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CONTEMPORARY : Ethical Feeding and the Posthuman Vampire in Urban and Romance

Leigh Marion McLennon

ORCID 0000-0001-8218-3768

Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

October 2017

School of Culture and Communication Faculty of Arts The University of Melbourne

Abstract

Contemporary uses a bloodsucking to play with continually shifting social boundaries, to try on new identities, and to refract our world in a different, context. It has been widely acknowledged that from the later twentieth century onward, the vampire has become “humanised”: it has become a sympathetic figure that is no longer necessarily or definitively evil. However, this narrative of the vampire’s humanisation is often oversimplified, and closer study is needed to identify how and why representations of the vampire have further developed in the new millennium. In this thesis, I argue that since the 1980s, the vampire has developed in new ways as a posthuman figure. A vital concern has emerged over the increasingly problematic distinction between the human and the vampire, and the ways in which and humans might interrelate. This concern is most clearly elaborated in relation to how and upon whom the vampire feeds. Taking a posthumanist and feminist theoretical position, I trace the ways in which representations of vampiric feeding have changed in recent decades, thereby identifying how the boundaries between the vampire and the human have been contested and renegotiated in new ways in recent vampire literature. As a response to and interrogation of the dramatic social shifts of the posthuman era, twenty-first-century vampire literature has divided into two popular strands. The first, dominant strand, and , embraces the posthuman vampire and celebrates its potential to forge symbiotic, mutually beneficial connections between the human and the monstrous. The second, less prominent strand, the post-apocalyptic vampire narrative, rejects the posthuman vampire, suggesting that this vampire is an atavistic evil, a harbinger of the disasters that must result when humans and align and intertwine. In both these strands, the fragility of the boundaries that divide the self from the Other is foregrounded through transgressive acts of vampiric feeding. The thesis thus provides an original contribution to knowledge in three key areas. First, it provides a genre study of the (still critically underacknowledged) genre of urban fantasy and paranormal romance, and it identifies and outlines how post- apocalyptic vampire narratives emerge in opposition to that genre. Second, it offers a new critical perspective by reading the vampire as a species in the posthuman polis. And

i third, by mapping contemporary representations of vampiric feeding, the thesis elucidates some of the ways that vampires in recent literature refract contemporary sociocultural anxieties about shifting conceptions of the self and the Other.

ii Declaration

This is to certify that:

i. the thesis comprises only my original work towards the PhD except where indicated in the preface; ii. due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used; and iii. the thesis is fewer than 100,000 words in length, exclusive of tables, maps, bibliographies, and appendices.

______Leigh M. McLennon

iii Acknowledgements

I offer my sincere thanks and deeply felt gratitude to the following people, whose encouragement made it possible to complete this thesis. Thank you to my supervisors, who guided me throughout this research. I am indebted to Professor Peter Otto for his ongoing support, his enthusiasm, his generosity with his time, and his valuable critical contributions. I also thank Dr. Grace Moore for her insightful feedback and her encouragement. Dr. Katherine Firth has been an inspiration and a true mentor, not only in academia but in life. I could not have triumphed over the monkey without her. From the School of Culture and Communication, I would also like to thank Professor Ken Gelder for his advice given early in my candidature; Dr. David McInnis for his encouragement and support in teaching; and all of those in the school who assisted in coordinating my study and who gave freely of their time and knowledge. I thank the Faculty of Arts and Melbourne Scholarships for their financial support, including the Australian Postgraduate Award, the Graduate Research in Arts Travel Scheme, and the Overseas Research Experience Scholarship. I am grateful to the Melbourne Global Mobility programme and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for facilitating my graduate exchange to the UIUC English Department. In particular, I thank Dr. Aleksondra Hultquist, Professor Markley, Professor Robert Rushing, Associate Professor Anthony Pollock, and Associate Professor Trish Loughran. Thank you also to the peers and friends who made me welcome in the USA and the members of the What You Will Shakespeare company. To my peers at home in Melbourne, my thanks to Dr. Corinna Box, Dr. Elena Benthaus, Dr. Athena Bellas, Dr. Naja Later, Dr. Jessica Balanzategui, Kim Clayton- Green, Dr. Anya Adair, Gabrielle Kristjanson, Tara Lomax, Sarah Richardson, Jemma Hefter, Dr. Stuart Richards, Felicity Ford, Luke van Ryn, Robbie Fordyce, and all those in the SCC and CCGC who have listened to me, encouraged me, and raised a glass (and sometimes many glasses) with me. You are superstars. Thank you to the Baillieu Library, especially the colleagues with whom I spent many hours shuffling books. I am grateful to the housemates who gave me endless patience and encouragement over many a chocolate pudding, glass of wine, and Austen adaptation, especially Lauren Mackenzie, Shivawn Stevens, Meredith Faragher, and Kirsten Wade. A

iv special thanks also to dear friends and fabulous women Eleanor Bally, Claire Gawne, and Emma Capponi. I am indebted to the Very Revd. Dr. Andreas Loewe for his support and encouragement during my stay at the deanery, where he and Katherine were willing to share good books, good food, and a clever cat (the true necessities in life). To my amazing family: Mum, Dad, and Tori. Your love and support and your confidence in me made this (and everything else I do) possible. Thank you. Finally, to Nicholas Strole, my true partner in every way and the best person I know—thank you for always believing in me, supporting me, laughing with me, and for making every day better: thank you for everything.

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Contents

Abstract ...... i

Declaration ...... iii

Acknowledgements ...... iv

1. Introduction: The Development of Vampire Literature from 1990 to 2010 1 Reading the Vampire in the Twenty-First Century 1 A Brief History of the Development of the Vampire in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries 6 Sympathetic Monsters: The Humanisation of the Vampire in the Later Twentieth Century 12 Vampires from 1990 to 2010 23 A Specific Focus on Adult North American 28 Outline for the Thesis 30

PART ONE

2. The Ethics of the Abstinent Vampire in the 1980s: Contesting the Boundaries that Delimit Vampire, Human, Animal, and Race in Fevre Dream 37 Natural Vampires 37 The Vampire as Species: The Ethics of Predation 40 Reading the Animalised Vampire through the Discourse of Race 51 Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Contexts: Interconnection and American Empire 64 Looking Forward to the Vampires of the New Millennium 71

3. Defining Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance: Crossing the Boundaries of Genre, Media, Self, and Other in New Worlds, 1985–2015 75 The Emergence of Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy 75 Problems in Defining UFPR: Competing Histories and Definitions 79 An Original Genre History of UFPR 86

A New Definition for Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance 93 Crossing Boundaries: UFPR as a Thematically Transgressive, Hybrid, and Transmedia Genre 96 A Marketable Format with Content That Resonates 103

4. “I Don’t Date Vampires. I Kill Them”: Blood/Lust as a Threat to the Post- /Feminist Vampire Slayer in the Early Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Novels 107 Vampires, Feminism, and Feeding in the 1990s 107 The Emergence of the Post-/Feminist Female Vampire Slayer 108 Introducing Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter and Her “Everyday-Supernatural” World 115 The Desire to Feed as Morally Corrupting: Vampire Strippers and Junkies 122 Feeding as Consuming: Warner and the Question of Who Eats Whom 128 Refusing the Vampire Bite: From Vampire Slayer to Human Servant 132 The Supernatural Sexual Politics of Meat 137 Moving Toward Intersectional Solidarity with Vampires 142

PART TWO

5. The Vampire as Posthuman: A Theoretical Framework 147 Vampires in the Twenty-First Century: The Emergence of the Post-Apocalyptic Vampire Narrative 147 Posthumanism as a Critical and Contextual Framework 155 Cyborgs, Companion Species, and Significant Otherness: Reading the Vampire through the Posthuman Theory of Donna Haraway 159 Negative and Affirmative Readings of the Posthuman Vampire 166

6. Eating Well: Vampiric Feeding as Affirmative Posthuman Interconnection in the Later Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Novels 170 Anita Blake Becomes Affirmatively Posthuman 170 Posthuman Vampires as Socially Other: Feminist Posthumanism and Monstrous Communities 172 Hamilton’s New Rules for Vampirism: How Do Vampires Eat Ethically? 175 From Slayer to Human Servant and Sexual Partner: The Shift from Consumption

to Communion in Vampiric Feeding 177 From Human Servant to Symbiotic Succubus 182 Webs of Love and Lust: When Supernatural Species Meet 189 The Posthuman Ethics of Eating Together 194

7. Conclusion: UFPR Today, the Post-Apocalyptic Vampire Narrative, and Going Forward into the Posthuman Future 201 The Vampire in the New Millennium 201 Genre Conventions in UFPR after 2000 202 UFPR and the Vampire Today 209 The Strain Trilogy and the Posthuman Vampire in the Post-9/11 Era 214 Reading the PAVN as a Backlash against UFPR 218 Vampires in the Posthuman Future 230

Bibliography ...... 233

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction: The Development of Vampire Literature from 1990 to 2010

Her beautifully rounded limbs quivered with the agony of her soul. The glassy, horrible eyes of the figure ran over that angelic form with a hideous satisfaction—horrible profanation. He drags her head to the bed’s edge. He forces it back by the long hair still entwined in his grasp. With a plunge he seizes her neck in his fang-like teeth—a gush of blood, and a hideous sucking noise follows. The girl has swooned, and the vampyre is at his hideous repast! James Malcolm Rymer Varney the Vampire, or, The Feast of Blood (1845–1847)1

Reading the Vampire in the Twenty-First Century The vampire is a monster that devours. Though it does not literally consume the bodies of humans, it is defined by its need to feed upon human life. It is usually seen as a monster that feeds on human blood, draining and drinking this blood in order to sustain its own immortal state, but it may also feed on the , emotions, souls, and sexual energy of humans. The vampire is an almost-cannibal: it feeds from the humans it closely resembles. However, its desire to feed in some way on human vitality marks the vampire as something Other than human. From early nineteenth-century literature to recent film and television, the vampire’s need to consume is visceral, intertwining bloodlust and lust in a gory spectacle of fangs sinking into flesh and delectable women sinking into swoons. Yet despite this dominant cultural image of the voracious, feasting vampire, representations of vampiric feeding have in fact changed dramatically over time.2 This

1 James Malcolm Rymer, Varney the Vampyre, or, The Feast of Blood (Crestline: Zittaw Press, 2007), 36. First published 1845–47. Emphasis in original.

