection in itself isn't original. Stephen Spruell does the same thing in his Rulers of Darkness series. However, the porphyria connection is a relatively small part of Mosiman's vampire mythology.
What is original about her story are the choices the afflicted must make once they discover their true nature. Dell Cambian is a normal high school girl concerned about nothing more serious than friends and dating, when one day mysterious lesions appear on her body. Within hours, she falls ill with severe, flu-like symptoms. But Dell's illness isn't a mystery to her parents, both of whom are afflicted with this condition, and who have already seen their eldest son through this transformation. They know what to do--they call Mentor, a 1000 year old vampire, to help Dell make this transition into her new life.
Mentor explains to Dell that her new life will necessitate her deciding what type of vampire she'll be: a Predator, a Craven, or a Natural. Predators and Cravens, as their names suggest, are the extremes of vampiric behavior. Predators are completely animal, unencumbered with any human notions of morality. They have no qualms about taking human life, and in fact, enjoy all aspects of hunting and feeding. Because killing is their vocation and avocation, they're all too happy to supply others with human blood at a huge profit to themselves. Cravens, on the other hand, are seriously handicapped by their notions of morality. They are so averse to killing that they must depend on Predators to supply them with blood. And here's where their own sense of morality warps them. In order to survive, they turn to prostitution and petty theft to pay blood money to the Predators. Their unwillingness to kill allows the Cravens to be easily exploited and compels them to part with any shreds of dignity they might have.
In between these two extremes are the Normals. Like the Cravens, they too are averse to killing. However, they refuse to allow their need for blood to make them into beings devoid of dignity or unable to control their own fate. Mosiman's categories of vampires invites a comparison to class distinctions. If the Predators are aloof aristocrats or multi-millionaires, above the law and conventionality morality, then the Cravens are the working and under classes, forced to do whatever is necessary to keep body and soul alive, and sometimes degraded by the choices they must make. The Normals are a sort of undead bourgeoisie. Like other vampires, they too need blood to survive, but their strong work ethic allows them to earn enough cash to pay their suppliers, even if that means there is less money left over to provide them the material possessions of a middle class existence. Dell discovers that her parents are Normals, and decides that she too is a Normal. This understanding of her own personal philosophy of life leads her to pursue a relationship with a human boy, something frowned upon by Mentor who says that such "mixed" unions are fraught with difficulties.
Mosiman's vampire mythology could lead to an interesting story. How did Dell come to discover that she was a Normal? How did other vampires discover their own true nature? If Dell were a child of Craven or Predator parents, would she too become this sort of vampire? Do vampires make this lifestyle choice based on some innate programming, or are their overriding life philosophies something learned from their parents in much the same way children often adopt the political and religious philosophies of their families? Unfortunately, Mosiman barely explores these issues. Instead, Dell's life becomes inter-twined with that of another newbie vampire, a ruthless old man who wants to cheat death, and two physicians who begin to wonder why the supply of a local blood bank goes missing when some of it is sent away for AIDS testing. These characters and the ensuing plot twist are predictable fare, and as a result, neophyte Dell's struggles are just plain boring. When the novel ends, I just don't care anymore about these characters.
Another problem is Mosiman's lackluster writing style. It's usually competent, but sometime slips from this minimal bar. Dialog is often tedious. True, a writer often wants to recreate life, but then again, we turn to fiction to have our world presented to us anew, as something different and interesting. Thus, it is not necessary to reproduce inane exchanges that anyone might have over the course of the day. A competent writer assumes that the reader knows these exchanges take place, and they're about as interesting as reading about tooth flossing or waxing the floor. Also, her explanation of her particular vampire mythology is rather hackneyed. It's always struck me as pretentious when authors give characters the names of common nouns, or when common nouns are transformed into proper nouns to name whole groups of people or their conspiracies. The technique is a cheap shortcut to making things sound more important than they are, and such pretense really doesn't fit the novel's setting, Dallas, Texas. Texas, and the United States overall, is short on ancient white people history. The United States isn't Avalon, and Big Mythologies of that sort just don't work here.
Voice of the Blood, on the other hand, follows a more typical narrative structure for a vampire novel, and Jefferson seems to be giving a nod to two of the three female vampire novelists from New Orleans. Ariane, a science grad student, falls in love with two vampires, each giving her a different example of how she could live her life. The first vampire is reminiscent of Anne Rice's Louis or Armand from her Vampire Chronicles. A hopeless romantic, Ricari is averse to killing, so he spends much of his elegant undeath starving and brooding. Ricari would like to end his ceaseless existence, but since he's a devout Catholic, he cannot commit suicide. Instead, he has selected Ariane to kill him in exchange for his vast fortune. But Ariane isn't very happy about this plan, especially since she finds herself falling in love with Ricari, who in spite of all his whininess, is decadent and beautiful. Instead, she keeps pressing him for details about his life. In another allusion to Rice, Ariane discovers Ricari was made by two 18th century lesbian lovers on a whim (Vampire Chronicle fans will remember that Claudia the child vampire was made by Lestat for Louis on a lark in a sad attempt to make them closer). But Ricari becomes impatient with Ariane's continuing demands for further intimacy and information about Daniel, the one vampire he has created. After a quarrel that turns physical, Ricari sends a badly wounded Ariane to Daniel simply so she'll shut up and satisfy her own curiosity.
Decadence is the only quality Daniel shares with his maker and former love. If Ricari is reminiscent of Anne Rice's characters, Daniel is very like Poppy Z. Brite's punkish Goth vampires in Lost Souls. A musician and performance artist, Daniel lives in a crumbling Los Angeles building with a coterie of teenaged waifs, male and female in a sort of joyful, existentialist commune. He shares sex, drugs, and blood with these children of the night and has no compunction about killing strangers on the street or one of his bed partners in the heat of passion. He doesn't even pay his phone bill. Daniel's bed partners and hangers on know that he's a vampire, and that they could be the meal or fuck du jour as suits his mood. Some of them even actively cultivate death. Nineteen year old Lovely isn't old enough to drink alcohol, but wants Daniel to kill him on his 21st birthday because he's convinced that it's all downhill from there.
Soon after her arrival in Los Angeles, Ariane falls in love with Daniel. Eventually he makes her into a vampire and she uses her scientific training to begin understanding the physical laws of her new condition. The novel ends with Ariane turning her mortal lover John into a vampire, but this exchange of bodily fluids fails to bring them closer together. Instead, vampiric blood exaggerates characteristics already present when the recipient was mortal, and John is now more aloof than ever.
Jefferson's narrative is a bit more typical--vampires are decadent and cruel, but mortals fall in love with them anyway; becoming a vampire is painful and disgusting; vampires have athletic sex every night--but her visual and witty literary style makes Ariane's tale compelling. And instead of Big Mythology, we have a protagonist chronologically and intellectually more mature than Mosiman's Dell, and thus, better able to relate her experiences. Ariane observes that the vampires in her "extended hemophagic family" were all created at a strategic time in their lives, "that time in one's life where living becomes an effort for the first time." Ariane observes that she herself "was not old enough yet to see life as a blessing, as something to be treasured and appreciated as it goes along." Instead, she became "became long-lived right at the time when it no longer seemed like something to desire. The very young take it in stride . . . that the immortality they feel inside is the real thing." Here the vampire isn't someone with an interesting disability, but instead someone more like everyone else, a creature that experiences eternally the existential angst we all go through as teens and young adults. Perhaps it is this similarity that makes Jefferson's portrait of the vampire a masterful chiaroscuro rather than a paint by numbers caricature.