Scarlet Ribbons

Suzy McKee Charnas

I have the peculiar (but my no means unique) distinction of being an author of a dozen published books who is also a “one-book author,” or rather an author known primarily to the general public for only one book among many. This is because I had the temerity to write, early in my career, a novel about a vampire.

Friends, aspiring authors, you do this at your peril: if successful, your vampire book will enveigle its way into the rest of your life, overshadow your more “serious” work for great numbers of your readers, sneak around interminably in your imagination looking for new expressive opportunities, and undercut (as well as support) your career for the rest of your natural life (and, who knows, perhaps beyond). You will be bound in scarlet ribbons of your own devising, never to be loosed again (but oh, they are beautiful...).

Not for nothing are vampires called “undead.” If a fictional vampire develops staying power with the public, it is apparently limitless staying power (see Dracula; see Lestat; see Christopher Lee and Bela Lugosi, actors whose careers were to a greater or lesser extent devoured by their vampire roles). Your sturdy vampire is with you, his author, forever, in a way that Sherlock Holmes was with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who really wanted to be remembered for his historical novels (and they're not bad, either).

Come to think of it, isn't Holmes rather vampiric himself, with his skinny frame, unsocial habits, chilly cleverness, irresistable substance addiction, love of the arts (well, playing the violin anyway) and world-weary, soul-eating boredom from which only criminal drama can rescue him?

Hmmmm...

But to return to the heart (such as it is) of my subject, the vampire proper and the author who tangles with him (or her) in fiction: why (apart from fond hopes of making huge amounts of money from sales and film rights) do it? Your vampire novel alienates the literary establishment from the rest of your work forever (the only thing more undying than a vampire is the deeply ignorant snobbery of the literatti toward anything that is marketed with a genre label), and many readers likewise turn up their noses at anything identified as “a vampire book,” as if afraid that the book itself were about to bite them and suck them dry if they are so unwise as to touch it... unfortunately, these are often the very readers — those with the hopeful expectations of fiction, or what we used to call standards — you wish to reach if you have serious ambitions as an author (and most of us do, no matter how we may protest that we're just entertainers competing against beer and TV for the public's loose change).

I offer my own experience here as an example of how it happens that otherwise sensible writers find themselves writing about mythical blood-drinking monsters, and of what such indulgence leads to.

It is, in its way, a curious tale, considering that I never had any intention of writing about a vampire and was in fact well-launched into what turned out to be a thirty-year-long SF project at the time that the scarlet ribbons of vampire fiction snared me — and life was never the same again. My vampire was, in fact, the answer and solution to my first and (so far) only case of Writers' Block: I had made a bit of a stir with my first novel, gotten lambasted as a corruptor of youth for its sequel, and was horribly bogged down in the creation of the third volume, so bogged down that I gave up and ran away.

That is, I locked up my studio and flew to New York to give a talk at Skidmore College about the second volume of my ongoing SF epic, which was safely completed and between covers; no worries there. As airplane-reading on the way east I picked up a copy of Omni magazine and began idly turning over in my mind a sentence or two I found in it about an attempt to create artificial blood for medical use. This was 1978 or so, and as far as I know they still haven't got the stuff, but it seemed like a nifty sort of idea for something science-fictiony, some easy little story I could knock out in a week just to get the creative juices flowing again.

Yeah, but what? Well, blood, right? So maybe something about a vampire; a vampire who unknowingly drinks from somebody who's a test-subject for this artificial blood, and — and — it kills the bloodsucker? So? Dumb story, no more than a tired retread of the weary tale of the vampire who bites somebody with some horrible disease and who then dies of the tainted meal. I abandoned the idea, such as it was, did my scheduled talk, and then spent a few days enjoying New York.

As part of this R & R, I went to see the revival of the old stage play of “Dracula” by Balderston and Deane, originally produced in NYC in 1927 with Bela Lugosi as the predatory Count. While far from being a fan of vampires in general, I had loved Stoker's novel and remained endlessly fascinated by the question of how such a clumsily written mess of a book could be so thrillingly riveting. Naturally, I wanted to see the stage version that had first ignited vampire fever in the US and inspired the famous movie-version with Bela Lugosi in the title role he had first created onstage.

The play revival was invigorated by the smouldering, seductive grace of Frank Langella as the Count and by gleefully bizarre set-designs by cult cartoonist Edward Gorey; but apart from a heart-jarring moment when Dracula blasted out of his coffin with a mightily upthrust and spot-lit fist, the piece was impossibly dated and foolish. The script was much the same as the one used for Lugosi's movie performance, and while it still works as a period piece on film, on the live stage it was now ludicrous and, eventually, rather dull.

I came away very unsatisfied (the show had great reviews and I'd been anticipating something much more effective). Mulishly insisting on throwing good money after bad, I decided to go and see another play about Dracula that was on at the Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village (“The Passion of Dracula”), this one by a couple of comic book artists, I think — I no longer have my playbill — in which the story was given an even more romantic spin by having the handsome undeadnik literally die for love.

It was a much better play, a lively and amusing evening. In retrospect, though, I found it even more unsatisfying than the other show had been.

As I sat in Grand Central Station a day or so later, waiting for my sister to come in from upstate, I saw what the problem (for me) was with both plays: here is this monster-guy who drinks people's blood — a predator at the grandest level but when you come right down to it a creature dependent on humans for its very existence, a parasite, even, like — like a giant mosquito — presented on stage as Casanova, the irresistable lover, the tragical wandering immortal, with a grand Romantic streak a mile wide.