1 2 thesis seeks to addresses key critical questions that remain unanswered by earlier studies of vampire literature: How, and why, has vampire literature continued to change significantly since the 1990s? Understanding the changing representation of vampiric feeding from the later twentieth century onward is crucial to understanding how vampires have come to be represented in the new millennium and why the way that they are represented has changed. Of course, it is not only the vampire who has changed significantly during this period. The cultures that produce representations of the vampire have also changed, and the vampire and its desire to consume are used in popular culture to refract very human sociohistorical anxieties. As William Patrick Day notes, “when one stands next to and looks in the mirror one sees only oneself.” 3 According to Judith Halberstam, as a monster the vampire is a “meaning machine”: it “can represent any horrible trait that the reader feeds into the narrative.”4 Yet these various meanings, these horrible traits, are not arbitrary. They are culturally determined: “Every age embraces the vampire it needs,” Nina Auerbach writes, arguing that the representation of the vampire changes with the world around it.5 Analysis of the act of vampiric feeding highlights the extent to which vampires may serve as vehicles for cultural anxieties. For example, both Christopher Craft and Talia Schaffer argue that in Dracula (1897), the vampiric bite destabilises the boundaries of normative sexuality as a simultaneously penetrative and receptive act. 6 Howard Malchow describes the vampire in nineteenth-century colonial literature as a monster that threatens the stability of civilisation and empire through its animalistic and cannibalistic feeding.7 Barbara Creed analyses the abjectness of the vampiric bite and

2 “Vampire literature” will be used throughout the thesis as a term for texts that significantly feature vampires in their narratives. This includes texts in literary fiction, popular fiction, film, television, and other media. Each medium undoubtedly influences the form and content of the individual text; however, as this thesis will show, the vampire is a highly adaptable entity, and the tropes with which it is commonly associated are transmedia tropes. 3 William Patrick Day, Vampire Legends in Contemporary American Culture: What Becomes a Legend Most (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), 5. 4 Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham, Duke University Press: 1995), 21. 5 Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 145. 6 , Dracula: A Norton Critical Edition, eds. Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal (1897; repr., New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997). See also Christopher Craft, “‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Representations 8 (1984): 109; Talia Schaffer, “‘A Wilde Desire Took Me’: The Homoerotic History of Dracula,” ELH 61, no. 2 (1994): 415, 417. 7 Howard Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).

3 cites it as an example of the vagina dentata.8 Judith Halberstam, Carol Senf, and Elizabeth Miller link the contaminating properties of the vampire’s bite in Dracula to syphilis.9 Examining vampire texts produced from the 1980s onward, Nina Auerbach, George Haggerty, and Xavier Aldana Reyes draw parallels between the vampire’s blood- letting bite and the spread of HIV/AIDS.10 Franco Moretti and Robert Latham connect the vampire’s insatiable appetite to the insatiable consumerism of modern capitalism.11 Auerbach, Kristina Aikens, and Dusty Lavoie comment on how the addictive quality of vampiric feeding evokes the struggles of drug addiction in texts from Dracula to The Lost Boys (1987) and True Blood (2008–2014).12 And William Patrick Day describes vampiric feeding as a compulsive feeding of appetite and desire without recourse to morality.13 In the last thirty years, a number of significant cultural and political shifts and events have occurred to produce the social and historical frameworks that now shape the early twenty-first century. Contemporary vampire literature uses a bloodsucking monster to play with continually shifting social boundaries, to construct new worlds, to try on new identities, and to see our own lives in a different, fantastic context. In this thesis, I argue that in recent decades, the vampire and representations of vampiric feeding have been significantly transformed. More particularly, I contend that from the later twentieth century onward, vampires begin to challenge in different ways the limits of what it means to be human. The contemporary vampire has become increasingly humanised, but since the 1980s, it has also developed in new ways as a posthuman figure. And with the emergence of fictional posthuman worlds in which

8 Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993). 9 Schaffer, “A Wilde Desire Took Me”; Halberstam, Skin Shows, 14; Carol Senf, “Dracula: The Unseen Face in the Mirror,” The Journal of Narrative Technique 9, no. 3 (1979): 168; Carol Senf, “Dracula: Stoker’s Response to the New Woman,” Victorian Studies 26, no. 1 (1982): 38, 42; Elizabeth Miller, “Coitus Interruptus: Sex, Bram Stoker, and Dracula,” Romanticism on the Net 44 (2006), http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2006/v/n44/014002ar.html?vue=integral. 10 Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, 175–82; George E. Haggerty, “Anne Rice and the Queering of Culture,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 32, no. 1 (1998): 10; Xavier Aldana Reyes, “‘Who Ordered the Hamburger with AIDS?’: Haematophilic Semiotics in Tru(e) Blood,” Gothic Studies 15, no. 1 (2013): 55–65. 11 Franco Moretti, “The Dialectic of Fear,” in Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Mille (London: Verso, 2005), 83–108; Robert Latham, Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs, and the Culture of Consumption (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002). 12 Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, 167; Kristina Aikens, “Battling Addictions in Dracula,” Gothic Studies 11, no. 2 (2009): 41–51; Dusty Lavoie, “The Vampires of True Blood and Beyond: Bodies, Desires, and Addictions in the Social Imaginary,” Proteus 28, no. 1 (2012): 29–36; The Lost Boys, directed by Joel Schumacher, Warner Bros, 1987; True Blood, created by Alan Ball, HBO, 2008–2014. 13 Day, Vampire Legends, 83.

4 vampires and humans interrelate (and compete) in new ways, a vital ethical concern has emerged that is elaborated in relation to how the vampire feeds and whom or what it may feed upon. The vampire in contemporary popular literature thus emerges as a response to and refraction of the dramatic social shifts of the posthuman era, which has resulted in a vampire literature divided into two distinct strands, one more popular and arguably less conservative than the other. Both strands of contemporary vampire literature engage with posthuman anxieties about the dissolution of the boundary between the self and the Other.14 However, they engage with these anxieties in dramatically different ways. The first, dominant strand, urban fantasy and paranormal romance (hereafter referred to as UFPR), embraces the posthuman vampire and celebrates its potential to forge symbiotic, mutually beneficial interconnections between the human and the monstrous. The second, less prominent strand, the post-apocalyptic vampire narrative (hereafter referred to as the PAVN), responds to the tropes of UFPR by rejecting the posthuman. In doing so, it returns to a more traditional representation of the vampire as monstrous Other. Unlike UFPR, PAVNs instead suggest that the posthuman vampire is a harbinger of the manifold disasters that will emerge if humans and monsters align and intertwine. In both UFPR and PAVNs, representations of vampiric feeding are used to explore anxieties centred on what it means to be post-/human. Yet few critics have considered in any depth how and why vampiric feeding has become the dominant ethical problem of contemporary vampire literature. This thesis thus offers an original contribution to knowledge in three key areas. First, it provides a detailed genre study of urban fantasy and paranormal romance, and it

14 The term “the Other” is used throughout this thesis to refer to that which is defined in opposition to, and thus both reinforces and undermines, the human. In the words of Terry Eagleton, the Other may be “a sign of something in man himself which he needs to repress, expel beyond his own being, relegate to a securely alien region beyond his own definitive limits.” This Other suggests that “what is outside is also somehow inside, what is alien is also intimate— so that man needs to police the absolute frontier between the two realms . . . because it may always be transgressed, has always been transgressed already, and is much less absolute than it appears.” Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Malden: Blackwell, 2008), 115; see also 151, 204–5. For example, Simone de Beauvoir writes extensively on the construction of women as “Other” to men in The Second Sex. She asserts that “no group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other over against itself” (xl). In her critique of gendered politics, de Beauvoir emphasizes that woman is “defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject . . . she is the Other” (xxxix–xl). In this sense, men are framed as fully feeling human subjects, while women are considered both Other and lesser beings. This relationship of the subject or self to the Other is relative, or reciprocal, but this reciprocity may be denied or go unacknowledged by the dominant group (xli). Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993).

5 identifies and outlines how post-apocalyptic vampire narratives emerge in opposition to that genre. Second, the thesis uses a feminist and posthumanist framework to engage with the vampire as an entity that challenges the limits of what it means to be human. In doing so, it focuses primarily on an analysis of interspecies relationships within the posthuman polis. Third, the thesis focuses specifically on vampiric feeding as an act that brings together humans and vampires, thereby transgressing the boundaries between the two. By mapping the ways in which the ethics of vampiric feeding have changed significantly since the 1980s, the thesis focuses on how vampires in these new respond to contemporary sociocultural anxieties about shifting conceptions of the self and the Other. This introduction establishes a brief critical history of earlier vampire literature in order to establish how the conventions of later twentieth-century vampire literature continue to influence texts produced in the new millennium. But it also pays particular critical attention to how changing genre conventions in vampire literature engage with and refract contemporary sociohistorical anxieties. A key model for my literary analysis of how the vampire changes and develops over time is found in Nina Auerbach’s Our Vampires, Ourselves. Auerbach reads innovations in vampire literature in the context of social and historical changes, suggesting that as vampire literature evolves, it is used to interrogate and refract contemporary cultural anxieties. Her seminal text offers “a history of Anglo-American culture through its mutating vampires.”15 As noted above, this history’s central claim is that “every age embraces the vampire it needs.”16 Implicit in this claim are two key questions: What is the vampire that each age embraces, and why might that age “need” this particular vampire? Auerbach traces how vampire literature develops over a series of historical phases, which span from the British Romantic period through to the American vampire literature of the late 1980s. In doing so, she correlates developing trends and conventions in vampire literature with their historical contexts. Auerbach’s model of “cycles” of vampire literature allows for a nuanced understanding of shifts within the broader genre of vampire literature as a whole.17 In this sense, Auerbach provides a useful model for conceptualising how both UFPR and PAVNs develop in the era approximated by the dates 1990–2010.

15 Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, 1. 16 Ibid., 145. 17 Ibid., 117, 145, 192.

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Auerbach reads new innovations in vampire literature through a series of brief textual analyses that place each text in its literary and sociohistorical context. Other critics have been more focused on the specific genre conventions that emerge to transform the vampire in later twentieth-century vampire fiction. The discussion to follow provides useful examples of this second critical approach. For example, essays by Jules Zanger and by David Punter and Glennis Byron read the changing nature of the vampire in the later twentieth century through its changing genre conventions.18 These conventions include the narrative elements that form patterns across vampire literature. Those narrative elements such as character types, setting, narrative technique, and (specific to vampire literature) the rules of vampirism enable us to track what changes and what stays the same in the genre.19 In its methodology, this thesis combines these two approaches to vampire literature: it performs a series of close readings that analyse how new conventions develop in vampire literature as a response to sociohistorical anxieties prevalent in the later twentieth century and early twenty-first century. In this way, I continue and update the work of Auerbach, revisiting the 1980s and adding a new cycle to those she has mapped.

A Brief History of the Development of the Vampire in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries Though found in earlier and European literature, the vampire first emerges in English literature in the poetry of Romantic poets, such as Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and

18 Jules Zanger, “Metaphor into Metonymy: The Vampire Next Door,” in Blood Read: The Vampire as a Metaphor in Contemporary Culture, eds. Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 17–26; David Punter and Glennis Byron, The Gothic (Malden: Blackwell, 2004). 19 Genre conventions that define the ontological “rules” of what it means to be a vampire in any given text include, for example, whether or not a vampire fears the holy cross, can enter a home without an invitation, can change into a bat, has psychic powers, or must drink blood to survive. New vampire texts must establish what rules apply to their particular iterations of the vampire. In this sense, as Ken Gelder argues, vampire literature is highly self-referential as a genre: each new text must intertextually respond to and distinguish itself from the antecedent literature. Gelder writes that “The is peculiar as a in that it is tied to a set of archaic ‘laws,’ or , about vampires that even the most recent vampire films are obliged to acknowledge.” In this way, he argues, “each vampire film is required to take a relational position (reproducing something, disavowing something else) to everything that has generically before.” See Ken Gelder, New Vampire Cinema (London: BFI, 2012), vi. Jeffrey Weinstock has also argued that intertextuality and referentiality are crucial elements of vampire cinema; see Jeffrey Weinstock, The Vampire Film: Undead Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). As this thesis shows, the intertextual relationality identified by Gelder and Weinstock is a key genre convention not only of the vampire film but of vampire literature more broadly.

