The Vampire Reflection

For the classic vampire, a mirror could be a source of its downfall: a vampire has no reflection, so a mirror could betray a bloodsucker's hidden nature. As a society goes, professor Peter Logan says that society has used the vampire in literature to mirror its own fears, desires, and social norms. Logan says, "a vampire is a tool with multiple uses, and clearly one that continues to be meaningful in different ways to a new generation," whether it's a fear of paupers, foreign aristocracy, unbridled sexuality, or embodying the conflicted antihero. Twilight is the newest of the societal reflections being consumed whole-heartedly by a new generation of vampire afficianados. Logan points out that the newest entries into the vampire continuum are more directly focused on sexuality — from the TV show True Blood, which includes a lot of vampire sex, to Twilight's boy-meets-girl courtship, they cross a line, where formerly vampires, being dead, weren't consummators of their sexuality, using other ways to express eroticism.

But, are vampires really that big of a genre now, besides the clumsy goths that shop at Hot Topic? If my recent trip of B. Dalton at West Acres is any clue, vampire and vampire-related books compose around half of all books published recently. OK, an exaggeration, but there's some evidence:


The B Dalton Top Twenty Paperbacks wall includes five (that's ¼) novels of the Charlaine Harris "Southern Vampire Mysteries" series.

This table has the sign "Beach Reading" prominently above it -- it includes three vampire books, and one zombie book. When I think girlie beach reads, blood and gore are right up there, you know.

The Young Adult fiction section has some — my daughter bought one of these cartoon-cutout-cover vampire books. Wait — then I turn around, and see this wall of vampire:


No, seriously, it required that many arrows, and I actually think I'm actually short a few. Young adult fiction is filthy with probably quickly- and poorly-written vampire erotica lite. But, hey, you follow where the money goes, and if teen girls aren't spending it on cellphone bling or shoes or whatever, they're going to buy it on mildly lusty vampirotica. Oh, and just to toss in some more undead:


Yup, that's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, in the Young Adult Fiction aisle. I thought it odd, but Barnes & Noble (who run B Dalton now) lists it in Young Adult as well. The living dead have never been so popular among tweens as it is now; how does that reflect on our society today?

Updates:

• "And vampirism essentially came out of the closet as a metaphor for the act of love that kills." – Neil Gaiman, on the current crop of vampire antiheroes, and how vampires are at their saturation point in literature. Via.
• "The myth seems to be twittering promiscuously to serve all avenues of life, from cereal boxes to romantic fiction."– Guillermo Del Toro, on the vampire's ubiquity in modern fiction. Via the same place as the Gaiman link.