I said to myself, said I (and to my sister, too, when she got in), “There is a really interesting story here somewhere, but it's about a vampire that's a predator, not Rudolph bloody Valentino. When I figure out what that story is I'm going to write it.”

And I did.

What I worked out over the next few days was that the core problem is the standard idea of the vampire as an ex-human being, someone alienated from his own humanity by death (pretty irresistibly alienating, that) and by some sort of damnation, but who because of his earlier status as one of us is still subject to human emotions — loneliness, longing, guilt, remorse, and love.

Suppose you had a vampire who was not a human being and had never been one? Suppose his emotions were by nature those of the man-eating tiger? Suppose his existence were absolutely singular, so that he had no vampire society to interact with in ways left over from previously human existences (yes, I had read Anne Rice's first book and enjoyed it — and she'd done the modern society of vamps to a turn, so why bother doing it again with less gusto)?

On the plane home, it started to come together: a vampire who is an ancient creature produced by evolution, not by a deal with the devil or a nasty bite on the neck, and who operates under cover of a human identity in a university setting (I was still thinking about artificial blood at the time, which I reasoned would be developed in a teaching hospital attached to a university). He is not in any way (except expert mimicry) One Of Us: he does not love us or envy us or lust after our sexy bodies, because having relationships with us is nothing to him except a bothersome necessity on the way to what he really wants, which is our blood. We are his livestock. You do not (normally) fall in love with cows.

Meantime, thinking about artificial blood had produced another character possibility for this story: to whom might artificial blood, blood with no racial origins, be a significant threat? To the worst racists I could think of, the Afrikaaners of South Africa in the harshest years of Apartheit, when blood as a racial marker was crucial to each citizen's entire life and prospects. So I had this university prof (my vampire would need social and professional status to maximize access to healthy, middle-class prey, right?) and then there's this human person from South Africa, now living in the US (I definitely wanted to sidestep writing in detail about a place I had never been to).

I held these two in my head (along with the teeth-jarring vibrations of jet engines) in the kind of creative tension that happens when fictional people start to form up in the imagination, and I let things happen. What happened was that the two of them morphed into identities melded out of elements from real life and from my reading. This is how fictional characters are made up.

He merged with the image of a paleontologist whose work I had read and loved in college, Loren Eiseley, who wrote about great vistas of time that my vampire character would have stamped into his own cellular memory. Even the facial type was right, massive and craggy, and in the cover photos on his books Eiseley appeared as a kind of distanced, solitary figure that suited my developing concept down to the ground.

With him, my professor of — of anthropology, a field with which I had a usable familiarity — came a setting, clear, recently visited, and packed with usable sensory detail. It was the faculty club at Skidmore, where I had just stayed overnight on my lecture stop.

Along with that physical setting came the basic human person from whom my vampire's antagonist, the South African Katje de Groot, developed. The Skidmore Faculty Club had at that time a housekeeper, a foreign woman -- French or French Canadian, I seem to recall — and this quickly translated into my displaced Boer widow.

With that — with the appearance of two strong characters in a setting I could see — the whole artificial blood notion vanished, replaced by a real story derived from the characters themselves: the quintessential hunter, Weyland the vampire, stalks someone who turns out to be not a dear, as it were, caught in the headlights, but a seasoned hunter herself. Katje now began to take on some of the characteristics I remembered from real people described in books like Out of Africa and The Flame Trees of Thika, about White colonial life East Africa: real women who shot real lions.

I never considered making my vampire female because of the Romanticism of the two plays I had just seen. I was entranced with the prospect of satirizing their hackneyed notion of the sexy male vampire who seduces and overwhlems women into orgasmic blood-donation, and upsetting the applecart entirely with Katje, who knows a predator when she sees one and who stalks him in turn. My vampire, Edward Lewis Weyland, far from being your irresistable seducer, was going to pick the wrong prey and as a result have a very rough ride.

I detail this process here because it's a clear example of how stories and characters form in the mind of the sort of author who finds her story by thinking up some people and flinging them into eachother's lives to see what happens, instead of setting up a plot and then filling in the blanks with figures designed to fit a completed story-line. The process as I know it is less like building a bridge from a blueprint than like a roller-coaster ride, with new discoveries continually jerking you up short and shifting the direction of the tale. The complete pattern is, in the end, only revealed through the writing itself.

When I got home I wrote the story and submitted it to Omni in honor of that initial, essential (if ultimately discardable) seed of an idea, artificial blood. The fiction editor at that time, Ellen Datlow, bought and published “The Ancient Mind at Work,” which later became Chapter One of my vampire novel — the book that has brought me the most readers, that is still making me money every year, and that is the only novel I've written that has attained (as I read from time to time in articles on vampire literature) the status of a “classic.”

It may be the book for which I am remembered (if I am remembered) in the same way that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is remembered for Sherlock Holmes. The peculiar thing is that according to my father I am a blood descendant, on his mother's side, of those same Doyles (albeit a fairly distant one). Odd, Watson, very odd indeed — but mere whimsical conjecture after all.

Meantime, you will have noticed that Weyland appeared first in a story, a complete story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. My vampire book did not begin life as a book at all; and I thought the story was done.

But those scarlet ribbons are not so easily cast off and left behind, as I was shortly to discover.