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Byron.20 From here, it makes its way into prose through a novella written by Byron’s physician: The Vampyre, by John Polidori (1819). Polidori borrows the conceit for this novella from Lord Byron’s “Fragment of a Novel,” fleshing out Byron’s idea for a story in which two companions travel abroad, where one of them, a vampire, appears to die. Lord Ruthven, Poldori’s vampire, travels to Greece with his younger companion, Aubrey. Like the vampire in Byron’s fragment, Ruthven appears to die. In the moments before he dies, Ruthven elicits a promise from Aubrey to speak of his death to no one. This seems harmless enough, until Ruthven returns to Aubrey by wedding his sister. Because of the oath he has taken, the younger man is unable to voice his fear that Ruthven is undead, and the story ends with Ruthven feeding upon and so murdering his new bride. Critics such as Twitchell, Auerbach, and Milly Williamson note that in this early vampire literature, vampires are transformed from the decaying revenants of folklore into Romantic aristocrats.21 Auerbach adds that in the early nineteenth century, the aristocratic vampire is defined by its homosociality and is thus symptomatic of a desire for sympathetic connections between men: vampires like Ruthven “fulfi[l] the promise of Romanticism, offering a mutuality between subject and object so intense that it overwhelms conventional hierarchies and bonds. The interfusion . . . between vampire and mortal makes boundaries fluid.” 22 Auerbach thus identifies intimacy between humans and vampires as a defining characteristic of vampire literature of the nineteenth century. And in The Lure of the Vampire, Williamson reads Ruthven and the Romantic vampire through the figure of Lord Byron, suggesting that the identification of the vampire with Byron generated a fascination with, and sympathy for, the vampire as a transgressive social outcast.23 The Romantic vampire thus subverts conventional hierarchies through its intimacy with humans and its new appeal as an aristocratic transgressor, though its feeding nonetheless is both sexual and violent in nature. In the early nineteenth century, the success of Polidori’s novella led to a proliferation of vampires on the stage and in prose. Twitchell suggests that “after the first twenty years or so of the nineteenth century, the vampire . . . found a temporary

20 See James B. Twitchell, The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 1981), and Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, 26, 47–52. 21 Twitchell, The Living Dead; Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves; Milly Williamson, The Lure of the Vampire: Gender, Fiction and Fandom from Bram Stoker to (London: Wallflower, 2005). 22 Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, 19. 23 Williamson, Lure of the Vampire, 36–38, 51.

8 home in the stage before finding a permanent place in the novel.”24 By 1820, The Vampyre had been adapted by Charles Nodier for the French stage as Le Vampire, then adapted back for the London stage by J. R. Planché as The Vampire; or, The Bride of the Isles. Williamson notes that around 1820, a bluebook adaptation of Planché’s play then returned this vampire to prose in the anonymous The Bride of the Isles: A Tale Founded on the Popular Legend of the Vampire. She links this bluebook genre with female readers of the early nineteenth century, suggesting that this spin-off is both a sign of the vampire’s popularity at this time and of the “devalued status” of a popular genre that is also feminised.25 Twitchell suggests that by the mid-Victorian period, the vampire had become so familiar that it had “become a stock character to be exploited” in texts such as Rymer’s Varney the Vampire.26 Varney, a serialised penny dreadful, was the most popular vampire text of the mid-nineteenth century. Williamson emphasises, in “Let Them All In: The Evolution of the ‘Sympathetic’ Vampire,” that Varney was a “bestseller,” and that “the vampire that most British Victorian readers would have been familiar with was not the menacing Dracula, but the tortured vampire Varney.”27 She thus identifies Varney, who detests his own vampiric condition, as a key example of the sympathetic vampire in the nineteenth century, even though this vampire feeds upon (and sometimes transforms or murders) human victims. Auerbach also situates Varney as part of her nineteenth- century cycle of the “intimate” vampire. However, she argues that for Varney, this intimacy is tempered by the “capitalist democracy” that influences both his serial’s form as a mass-marketed penny dreadful and his depiction as a vampire seeking social success and financial gain.28 The best-known female vampire of the nineteenth century is Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, first published as a serial one year before its inclusion in Le Fanu’s short story collection In a Glass Darkly (1872).29 Auerbach includes Carmilla in her nineteenth- century “cycle” of intimate vampire literature, but argues that this text comes at the end of the cycle, offering a story that is “the climax and the end of a dream of intimacy so

24 Twitchell, The Living Dead, 5. 25 Williamson, Lure of the Vampire, 52. 26 Twitchell, The Living Dead, 6. 27 Milly Williamson, “Let Them All In: The Evolution of the ‘Sympathetic’ Vampire,” in Screening the Undead: Vampires and in Film and Television, eds. Leon Hunt, Sharon Lockyer, and Milly Williamson (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 71. 28 Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, 30–33. 29 Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

9 compelling only vampires could embody it.”30 She notes that this female vampire “feeds on woman with a hunger inseparable from erotic sympathy.”31 Carmilla is thus a key figure in nineteenth-century vampire literature because her feeding is rendered as both sexualised and sympathetic, rather than merely predatory. Carmilla is also a key figure in vampire literature because her story problematises the relationship between the supernatural and the everyday, the religious and the medical. Auerbach suggests that in Carmilla “the strangeness of vampirism is its kinship to the commonplace.”32 Gelder makes a related claim in Reading the Vampire when he analyses Carmilla through the psychoanalytic framework of Freud’s “The Uncanny.”33 Gelder argues that in Carmilla, the threat of the uncanny “is able to be managed” by “giving it signification”—by exposing the meaning of what is hidden.34 In this way, “[late] Victorian vampire narratives spend more time diagnosing the vampire than showing it at first hand, introducing a number of ‘paternal figures’—often doctors—into the story for exactly this purpose.”35 Through this “‘bureaucracy’ of ‘paternal figures,’” the uncanny or otherwise symbolic potential of “the vampire can be diagnosed and managed” because it can be identified and classified.36 According to Gelder, this is also true of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.37 He thus identifies a key shift in vampire literature in the later twentieth century, a move away from religious determinations of good and evil, toward classifying and defining the vampire in biological, medical, psychological, or otherwise clinical terms. Though Dracula today is often read as a definitive example of the nineteenth- century vampire,38 Auerbach argues that this text in many ways constituted a significant break from earlier vampire literature by providing “a lexicon of vampirism for the twentieth century.”39 She argues that Dracula marks the beginning of a new “cycle” of vampire literature, where vampirism is no longer intimate but invasive, “moving from

30 Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, 53. 31 Ibid., 41. 32 Ibid., 44. 33 That is, “the of the two apparently opposite German words, unheimlich (unfamiliar) and heimlich (familiar): they coincide around a sense of ‘something hidden and dangerous,’ particularly in relation to sexual knowledge.” Gelder, Reading the Vampire (London: Routledge, 1994), 44. See also Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (1919; repr. London: Penguin, 2003). 34 Gelder, Reading the Vampire, 44. 35 Ibid., 49. 36 Ibid., 50. 37 Ibid., 49. 38 For example, in Jules Zanger, “Metaphor into Metonymy: The Vampire Next Door”; see n. 74. 39 Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, 52.

10 the erotic to the clinical, from affinity to penetration.”40 The vampires of the early twentieth century, as found in F. W. Murnau’s (1922) and Universal horror films exemplified by Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), draw from Dracula, focusing on the role of vampire as a tyrannical invader that was first explored in this text.41 However, Dracula and those early twentieth-century texts it influenced continue one key convention established in nineteenth-century representations of the vampire: literature from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century predominantly represents the vampire as an evil, demonic supernatural being. In The Vampyre, for example, Lord Ruthven dies and is revived by moonlight. In Carmilla, the eponymous vampire takes on a ghostly and insubstantial form in the shape of a great cat, as she feeds upon her friend. In Stoker’s Dracula, vampires are ruled and defeated by about garlic and native earth. In Dracula’s castle, is confronted by various unnatural and evil acts, perhaps the most heinous of which is the feeding perpetrated by Dracula’s three “brides” as they devour a baby. Auerbach relates that the name “Dracula” was chosen by Stoker because he mistakenly thought that it meant “devil.”42 That vampires are ultimately evil beings remains a key assumption in vampire literature until the later twentieth century. Vampiric feeding in these nineteenth- century texts thus undermines traditional heteronormative familial structures, is sexualized negatively, and is an evil, immoral act. Ruthven, Varney, Carmilla, and Dracula remain the most influential vampires of the nineteenth century—and those most analysed by critics. Twitchell’s study, The Living Dead, was the first extended scholarly analysis of the vampire in literature. Writing in 1981, Twitchell could still describe Carmilla and Dracula as “two popular but critically neglected works.”43 However, the critical study of the vampire in literature developed rapidly from this point onward, first in scholarly essays, for example those by Craft and Senf, and then in edited collections and monographs, such as Senf’s The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century English Literature and the collection Dracula: the Vampire and the Critics, edited by Margaret L. Carter.44 These and other early studies of the vampire approach

40 Ibid., 52–53; see also 65–66. 41 Nosferatu, directed by F. W. Murnau, Prana-Film, 1922; Dracula, directed by Tod Browning, Universal Pictures, 1931. 42 Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, 134–35. 43 Twitchell, The Living Dead, 6. 44 Examples of critical essays include Craft, “Kiss Me with Those Red Lips”; Senf, “Dracula, the Uncanny Face in the Mirror”; and Senf, “Dracula: Stoker’s Response to the New Woman.” See also Carol Senf, The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (Bowling Green: Bowling

11 vampire literature, once considered a low-brow popular fiction, as a subject worthy of serious cultural critique, reading the vampire as a product of its sociohistorical context and through theoretical frameworks provided by accounts of gender, sexuality, and psychoanalysis. In the mid-to-late 1990s, a number of critical studies were published that assessed representations of the vampire in fiction, television, film, and other media, from Romantic literature until that time. These critical studies include Nina Auerbach’s cultural critique in Our Vampires, Ourselves, Ken Gelder’s Reading the Vampire, Judith Halberstam’s Skin Shows, Laurence Rickels’s The Vampire Lectures, and the edited collections Blood Read: The Vampire as a Metaphor in Contemporary Culture and The Blood is the Life: Vampires in Literature.45 In particular, Auerbach’s and Gelder’s monographs and Gordon and Hollinger’s collection Blood Read established the critical foundation for much subsequent analysis of vampire literature. In the first decade of the new millennium, further studies expanded on the conclusions offered by these critics, including William Patrick Day’s Vampire Legends in Contemporary American Culture, Milly Williamson’s The Lure of the Vampire (which contributes an important reading of the relationships between vampires, readers, and fandom), and Stacey Abbott’s Celluloid Vampires.46 Individually and collectively, these studies provide a strong critical history of representations of the vampire in literature, film, and popular culture. They chart and analyse how the vampire changes from an unholy monster in nineteenth-century English literature to a sympathetic protagonist in the popular and literary cultures of the later twentieth century. To provide another comprehensive history of the vampire is not the goal of this thesis.47

