Love Beyond the Pale: the vampire in pulp romance
One of the most curious sub-genres going these days is the vampire pulp romance. It seems that the Cartland clan have finally cottoned on to the tallest, darkest stranger on the block, and it’s making an uneasy mix. Girl meets boy, (big, bad and brooding), they fall in love, but he can’t have her. Usually this is because or hero might lose control and have a mid-coital snack that she’d never recover from. Then things become very curious as the romance conventions kick in.
Firstly, no matter how unlikely, the happy couple have to get married before any penetration occurs (until this blessed event, almost anything else goes, as long as it ends with “No, no, I can’t”).
Secondly, no matter how much she is attracted to his dark, mysterious nature, he must be ‘cured’ of his vampirism before they can live happily ever after. None of which makes a great deal of sense to the urban vampire reader, but it’s a window into what the conventional, suburban world considers ‘a bit of rough’.
You will have noticed by now that the love story is always heterosexual, and the vamp is always the guy. What is the girl? A witless damsel so stupid that you wish the dude would just rip her throat out and get it all over with. The guy runs around being all angst-ridden, sending mixed signals and sleeping in a coffin, despite that it takes her three quarters of the book to work out what he is, (when she invariably faints). During this ‘getting to know you’ phase the girl is hypnotized and siphoned, lapsing in and out of conscious so often she should qualify for frequently flyer miles, and never thinking anything of it. Whenever she questions his bizarre behavior, he demands she ‘trust him’ and she dutifully does. The down-hill chapters involve tying up the cure, marriage and sex loose ends. The sex when it ‘comes’ is usually boring, missionary and highly metaphorical.
The vamp himself is tall (of course), dark (of course), a Count or Baron and usually mock-foreign. This involves a castle and an accent that makes the Swedish chef look like a method actor. Usually he chooses one word (‘cara’, ‘ma petit’ or ‘cherie’ are popular) and says it about once a paragraph throughout the whole book. In between shape-changing, flying, hypnotizing people and living for ever, he lurks mournfully around the under-age bimbo and tries to turn back into a mortal (why!?).
It only remains to tell you which authors you should watch out for (generally so you can dodge, unless you love-to-hate as much as me).
Amanda Ashley writes the classic (read clichéd) plot. The heroes favor ‘cara’ as their mock-foreign phrase. Featuring ‘Embrace of the Night’; Sara who is the most pure and pathetic pin-cushion in the west, (paralyzed and training to be a nun). Also, ‘Shades of Gray’ and ‘A Darker Dream’.
Jasmine Cresswell’s ‘Prince of the Night’ is an example of a vamp who turns out to be an alien (‘yuck!’). The problem is that the vamp-aliens are all male, and women who sleep with them invariably die giving birth. For no apparent reason love conquers all and produces an heir (oh, goody).
Sabine Kell’s ‘A Deeper Hunger’ has a heroine who falls unconscious more often than she falls asleep, and still hangs around for more. Has the temerity to promote itself as “in the immortal tradition of Interview with The Vampire” (much in the same way that Tupperware is in the tradition of Royal Doulton).
Susan Krincaid’s ‘Prince of Dreams’ is one of the more extreme examples of brainless love. She thinks he may have killed her cousin, and still hangs around him like a love-struck limpet while he works his way through a list of scary vampire symptoms. Still, ‘Nicholas’ is notable as the only blond vampire I have discovered in the sub-genre so far.
Linda Lael Millar’s books are actually mildly readable as she takes the trouble to insert some semblance of a plot: ‘Forever and the Night’, ‘For All Eternity’, ‘Time Without End’ and ‘Tonight and Always’. The first book is in the love, confusion, cure, marriage, sex (in that order) mould. The others are a little more adventurous. The second actually features a female vampire and mortal male, but the third book features a character who was gay in the first book, but suddenly isn’t when the right woman comes along.
Fans of the classic ‘Dark Shadows’ TV series might look into the novelisation ‘Angelique’s Descent’, which is generally marketed as a romance, though not much romance goes on. It’s basically a pre-history of the witch character from the show (a woman spurned by the vampire Barnabus). Bizarrely, it is written by the actress (Lara Parker) who played this character in the original show.
So if you’re yearning for a Ken doll in wolf’s clothing, or a damn good laugh, this is the pulp for you. If you want real vampire love, that’s another story.
For more info and links to other books in this ‘vein’ see http:/www.geocities.com/veinglory/index.html