Towards a Philosophy of the Undead

I think I may have recovered from the loss. And there's a lot of ground to cover here, so let's get started.

I think I may have mentioned before that I prefer my vampires to be more like monsters than sex machines. I have no interest in the love lives of the undead, or really in any story that hinges so strongly on convincing me of the IRRESISTIBILITY of someone. I think this is a place (one of so many) where Twilight falls apart for me.

There are a lot of stories that depend on the weight of their love story to work. That is, depend on my believing that the lovers really need to end up together--emotionally, practically, whatever--and that whatever crazy stuff that either impedes them or results from their fighting for their love makes sense. In some stories, it works--Romeo and Juliet is a great, iconic example--and in some it doesn't--see Star Wars Episode III: Vader is a Dink. Twilight wants to be a book where this works, wants me to believe that these two people have a mystic connection. It takes a good writer to prove that--someone who can use words other than "attractive" to describe the main character's voice, and whose idea of soul-baring conversation does not involve questions about favorite colors and flowers.

I can believe in the lust--she throws that at me enough. But I can't see it as a bond, something that holds them together in the face of, you know, his undeadness and society's disapproval and whatever else they're going to run into before the book blessedly ends. I won't bother you with all the ways in which he's emotionally abusive and kind of creepy, either. But she just hasn't sold me on why being with a vampire is so yummy.

Interestingly, the author claims she didn't read many (or maybe it was any) other vampire books before she wrote hers. (This explains why they can go out during the day,though not why they bother attending high school.) But she seems pretty well plugged into the idea that Vampires Are Sexy. Which brings me back to: why?

Vampire people are different than zombie people. After death, vampires become more, stronger, faster, sexier. Maybe even smarter and richer and more talented. Zombies become less--slower, dumber, a void where people used to be. Vampires are better than people, except for the morality bit--zombies are less than people in every way. To put it Freudianly, vampires are about sex, zombies are about death. Vampires are about something better, zombies are about something worse.

The vampire model doesn't make sense to me. You're dead. In most of these stories, the absence of morality (and the ability to eat garlic) are really almost no loss at all--vampires just live the sweet (if dark) life. I can't buy into that, somehow, and I'm not even sure why it's fun to read about.

Zombies, on the other hand, are SCARY AS HELL. They are death incarnate, and they're coming for you. With the added bonus of wearing the faces and dessicated bodies of people you maybe used to know. And they're trying to eat you. Not just drink your blood like some sort of froufrou aperatif. Chomp chomp like a turkey leg at the fair. They're messy, and scary, and, as such, represent more of what there is to be afraid of in the world. I'm not afraid of sexy. And it's hardly worth it to be afraid of inhumanly fast and strong. Death by vampire would be pleasant--either swift, or sexy, or becoming one of them (well, I'd argue that as pleasant, but still). There is nothing less than awful about being eaten by a zombie.

This post is going off the rails a bit; I'm sorry y'all missed the one that Blogger ate, because it was much more coherent. We'll wrap it up with a few quick observations.

1) Twilight is mediocre at best.
2) The Forest of Hands and Teeth was a good, if flawed, story, that did the zombie thing REALLY well.
3) I like my vampires more like zombies.
4) Looking forward to 99 Coffins, the sequel to 13 Bullets, by David Wellington. Now those are vampires.