Green State University Popular Press, 1988); and Margaret L. Carter, ed., Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988). 45 Laurence Rickels, The Vampire Lectures (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger, eds., Blood Read: The Vampire as a Metaphor in Contemporary Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); Leonard G. Heldreth and Mary Pharr, eds., The Blood is the Life: Vampires in Literature (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999). 46 Stacey Abbott, Celluloid Vampires: Life After Death in the Modern World (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2007). 47 Importantly, even in these studies, many other vampire texts of the nineteenth century have been overlooked, complicating the history of the vampire in this period—for example, there is little critical commentary on the vampire in nineteenth-century French literature such as Théophile Gautier’s “La Morte Amoureuse” (first published in 1836) and Paul Féval’s three vampire novels, La Vampire, La Ville Vampire, and Le Chevalier Ténèbre, (serialized and published as novels in the mid-to-late nineteenth century). Nonetheless, a study of such texts remains

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Instead, this thesis focuses on how representations of the vampire have changed in the years from approximately 1990 to 2010. During this period, the vampire has been an overwhelmingly prominent figure in popular culture. Yet until very recently, there have been few detailed attempts at an extended analysis that identifies and explains how representations of the vampire have changed during this time. Despite the vampire’s ongoing popularity, broad and significant changes to the conventions of recent vampire literature largely remain unacknowledged and understudied. Instead, critical commentary on popular vampire texts produced since the 1990s (for example, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Saga, and True Blood)48 has primarily been concerned with placing individual texts within a longer history of vampire literature that stretches back to the Victorian and Romantic periods.49 This critical approach risks producing a view that focuses too sharply on how single, discrete texts relate to the historical tradition of vampire literature. Such studies often do not address why striking new conventions have developed within contemporary vampire literature. They are also likely to overlook the development of UFPR and PAVN, two new popular genres in which vampires play a significant role.

Sympathetic Monsters: The Humanisation of the Vampire in the Later Twentieth Century The most significant development in twentieth-century vampire literature from the 1970s onward is often identified as the “humanisation” of the vampire, or the representation of the vampire as a more “sympathetic” figure. Milly Williamson argues in The Lure of the Vampire that “the twentieth century produced a new generation of morally ambiguous sympathetic vampires who lure audiences with the pathos of their predicament and their painful awareness of outsiderdom.”50 More recently, Williamson has noted, in her essay “Let Them All In,” that in criticism of vampire literature “it is

beyond the scope of this thesis. The preceding history of the vampire in this period is intended only to summarise extant critical interpretations of the vampire in this period, thereby providing a background for the following analysis of twentieth- and twenty-first-century vampires. 48 Buffy the Vampire Slayer, created by , the WB/UPN/20th Century Fox, 1997– 2003; Stephenie Meyer, the Twilight Saga, 4 novels (2005–2008); the Twilight Saga, 5 films, Summit Entertainment, 2008–2012; True Blood, created by Alan Ball, HBO, 2008–2014. 49 Recent exceptions to this include criticism by Williamson and Crawford, who, as I do in this thesis, both consider Buffy the Vampire Slayer as an important text in the development of the urban fantasy and paranormal romance genre. See Williamson, “Let Them All In,” 75, and Joseph Crawford, The Twilight of the Gothic? Vampire Fiction and the Rise of the Paranormal Romance, 1991–2012 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014), 9, 121–37. 50 Williamson, Lure of the Vampire, 29.

13 now a truism to suggest that the vampire is no longer a monster dramatizing the fear of the Other, but has been rendered sympathetic, knowable, a figure of empathy.”51 Jules Zanger attempts to chart this shift in “Metaphor into Metonymy: the Vampire Next Door.” He argues, “No longer embodying metaphysical evil, no longer a damned soul, the new vampire has become, in our concerned awareness for multiculturalism, merely ethnic.”52 For Zanger, in the later twentieth century, “the new vampire has become socialized and humanised.”53 Similarly, in The Gothic, Punter and Byron argue that in that later twentieth century, vampires “become more sympathetic, closer to the human and much less radically the ‘other.’ They are more likely to offer a site of identification than a metaphor for what must be abjected.”54 Punter and Byron call this shift “the modern humanisation of the vampire.”55 The increased humanisation of the vampire in literature of the later twentieth century refracts concurrent, shifting conceptions of identity. Carter explains that the “shift” toward a humanised vampire “reflects a change in cultural attitudes toward the outsider, the alien other.”56 Auerbach provides a more specific context: after the civil rights movements of the 1960s, in which hierarchical authority was widely contested by those it oppressed, the vampire, as an archetypal outsider, took on a new, more sympathetic form. In this period, the social power structures that had previously excluded women, people of colour, and other marginalized groups began to lose authority: “whether Americans feared cultural crisis and disintegration or relished the new beginnings they promised, authority in the 1970s was, before all things, mortal. Vampires rushed to fill the vacuum.”57 Williamson also argues that “the vampire’s troubling ontology resonates with many experiences of the self in modernity for those who do not occupy the normative identity.”58 Like Auerbach, she concludes that the vampires of the later twentieth century “speak to the changed attitudes towards

51 Williamson, “Let Them All In,” 71. 52 Zanger, “Metaphor into Metonymy,” 19. 53 Ibid., 22. 54 Punter and Byron, The Gothic, 270. 55 Ibid., The Gothic, 270–71. See also: Gordon, Joan. “Rehabilitating Revenants, or, Sympathetic Vampires in Recent Fiction,” Extrapolation 29 (1988), 227–34; Gordon and Hollinger, Blood Read; and Sam George and Bill Hughes, “Introduction: Undead Reflections; The Sympathetic Vampire and its Monstrous Other,” in Gothic Studies 15, no. 1 (2013): 1–23. 56 Margaret Carter, “The Vampire as Alien” in Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture, eds. Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 27. 57 Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, 132–33. 58 Williamson, Lure of the Vampire, 2.

14 authority and sexuality,” further stating that “this vampire’s sympathetically depicted ‘otherness’ lured us . . . with its rebellious pose and its refusal (or inability) to live by the rules of the day.”59 By presenting the vampire as a sympathetic figure, vampire literature was thus able to explore the dramatic social flux of the later twentieth century. It is important to note that the sympathetic vampire is not unknown in earlier vampire literature. As noted by Auerbach and Williamson, by moving in human social spheres and cultivating an intimacy with humans, vampires like Ruthven, Varney, and Carmilla were already challenging the distinction between the vampire and the human. The humanised vampire thus develops in a complex way from the nineteenth century into the twenty-first. In her essay in Blood Read, Margaret L. Carter argues that the key distinction perhaps is that in earlier vampire literature, “a fictional vampire aroused positive emotions in spite of, not because of, his or her ‘curse.’” However, she continues, “in novels and stories published in the United States since 1970 . . . the vampire often appears as an attractive figure precisely because he or she is a vampire.”60 And though vampires in earlier literature offered opportunities for sympathy, it is only in the later twentieth century that the vampire begins to be consistently represented as a feeling subject within the text, rather than as a double for the protagonist or as a demonic antagonist. While earlier literature generally required the death of even sympathetic vampires, in the later twentieth century, humanised vampires are not so easily slain. As the boundary between the human and the vampiric Other becomes unsettled by the sympathetic and humanised vampire, it becomes increasingly problematic to deploy the vampire as a monstrous, oppositional figure. As vampires in the later twentieth century become increasingly like humans, they even more strongly challenge the hierarchical structures that divide the human from the Other. Punter and Byron distinguish broadly between nineteenth-century and later twentieth-century vampire literature. They argue: In nineteenth-century fiction, the representation of the vampire as monstrous, evil and other serves to guarantee the existence of good, reinforcing the formally dichotomized structures of belief which, although beginning to crumble under the impact of an increasingly secular and scientific world, still constituted the dominant world view. Vampire fiction

59 Williamson, “Let Them All In,” 72. 60 Carter, “The Vampire as Alien,” 27.

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of the later twentieth century becomes increasingly sceptical about such categories.61 The clear distinction that Punter and Byron draw between the nineteenth- and the twentieth-century vampire is perhaps an oversimplification. Nonetheless, Punter and Byron usefully suggest that as the vampire becomes more like “us,” justifying its extermination becomes increasingly difficult—and consequently, it becomes increasingly difficult to restore the hierarchies and boundaries that value the human over the monstrous. As vampire literature in the 1970s and 1980s develops in response to the social conditions of the time, four key conventions emerge that facilitate the humanisation of the vampire. For the first time, the vampire provides the dominant perspective from which the story is told; the vampire loses many of the folkloric associations that link it with religious evil; it emerges for the first time as an erotic figure and even as a romance ; and, finally, the humanised vampire increasingly desires community and fellowship. During this period, the vampire first gains its own voice and attempts to claim its place as an Othered, yet feeling, subject. Auerbach argues that rather than representing an evil threat that needed to be defeated by a human authority, “vampires in the 1970s become authorities.”62 In other words, vampires become narrators and protagonists, subversively retelling their stories from a new point of view. Carter as well as Punter and Byron explicitly describe this key shift in perspective as a crucial new convention that contributes to the humanisation of the vampire.63 Furthermore, as Gelder argues, “the reader hears the ‘other’ speaking first-hand; the vampire . . . makes himself known.” 64 These vampires live outside the boundaries of dominant social paradigms yet (as they themselves often claim) are not evil. For example, Fred Saberhagen rewrites Dracula from the vampire’s perspective in The Dracula Tape (1975), allowing the Other to tell his own history, reimagining himself as a romantic hero.65 In this version, it is not Dracula who kills Lucy by feeding on her; it is the dangerous blood transfusions performed by Abraham . Similarly, in Anne Rice’s early Vampire Chronicles (1976–), tales are narrated by the protagonists Louis and Lestat as

61 Punter and Byron, The Gothic, 270. 62 Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, 131. Emphasis in original. 63 Carter, “The Vampire as Alien,” 27; Punter and Byron, The Gothic, 270. 64 Gelder, Reading the Vampire, 109. 65 Fred Saberhagen, The Dracula Tape (New York: Warner Books, 1975).

16 they come to terms with their transformations from human to vampire.66 In Interview with the Vampire (1976),67 Rice’s vampire Louis shows, by narrating his own existential torment, that the vampire has become a feeling subject who longs to discover meaning, both in his own existence and in his relationship to the humans upon whom he feeds. While these vampires are not necessarily good or benevolent, when they are positioned as the narrator or protagonist, the reader is offered a new opportunity to sympathise with an entity that was formerly represented as a monstrous antagonist. The humanisation of the vampire is also facilitated by the second of the changes listed above: the transformation of the vampire from a figure of religious evil to a minority social figure. Zanger suggests that a “demobilising of the metaphoric vampire” occurs in this period, arguing that the vampire—once a religious and supernatural figure—is rendered ordinary and “demystified” from the 1970s onward.68 He writes that this “new” vampire’s “evil acts are expressions of individual personality and condition, not of any cosmic conflict between God and Satan. Consequently, the vampire’s absolutely evil nature, as objectified in Dracula, becomes increasingly compromised” and vampires undergo “the parallel loss of many of their folkloric attributes.”69 Punter and Byron describe the same phenomenon, noting that in vampire literature from the 1970s onward, “Christian ideology . . . begins to disappear and vampires move further away from their folk-lore connections with such things as garlic and crucifixes. Rather than being the devil’s work, vampirism is explained in new ways.”70 In the 1970s, a key example of this irreligious vampire was provided by Anne Rice’s early Vampire Chronicles novels, which represent vampires who possess inhuman speed, strength, and intellect. These powers are framed as a quirk of vampire physiognomy rather than as demonic powers. For these vampires, religious symbols pose no threat; indeed, the only thing that can destroy them with any certainty is fire. Though Rice’s later Chronicles go on to develop an extensive supernatural and religious role for her vampires, in Interview with the Vampire in particular, they are carefully distanced from a religious and supernatural ontology that might definitively condemn them as evil.71

66 Anne Rice, the Vampire Chronicles, 12 novels (1976–). 67 Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire (1976; repr., New York: Ballantine Books, 1997). 68 Zanger, “Metaphor into Metonymy,” 17, 19. 69 Ibid., 18, 19. 70 Punter and Byron, The Gothic, 270. 71 Only later in the series, in Queen of the Damned (1988), are vampires shown to have truly supernatural origins—that is, in Rice’s mythology, the first vampire was created when a

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In the 1980s, Suzy McKee Charnas’s Weyland provides a second example of the new irreligious vampire. In Charnas’s underrated but ground-breaking novel The Vampire Tapestry (1980), Weyland is described as a natural predator. This vampire is one of the earliest to be framed as an entirely biological rather than supernatural entity. He is not a minion of the devil but belongs to a species produced by convergent evolution with humans.72 If the vampire no longer represents a definite religious evil, the moral certainties that underlie earlier vampire texts become questionable, and the boundary between good and evil becomes uncertain. Zanger goes as far as suggesting that after 1970 this uncertainty over good and evil diminishes the narrative significance of ethical and moral concerns in vampire fiction. He claims that in the later twentieth century, there is a “greying down of the moral dimensions of the narrative” that results in a vampire literature devoid of “any necessary moral weight.”73 He thus implies that if the vampire is no longer a religious, supernatural evil that must be fought and defeated in the name of good, but a humanised, sympathetic figure, there can no longer be an ethical or moral stake in the text. This view is not supported by textual evidence. The vampire of the later twentieth century is capable of embodying more than a social Other, and it continues to have the power to engage with moral and ethical issues.74 In fact, it can be argued that entered the body of an evil king and queen. However, this spirit is not a spirit from Christian ideology but rather of an ancient religion of Mesopotamia. Still later in Rice’s chronicles, religion plays a different role again: the vampire Lestat becomes heavily embroiled in Christian ideology as he tours Heaven and Earth in Memnoch the Devil (1995). These later books suggest that, as further discussed in n. 74 of this chapter, religion and the supernatural still play a key role in the vampire genre post-1970s. 72 Suzy McKee Charnas, The Vampire Tapestry (1980; repr., London: The Women’s Press, 1992). As further discussed below and in the chapters to follow, this biological vampire signifies an important step in the humanisation and posthumanisation that the vampire undergoes in later vampire literature. 73 Zanger, “Metaphor into Metonymy,” 21, 19. 74 When Zanger insists that religious and moral symbols and ideologies decline in vampire texts post-1970s, it should be noted that Dracula is his model for a nineteenth-century vampire that reinforces social boundaries between good and evil through religious ideology, symbol, and metaphor. Yet despite Zanger’s claims, adaptations of Dracula consistently continue to explore the concept of religious evil. For example, Francis Ford Coppola transforms Stoker’s tale of a satanic invader into a romance in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (directed by Francis Ford Coppola, Columbia Pictures, 1992), but the film nonetheless continues to draw on religious ideology and imagery. Coppola transforms Dracula into a romance hero by borrowing from The Mummy (directed by Karl Freund, Universal Pictures, 1932); Dark Shadows (created by Dan Curtis, CBS, 1966–1971); and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (directed by Dan Curtis, Latglen Ltd, 1973). In all these earlier texts, as in Coppola’s film, the female protagonist is rewritten as Dracula’s long-lost love, reincarnated. Despite its retelling of Dracula as a love story, Dracula’s satanic origins remain prominent in Coppola’s film. His Dracula becomes a vampire when he curses God for the death

18 the vampire’s “new capacity for self-examination, for self-judgement, even for self- loathing,” as acknowledged by Zanger,75 is actually evidence that vampire texts remain deeply concerned with moral boundaries. While vampire texts from 1970 to 1990 may not always utilise Christian ideology or symbolism, this does not mean they no longer raise ethical and moral issues. For example, the existential self-questioning of Anne Rice’s vampires is arguably intended to foreground the distinction between good and evil, though not without problematising it. Louis asks in Interview with the Vampire, “Am I damned? Is my very nature that of a devil? . . . And if it is, why then do I revolt against it, tremble, . . . turn away in disgust when Lestat kills? What have I become in becoming a vampire?”76 His questions demonstrate how the loss of moral certainty torments him. The difficulty for Louis is that in a fictional world where religion no longer provides a framework for morality, moral judgements become uncertain and relative, producing complex ethical dilemmas.77 Nonetheless, as Zanger as well as Punter and Byron note, once the vampire is no longer defined as a figure of religious and folkloric evil, it can become a more complex and sympathetic character. To the extent it is given nonreligious explanations for its powers and abnormalities, the vampire of the later twentieth century becomes less spiritually and metaphysically Other.78 In vampire literature of this period, what seems supernatural is often framed as an enhanced version of the “natural.” As a result, the

of his wife. The film’s finale also shows Dracula dying in Mina’s arms beneath a Byzantine church altar; however, instead of a heavenly scene on the church dome above, the camera pans up to a scene of the two lovers. This suggests that while religion still has a role to play in the vampire narrative, vampires in the 1990s can be redeemed by love and forgiveness that is human, not divine. Additionally, (directed by Patrick Lussier, Miramax Films, 2000) makes it clear that Dracula is religiously evil by reimagining the vampire’s origins: Dracula is actually Judas Iscariot, condemned to walk the earth as a vampire for betraying Jesus Christ. And Van Helsing (directed by Stephen Sommers, Universal, 2004) shifts the focus of religious morality from Dracula to Van Helsing himself, who is actually the archangel Gabriel, sent to earth to do God’s work by exterminating the undead. These versions of Dracula may not necessarily reinforce the dichotomies between good and evil found in their source material, but they nevertheless actively explore the relationships between good, evil, religion, and vampires. 75 Zanger, “Metaphor into Metonymy,” 22. 76 Rice, Interview with the Vampire, 72. 77 In this sense, Louis’s position as a vampire of the later twentieth century is a markedly postmodern position: he grapples with the postmodern dissolution of the grand narratives that should define his moral position as a vampire. As argued by Jean-François Lyotard, the postmodern condition is distrustful of grand or metanarratives, those broader ideological or institutional forms of knowledge that seem to make sense of history and legitimate social practices. See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). 78 Punter and Byron, The Gothic, 270.

19 vampire becomes an entity with which it is possible, at least in part, to sympathise and even identify with. As the vampire becomes a feeling subject, no longer confined to the role of an evil antagonist or demon, new possibilities emerge for its representation. This is evident in the third significant innovation made in vampire literature of the 1970s and 1980s: the eroticising and romanticising of the vampire as a sexual being and lover. Joseph Crawford and Nina Auerbach both identify Barnabas Collins, the vampire in Dark Shadows, as one of the earliest versions of the vampire as an attractive paramour.79 In this television series, Barnabas discovers the of his lost lover, Josette. Series creator Dan Curtis reused this innovation in his 1973 adaptation titled Bram Stoker’s Dracula, rewriting the Dracula narrative as a romance in which is the reincarnation of Dracula’s long-lost love.80 In her discussion of the vampire as a lover, Auerbach also highlights Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape, Curtis’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Jon Badham’s Dracula (1979)81 as significant texts. These retellings of Dracula all depict a feeling vampire who forms a romantic relationship with a human woman. Auerbach argues that in these narratives, “the women, victims no more, embrace vampirism with rapture as the sole available escape from patriarchy.”82 These romance-hero versions of Dracula offer to share their immortality and their supernatural power with the women upon whom they feed; this power thus disrupts the heteronormative relationship models and patriarchal family structures that have limited women socially. Auerbach goes on to argue that vampires in the 1970s make “radical claims, turning the old story into a vehicle for twentieth-century social critiques, especially feminist critiques.”83 The eroticised and romanticised vampires of the 1970s suggest the possibility of embracing non-normative, transgressive identities, thereby inviting new feminist and queer critiques of vampire literature.84

79 Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, 137–38; Crawford, The Twilight of the Gothic, 50–52. 80 Bram Stoker’s Dracula, directed by Dan Curtis, Latglen Ltd, 1973. 81 Dracula, directed by John Badham, Universal Pictures, 1979. 82 Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, 140. 83 Ibid. 84 Feminist critiques are also found in vampire literature of the 1970s that does not focus on the romanticized male vampire, or the “traditionally male, sexually dominant, invasive vampire,” as Gina Wisker argues. “A number of contemporary women writers,” she notes, “turned this figure into one whose sexuality and sexual choices are less likely to be heteronormative,” instead offering “exciting, radical examples” of feminist and queer vampire literature. Wisker cites, for example, the fiction of Angela Carter and Anne Rice. See Gina Wisker, Contemporary Women’s (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 158; 157–86.

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In this era, Louis, the narrator of Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, contests the boundaries of heteronormative relationship models through his homoerotic relationship with the vampire Lestat.85 Gelder writes that Rice’s Chronicles “share a number of characteristics usually associated with women’s romance, notably, the tracing out of the vampire’s search for fulfilment, for a ‘complete’ love relationship.”86 Crawford also highlights this link between Rice’s Chronicles and the romance genre, noting that though Rice’s vampire novels “are not romances,” her vampire novels are “deeply romantic, full of obsessive, centuries-long, usually homosexual love affairs between beautiful, powerful, aristocratic vampires, most of which unfold in lush, luxurious historical settings comparable to those which appeared in the best-selling erotic historical romances of the 1970s.”87 In terms of the act of vampiric feeding specifically, although in earlier films and fiction victims frequently swooned during the vampire’s bite, Rice’s novels are also significant for making explicit the conflation of this bite with sexual ecstasy. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s (1978) is another significant text in the development of the vampire as a romance hero.88 It is the first novel in Yarbro’s still- ongoing Saint-Germain series (1978–), a series of and horror novels that follow the benevolent, human-friendly vampire Saint-Germain,89 and one of the earliest texts that shows how a vampire might give sexual pleasure to willing human women. It thus provides one example of how vampire texts in the later twentieth century begin to explore the potential for representations of non-normative and transgressive female sexuality. Though Saint-Germain drinks the blood of human women, he does so in a mutually fulfilling and reciprocal arrangement, providing sexual ecstasy in exchange for sustenance. Yarbro’s novels thus make a ground-breaking move toward the paranormal romance genre that later emerges. The increased desire for intimacy and companionship that is suggested by the romanticised, eroticised vampire also facilitates the humanisation of the vampire in later twentieth-century literature. Punter and Byron note that “the modern vampire, rather than being solitary like Stoker’s Count, desires companionship.” They further claim that “the solitary vampire often gives way to a community,” and moreover, that “this process

85 Auerbach, 153–54, 175; Haggerty, “Anne Rice and the Queering of Culture.” 86 Gelder, Reading the Vampire, 109. 87 Crawford, The Twilight of the Gothic, 57. Emphasis in original. 88 Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Hotel Transylvania (New York: Signet, 1978). 89 Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, the Saint-Germain novels, 27 novels (1978–).

21 of socialisation humanises vampires.”90 This new desire for family and community can be seen in novels and films of the period and is the fourth convention that facilitates the vampire’s humanisation in the later twentieth century. For example, Rice’s Interview with the Vampire provides an example of an alternative model for the vampire family. The vampires Lestat and Louis transform a human girl into a child vampire, and the three live together for decades, mimicking a human family with the two male vampires in a parental role.91 In the 1980s, further examples of the alternative vampire family are found in The Lost Boys and Near Dark (1987).92 In both films, after falling for a vampiric woman, the young male protagonist is partially transformed into a vampire and inducted into a vampire gang. In The Lost Boys, this is a gang of male vampires who mimic a human adolescent gang. In Near Dark, it is a roving vampire gang that resembles a family group, with parents and teen- and child- vampire siblings. Zanger claims that from the later twentieth century onward, in vampire literature “almost all essential relationships are between vampire and vampire.”93 Punter and Byron similarly suggest that while “intimacy with humans” characterises the nineteenth- century vampire,94 for the “modern” vampire this companionship is different: “while contemporary vampires again desire intimacy, it is primarily with others like themselves.”95 Yet these claims are contested by the concurrent shift toward the vampire as a romance protagonist who is sexually appealing to and/or falls in love with humans. Even before the end of the 1980s, human characters were returning to a central place in many vampire narratives. In fact, though Zanger cites Near Dark as an example of a text that minimises the role of the human in the vampire narrative, this film actually revolves around the partially human character of Caleb and the tensions between his dysfunctional vampire family and wholesome human one. Significantly, Caleb refuses to drink from or kill a human himself, thereby refusing to embrace his new state as a vampire. By refusing to fully participate in the vampire world, Caleb offers a human, moralising perspective on its violence and sadism. At the film’s conclusion, Caleb and his vampire lover are

90 Punter and Byron, The Gothic, 270–71. 91 Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, 154; Wisker, Contemporary Women’s Gothic Fiction, 176; Candace Benefiel, “Blood Relations: The Gothic Perversion of the Nuclear Family in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire,” Journal of Popular Culture 38, no. 2 (2004): 261–73. 92 Near Dark, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, F/M Entertainment, 1987. 93 Zanger, “Metaphor into Metonymy,” 21. 94 See also Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, 14, 38–41. 95 Punter and Byron, The Gothic, 271.

22 rescued by Caleb’s father, who uses a blood transfusion to restore them to a fully human state—suggesting that the distinction between the human and the vampire is more fluid and mutable than it is assumed to be in much of the earlier vampire literature.96 Near Dark thus suggests that it is not the marginalisation of the human, nor even the humanisation of the vampire, per se, that become central concerns in the vampire literature of the later twentieth century. Rather, the relationship between the vampire and the human, and questions about where the boundary lies between the two, emerge as the key concerns of vampire literature of this era. Near Dark also suggests that this boundary is marked by feeding, love, and violence. Texts including Near Dark and The Lost Boys (whose protagonist, Michael, also does not fully complete the transition to vampire) centre on a protagonist who sits uneasily on the boundary between human and vampire. These protagonists are significantly liminal figures who, in the late 1980s, foreground and intensify the increasing difficulty of distinguishing between the human self and the monstrous Other. Auerbach notes that Near Dark and The Lost Boys thus generate the “most important paradigm-shift of the 1980s: the half-vampire.” 97 Auerbach finds examples of a conservative vampirism in The Lost Boys and Near Dark, whose half-vampire protagonists are cured by the intervention of a benevolent male patriarch. She notes that in both of these films, “for the first time, vampirism itself is

96 Zanger also makes some unsupported assumptions about how the audience relates to vampires as characters, ignoring the potential fluidity of audience identification. He writes, “Lacking a Van Helsing for whom to root, or a Mina for whom to fear, the contemporary audience must identify with the lesser of evils provided for it—the ‘good’ vampire, the reluctant killer, the self-doubting murderer” (“Metaphor into Metonymy,” 21). This suggestion ignores the complex politics of audience identification, supposing that readers only identify with the monstrous when there is no human character to offer an alternative. There is evidence that undermines this assumption, for example, those feminist critiques of Dracula that analyse the staking of Lucy and argue that a reader, male or female, might identify more with the vampire’s position as a victim in this scene. See Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin De Siècle (New York: Viking, 1990), 181–82; and Williamson, Lure of the Vampire, 11–14. Critics such as Carol Clover and Barbara Creed have written extensively on the politics of identification in the , suggesting that the interplay between monster/victim and male/female identification is extremely complex. See Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) and Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine. 97 Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, 168. Like much other vampire literature, “reversible” vampirism has its origins in Stoker’s Dracula, in which Mina Harker begins to become a vampire after she is fed upon by and forced to feed from Dracula. The beginning stages of Mina’s transformation allow her to track the movements of Dracula, and when he is eventually slain, she regains her human state. However, this idea of reversible vampirism or the half-vampiric state did not become a common trope until the 1980s. In addition to the Lost Boys and Near Dark, the film Fright Night (directed by Tom Holland, Columbia Pictures, 1985) also gives an example of “reversible” vampirism in the character Amy.

23 mortal.”98 The semivampire protagonists of these films are able to—and desire to— become human again, suggesting to Auerbach that in the 1980s vampirism was losing appeal. Auerbach therefore reads vampires of the 1980s as “fatigued” and “unable to bear continual changing times,” suggesting that these vampires have “crawled out of their stories to die.”99 According to Auerbach, vampires of the 1970s took charge of their own narratives; but vampires of the 1980s are once again “systematically stripped of their powers” by thriving Republicanism.100 In Auerbach’s analysis, the Republican party of this decade was characterised by its conservative, black-and-white morality and the lauding of patriarchal authority. As products of a period in which “conservative leaders took hold of America and England,” the vampires of this era thus return to the role of the evil outsider who threatens the conservative state.101 The weakened vampires of the 1980s lead Auerbach to conclude her study by suggesting that “at the end of the twentieth century, vampirism is wearing down and vampires need a long restorative sleep.”102

Vampires from 1990 to 2010 In retrospect, Auerbach’s remarks on the future of the vampire are surprising; in the years after Auerbach concluded her study in 1995, vampires have had little opportunity for restorative sleep. In fact, since 1990 vampires in contemporary fiction have moved more fully into the human world than ever before. And while the humanisation of the vampire in later twentieth-century literature has been frequently acknowledged, the way that the vampire is humanised changes significantly from the 1980s onwards. By revisiting the vampire literature of the 1980s and 1990s, in subsequent chapters this thesis offers an alternative account of how the vampire develops from this period onward—not only as a sympathetic, feeling subject but as a posthuman one. The 1990s ended Ronald Reagan’s conservative “morning in America,” and since then North America has undergone a number of dramatic changes. Government in the United States has repeatedly swung from a Republican president to a Democratic one and back again (George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama,

98 Ibid., 168 99 Ibid., 192. 100 Ibid., 162. 101 Ibid., 165. 102 Ibid., 192.

24 and Donald Trump). In September 2001, the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the first foreign attack on American soil since World War II, sparked a chain of events leading to long-lasting imperial aggression from the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq. Since this time, new anxieties have arisen about conflict between the East and the West, terrorism, American imperialism, military technologies, and weapons of mass destruction. New international humanitarian crises, including a global refugee crisis, have also been sparked by military and terrorist conflict across the Middle East. From 1990 onward, the struggle for civil rights that began in the 1960s has continued in new campaigns for feminism, LGBT rights, and racial equality. Over the last two and a half decades, many significant social, philosophical, and legal developments have occurred, including (to name only a few broad examples) feminist movements such as postfeminism and third wave feminism; the legalization of gay marriage within the United States; and the ongoing struggle for racial equality in the United States, as vividly demonstrated by incidents from the 1992 Los Angeles Riots to the widespread protests of the more recent Black Lives Matter campaign. As the old millennium rolled on to the new one, the Y2K scare brought fears of a potentially devastating glitch in the way that global information systems counted time. These millennial anxieties over technology seem all but been forgotten today. Instead, the first decades of this century have seen radical new developments in information and communications technologies, such as omnipresent Wi-Fi and smartphones. A real crisis emerged, however, in 2007–2008, when global financial highs of the real estate and “Dot-Com” (information technology) sector crashed with the Global Financial Crisis. Throughout the last two decades, the biological limits of what it means to be human have been dramatically contested with advances in biotechnologies, from the Human Genome Project to new cyborgian technologies in prosthetics. At the same time, ecological and environmental awareness have shifted toward a new emphasis on sustainability and climate change. Only recently have new critical studies begun to analyse the relationship between significant social changes, such as those I have briefly sketched above, and the significant shifts in the way that the vampire is represented in fiction, television, and film. Critical texts published since my research for this thesis began have also begun to address how newer vampire texts develop, and differ from, the vampire literature that

25 preceded them.103 This recent interest in the contemporary vampire suggests that the research in this thesis is both timely and critically relevant, contributing original work to a still emerging field of research. With the popular success of the Twilight Saga and True Blood, it was not long before a substantial number of articles and edited collections on these texts began to emerge.104 However, it has taken longer for academics to identify the role of these texts in the UFPR genre or to attempt to make a study of that genre itself. At the outset of the research for this thesis, there was no extant study of UFPR as a genre. In her analysis of eroticism and horror in Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series (1993–), Angela Ndalianis provides a brief but useful history of UFPR as a hybrid romance- horror genre.105 The genre study in chapter 3 of this thesis (published in an earlier form in 2014 in Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media)106 extends this history to provide a more extensive and inclusive outline of this genre and, in particular, of the development of urban fantasy. Lorna Piatti-Farnell’s recent The Vampire in Contemporary Popular Literature attempts to give an account of how the vampire has been represented thus far in popular fiction of the twenty-first century. In her introduction, Piatti-Farnell observes that much of this fiction falls into the genre category of UFPR. She notes that “the categories of paranormal romance, urban fantasy and have proven to be very

103 For example, as discussed below: Angela Ndalianis, The Horror Sensorium: Media and the Senses (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2012); Crawford, The Twilight of the Gothic; Lorna Piatti-Farnell, The Vampire in Contemporary Popular Literature (New York: Routledge, 2014); and Stacey Abbott, Undead Apocalypse: Vampires and Zombies in the Twenty-First Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). 104 In the case of the Twilight Saga, scholarly monographs were also quick to appear. On the Twilight Saga, see: Wickham Clayton and Sarah Harman, eds., Screening Twilight: Critical Approaches to a Cinematic Phenomenon (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014); Anne Morey, ed., Genre, Reception, and Adaptation in the “Twilight” Series (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012); Giselle Liza Anatol, ed., Bringing Light to Twilight: Perspectives on a Pop Culture Phenomenon (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Maggie Parke and Natalie Wilson, eds., Theorizing Twilight: Critical Essays on What’s at Stake in a Post- Vampire World (Jefferson: McFarland, 2011); Natalie Wilson, Seduced by Twilight: The Allure and Contradictory Messages of the Popular Saga (Jefferson: McFarland, 2011); and Rebecca Housel and J. Jeremy Wisnewski, Twilight and Philosophy: Vampires, Vegetarians, and the Pursuit of Immortality (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2009). On True Blood, see: William Irwin, Rebecca Dunn, and George Housel, True Blood and Philosophy: We Wanna Think Bad Things With You (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2010); and Brigid Cherry, ed., True Blood: Investigating Vampires and (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012). 105 Ndalianis, Horror Sensorium, 78–80. 106 Leigh McLennon, “Defining Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance: Crossing Boundaries of Genre, Media, Self, and Other in New Supernatural Worlds,” Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media 23 (2014), http://refractory.unimelb.edu.au/2014/06/26/uf-mclennon/.

26 prolific literary territories for the vampire to colonise in the post-2000 context.”107 Piatti- Farnell maintains, moreover, that “it is important to evaluate how, in being moulded around genre-specific categories, literary vampires are able to reconfigure the ordinary.”108 Her study identifies, in an encyclopaedic fashion, the many genre tropes associated with the vampire in recent fiction. She makes a brief interpretation of each of these tropes, mustering a broad range of critical frameworks to suggest how each trope might refract contemporary cultural concerns.109 Her survey of recurring tropes may be read usefully alongside the more extensive close textual analysis undertaken in this doctoral thesis. In his still more recent study The Twilight of the Gothic, Joseph Crawford assembles an excellent history of the paranormal romance in the context of Gothic literature. Crawford’s research stands in a complementary relationship to this thesis’s study of genre, gender, and the monstrosity of the vampire. He connects the UFPR genre in its current form with the early modern romance, the Gothic novel that flourished in the late eighteenth century, the Gothic trope of the Byronic hero in Romantic and Victorian literature, and the rise of mass-market romance in the early twentieth century. He thus argues that “the histories of those genres which we now call ‘Gothic’ and ‘romantic’ fiction have always been heavily interlinked.”110 Crawford then identifies a number of connections between the romance fiction of the 1970s and vampire texts of that era, including Dark Shadows, Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Saint-Germain novels. Building on this history, Crawford goes on to analyse paranormal romance texts of the 1990s and beyond, with particular attention to Maggie Shayne’s Wings in the Night series (1993–2011),111 Lori Herter’s De Morrissey series (1991– 1993),112 Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series (1993–),113 ’s Southern Vampire Mysteries (2001–2013),114 Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Meyer’s Twilight Saga.

107 Piatti-Farnell, The Vampire in Contemporary Popular Literature, 11. 108 Ibid., 13. 109 For example, in the same chapter, Piatti-Farnell draws on theories of sensory perception from Aristotle and Plato to analyse how “the power of sight” (100–102) and “the olfactory register” (102–8) are represented in contemporary vampire texts, before going on to analyse vampires “as a metaphorical rendition of the impact of information technologies” (120), drawing on the work of posthumanist theorists Katherine Hayles and Pramod Nayar. 110 Crawford, The Twilight of the Gothic, 5. 111 Maggie Shayne, Wings in the Night series, 18 novels (1993–2011). 112 Lori Herter, De Morrissey series, 4 novels (1991–1993). 113 Laurell K. Hamilton, the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series, 25 novels (1993–). 114 Charlaine Harris, the Southern Vampire Mysteries, 13 novels (2001–2013).

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Crawford suggests that “the mould” for urban fantasy as a genre solidified in the years between 2002 and 2005. His definition of UFPR is largely unconcerned with the history of early urban fantasy or with its definition in relation to paranormal romance. Crawford’s history of this genre is also intentionally linear, seeing it move from fiction to film, rather than a genre that simultaneously develops across multiple media. In Crawford’s account, “first there were books: after the success of Twilight, paranormal romances came to be written in such volume that they rapidly established themselves as a new bookstore category. . . . Then the films and TV shows.”115 In his attempt to “map out” a “line of literary and cultural descent” for this genre, Crawford is challenged by the fact that the genre tropes of UFPR had already begun to cohere in the early 1990s in a variety of media at the same time. His reading is also complicated by the transmedia format of more recent vampire texts and by theories that read the development of genre as nonlinear.116 Where Crawford defines a longer historical line of descent for contemporary vampire literature, this thesis focuses on drawing connections between vampire literature of the 1970s and 1980s, early urban fantasy texts of the 1980s, and the development of the heroine and the supernatural world in the 1990s, analysing how these elements together (along with several other genres, including mystery, thriller, and ) have shaped the UFPR genre that has been popular since 2000. It thus shows how, as Sam George and Bill Hughes write, “the vampire materialises through a transformation of genres” whereby “literary kinds fuse promiscuously with others, embed themselves in others.”117 This thesis, as I noted above, proposes that the most significant new trend in the vampire genre from 1990 onward is not the “humanisation” of the vampire, but an increased emphasis on the problematic division between vampires and humans. This involves a renewed interest in human protagonists, a focus on vampire-human relationships, and an exploration of what place the vampire can hold in the human world. Consequently, the analysis in this thesis focuses on questions about supernatural world-building, intersections of Otherness, vampiric biology, and above all, the act of vampiric feeding as the act whereby humans and vampires must come together.

115 Crawford, The Twilight of the Gothic, 4. 116 As will be discussed below and in chapter 3. 117 Sam George and Bill Hughes, “Introduction,” in Open Graves, Open Minds: Representations of Vampires and the Undead from the Enlightenment to the Present Day (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 5.

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These same questions are raised by the second strand of vampire fiction to develop since 2002, the post-apocalyptic vampire narrative. While this thesis primarily focuses on the vampire and vampiric feeding in UFPR, in identifying key shifts in vampire literature since 1990, it also must acknowledge the PAVN as a distinct trend in the vampire literature of this period. Until recently, this post-apocalyptic trend has also been understudied. Stacey Abbott’s new monograph Undead Apocalypse: Vampires and Zombies in the Twenty-First Century offers a detailed analysis of the emergence of the PAVN. Her text provides a useful discussion of those elements of the PAVN outside the scope of this thesis. Abbott argues that, alongside UFPR, since 2000 “a dystopian sub-genre of vampire and text has become equally significant, confronting audiences as much with horror and the threat of near annihilation” as UFPR “infuses the undead with promises of love and eroticism.”118 This subgenre “sees the return of the monstrous vampire, embodying our worst fears for infection and contamination of the population.”119 As this thesis does in chapter 5, Abbott’s study links the emergence of the PAVN to the popularity of the zombie in film and television; to anxieties about the posthuman collision of human, animal, machine, and monstrous Other; and to post- 9/11 anxieties about terrorism and invasion. While Abbott’s focus is on tracing how the PAVN emerges from earlier vampire (and zombie) literature, film, and television, the conclusion to this thesis additionally argues that the PAVN also emerges in response to, and as a rejection of, the popularity of UFPR in the new millennium.

A Specific Focus on Adult North American Genre Fiction In order to analyse how contemporary vampire literature refracts the anxieties of a specific, contemporary sociohistorical milieu, this thesis focuses on examples of UFPR and PAVNs found in US and Canadian popular fiction. North American popular fiction currently dominates the international market for vampire literature. 120 UFPR and PAVNs are predominantly written by North American authors, predominantly published in the United States and Canada, and primarily set within fantastic versions of the United States and Canada.

118 Abbott, Undead Apocalypse, 4. 119 Ibid., 8. 120 Crawford, for example, identifies that “the early paranormal romance was a strikingly American genre,” noting that “it was not until 2000 or so that non-American authors . . . started to become prominent,” and that “American writers remain disproportionately predominant” in UFPR today. See Crawford, The Twilight of the Gothic, 63–64.

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I have selected popular fiction for my close textual analysis because the genre conventions of UFPR and PAVNs are most distinct in this form, which repeats key conventions of these new genre models with limited variations in each text or series. This approach enables meaningful comparison across the three decades, in an under- researched area of the field. There are, of course, a number of postmillennial vampire texts that do not easily fit within the genre limits of either UFPR or PAVNs—for example, more “literary” vampire texts such as Elizabeth Kostova’s (2005) and independent, international films such as Let the Right One In (2008), Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014).121 One might argue that these texts also refract the same sociohistorical anxieties about new challenges to the boundaries dividing the self from the monstrous Other. However, this argument remains outside the scope of my thesis, which is concerned with the more readily identifiable patterns found in popular genre texts. I have also excluded outright adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula from this study. There have been numerous adaptations of Dracula produced in the last three decades, including Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992); Dracula 2000 (2000); Van Helsing (2004); Kostova’s aforementioned Historian; Argento’s Dracula 3D (2012); and (2014).122 Again, many of these adaptations arguably explore the same sociohistorical, posthumanist anxieties as UFPR and PAVNs. However, these adaptations are concerned specifically with rewriting the conventions of earlier Gothic literature and of Dracula as a source text. Because of this, Dracula adaptations may not follow the specific new conventions of vampire literature developed in UFPR and PAVNs. The thesis primarily reads popular fiction aimed at adult readers. Paranormal romance, urban fantasy, dystopian fiction, and the post-apocalyptic vampire narrative have been extremely popular genres in young adult (YA) fiction between approximately 2005 and 2015.123 However, this thesis is not concerned with the issues of adolescence at

121 Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian (New York: Little, Brown, 2005); Let the Right One In, directed by Tomas Alfredson, Sandrew Metronome, 2008; Only Lovers Left Alive, directed by Jim Jarmusch, Pandora Film, 2013; A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, directed by Ana Lily Amirpour, Vice Films, 2014. 122 Dracula 2000, directed by Patrick Lussier, Miramax Films, 2000; Van Helsing, directed by Stephen Sommers, Universal Pictures, 2004; Dracula 3D, directed by , Filmax, 2012; Dracula Untold, directed by Gary Shore, Universal Pictures, 2014. 123 See: Jeffrey S. Kaplan, “The Changing Face of Young Adult Literature: What Teachers and Researchers Need to Know to Enhance their Practice and Enquiry,” in Teaching Young Adult

30 stake in YA fiction. YA vampire literature is marketed at adolescents and is markedly concerned with issues of adolescent identity, which are foregrounded, for example, by their high school settings (whether mundane or magical), as seen in the Twilight Saga, Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy series (2007–2010), and the House of Night series by P. C. and Kristen Cast.124 Unsurprisingly, YA vampire literature thus develops its own additional and related genre conventions. Nonetheless, I make some reference to Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga (both the novels and film adaptations). The popularity and the pop-cultural significance of these series necessitates that this thesis consider how they have followed and shaped the genre conventions identified and outlined in the following chapters. Whedon’s series has been popular with adolescents, adults, television critics, and academics, and Meyer’s novels and their film adaptations have been popular with a large female adult audience outside their target adolescent audience. Thus, both Buffy and the Twilight Saga popularise significant developments in the ways that vampires are represented in the later twentieth and early twenty-first century.

Outline for the Thesis By tracing the ways in which representations of vampiric feeding change in popular vampire literature from the 1980s onward, this thesis reveals how the boundaries between the human and the vampire have been renegotiated and even dismantled in these texts in recent decades. Focusing on urban fantasy and paranormal romance, and contrasting this with the post-apocalyptic vampire narrative, the thesis is able to identify significant trends in vampire literature. By reading the contemporary vampire through a feminist and posthumanist theoretical framework, the thesis reveals how this vampire continues to refract specific, sociohistorical anxieties about the self and the Other, as identified by these theoretical positions, between 1980 and the present time. Chapter 2 of this thesis suggests that the shift toward a new form of posthuman vampire began in the early 1980s, in novels that reframe the vampire as a biological

Literature Today: Insights, Considerations, and Perspectives for the Classroom Teacher, eds. Judith A. Hayn and Jeffrey S. Kaplan (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012), 19–40; and Sue Corbett, “New Trends in YA: The Agents’ Perspective,” Publishers Weekly, September 27, 2013, accessed May 2, 2015, http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-industry- news/article/59297-new-trends-in-ya-the-agents-perspective.html. 124 Richelle Mead, Vampire Academy series, 6 novels (2007–2010); P. C. Cast and Kristen Cast, the House of Night series, 12 novels (2007–2014).

31 species. In particular, George R. R. Martin’s Fevre Dream (1982) is a significant text in the development of the posthuman vampire.125 Chapter 2 analyses how Fevre Dream, a novel, establishes some of the key conventions that herald the vampire’s changing representation as a humanised and posthuman entity in UFPR novels of the decades to come. Not only is this novel one of the earliest texts to frame the vampire as a naturally occurring biological predator and as a social minority, it is also one of the first vampire texts to frame vampiric feeding as an ethical (or unethical) choice for vampires. In this way, Fevre Dream foregrounds the vampiric need to feed on human blood as the crucial desire that proves vampires to be good or evil. Though Martin’s novel ultimately offers a version of the humanised vampire, it nevertheless poses a number of key posthumanist questions. Most significant among these questions are, first, how do interconnections between vampires and humans threaten the boundaries between the human self and the Other? And, second, how can the self and the Other successfully interconnect in ways that allow both to flourish? In the 1990s, texts in the emerging UFPR genre ask these same questions about the possibilities for relationships between humans and vampires. As chapter 3 of this thesis will show, urban fantasy and paranormal romance has arguably become the prevailing mode of vampire literature since 2000. Despite its overwhelming popularity, UFPR remains understudied as a new genre. Only very recently has there been a critical acknowledgement that the genre of UFPR is a coherent body of work that in recent decades has substantially transformed the conventions of vampire literature. Chapter 3 contributes significantly to this recent criticism by providing a detailed original genre study of UFPR. In doing so, it draws on the film genre theory of Rick Altman, Ken Gelder’s analysis of genre fiction, and Henry Jenkins’s work on transmedia texts and genres.126 Chapters 4 and 6 of the thesis narrow their focus from a structural genre study of UFPR to analyse how the vampire develops as a humanised and posthuman monster in one seminal UFPR series, Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter (1993-). This series pioneers two significant new conventions in UFPR (and, influentially, in vampire literature more broadly): the strong female protagonist, and a

125 George R. R. Martin, Fevre Dream (1982; repr., Gollancz: London, 2011). 126 Rick Altman, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre,” Cinema Journal 23, no. 3 (1984); Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: BFI Publishing, 1999); Ken Gelder, Popular Fiction: the Logics and Practices of a Literary Field (New York: Routledge, 2004); Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University, 2006); and Henry Jenkins, Confessions of an Aca-fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins (http://henryjenkins.org/).

32 new kind of “everyday-supernatural” fictional setting. Influenced in the 1990s by third wave feminism and postfeminism, Hamilton’s series is one of the earliest vampire texts that centres its narrative on a female protagonist and interrogates the vampiric bite from the (initially human) heroine’s perspective. The central problem posed for interactions between heroines and vampires in the new, supernatural worlds of UFPR is the vampire’s desire to feed on humans. In the early novels in Hamilton’s series (from approximately 1993 to 1996), vampiric feeding is viewed with suspicion, as a predatory act of violence, an act that threatens the agency and integrity of the human subject. However, Hamilton’s later novels (from approximately 1997 to the present time) dramatically shift in their representation of vampiric feeding by suggesting that this feeding can become a symbiotic, mutually beneficial act. With this shift in the significance of vampiric feeding, the vampire in UFPR becomes affirmatively posthuman.127 In charting the shift from the humanised vampire to new forms of posthuman vampires, chapter 5 establishes a posthumanist theoretical framework as a key critical framework for analysing contemporary vampire literature. This posthumanist framework is helpful in the textual analysis of the later Hamilton novels and in analysis of the post- apocalyptic vampire narrative, which emerges partially in reaction to the representations of the vampire in UFPR texts like Hamilton’s. As a posthuman entity, the vampire blurs the boundaries between technology, the human, and nonhuman animal species. From 2000 onward, as the UFPR genre gains in popularity, this genre frequently represents the vampire as one of a number of posthuman species that must coexist with humans. Chapter 6 explores Hamilton’s later novels through Haraway’s work on animals, interspecies relationships, and monsters.128 In reading the vampire as what Haraway terms a posthuman “companion species,” the thesis contributes significant new research to the study of the vampire as a posthuman entity. As I shall outline in chapter 5, the vampire becomes a very different kind of posthuman entity in another form of vampire literature that emerges post 9/11. Post- apocalyptic vampire narratives seek to return the vampire to its wholly monstrous nature

127 My use of the term “affirmative posthumanism” draws on Rosi Braidotti’s definition of “affirmative critical posthumanism,” an approach to posthumanism that emphasises the positive possibilities of the loss of distinct boundaries between the human and the Other. I discuss this theoretical framework further in chapter 5. See Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Malden: Polity Press, 2013), 54. 128 Donna J. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003); Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

33 by drawing on the frightening representations of earlier vampire films, literature, and folklore. They revert to a representation of the vampire as a monstrous threat as they dramatize an apocalyptic or cataclysmic event (and/or its aftermath) caused by the rapid spread of vampirism. PAVNs narratives thus respond negatively to contemporary anxieties about the posthuman. Chapter 7, the concluding chapter of this thesis, broadens the scope of my analysis of the ways in which representations of the vampire have developed between 2000 and 2015. It builds on the work of chapter 3 to outline some of the genre conventions that after the year 2000 become firmly established in UFPR. It also briefly considers the relationship between UFPR and vampire literature more broadly, as well as that between UFPR and popular culture more broadly, as it stands at the end of this period. In doing so, the conclusion gestures toward avenues for future research on contemporary vampire literature, such as how the popular genre structures of UFPR continue to be adapted across genres and media, and how vampire literature beyond the UFPR and PAVN also responds to anxieties about the posthuman future in the twenty- first century. Finally, chapter 7 returns to the reading of PAVNs established in chapter 5 and provides a brief close reading of Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s Strain trilogy (2009–2011, recently adapted as a television series, 2014–2017).129 It analyses this trilogy as an example of how, in the post-9/11 era, PAVNs reject the affirmative posthumanism of UFPR and instead reinstate the traditional hierarchies that subordinate the Other to the human. Crucially, with this analysis, the concluding chapter underscores that PAVNs such as the Strain trilogy emerge not only as a negative reaction to anxieties about the posthuman Other but as a negative reaction to the representations of romanticised, eroticised, and affirmatively posthuman vampires found in UFPR. PAVNs thus operate as part of a backlash against UFPR’s affirmative posthumanism and its romance- and female-centred narratives. As I shall demonstrate in this thesis, the conventions that have become established in contemporary vampire literature between approximately 1990 and 2010 have dramatically changed the vampire and its relationship to the humans upon whom it feeds. The new forms of posthuman vampires that have emerged in this period engage

129 Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, the Strain trilogy, 3 novels (2009–2011), comprising The Strain (2009; repr., London: Harper, 2010); The Fall (New York: HarperCollins, 2010); and The Night Eternal (New York: HarperCollins, 2011). Adapted as The Strain, created by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, FX Productions, 2014–2017.

34 in dramatic and influential new ways with concerns about what it means to be human in an age of ongoing civil rights battles, drastic technological changes, and pervasive global interconnection. Nowhere is this more evident than in the act of vampiric feeding, an act that continues to test the boundaries between the human and the Other, whether it is framed as a satisfying mutual exchange or a violent and horrific attack.

PART ONE

CHAPTER TWO

The Ethics of the Abstinent Vampire in the 1980s: Contesting the Boundaries that Delimit Vampire, Human, Animal, and Race in Fevre Dream

Natural Vampires In the 1980s, several innovations in vampire literature made it possible to imagine the vampire as part of the social ecology of a fictional United States. Chief among these innovations is the way the vampire is framed in biological terms, as a natural predator and as a minority living within a broader, multicultural human community. By reframing the vampire in these ways, it becomes possible to consider in new ways what it means to be human, and to be a good human being, in a world cohabited with Others. As a species, the vampire must coexist with humans socially and ecologically. This premise of a natural and social (rather than supernaturally evil) vampire, of a vampire with the potential to live harmoniously with humans, becomes central to conceptions of the posthuman vampire and the monstrous Other in the urban fantasy and paranormal romance (UFPR) genre that emerges in subsequent decades. This “naturalised” vampire first appears in novels such as Suzy McKee Charnas’s The Vampire Tapestry (1980), Whitley Strieber’s The Hunger (1981), George R. R. Martin’s Fevre Dream (1982), Brian Stableford’s The Empire of Fear (1988), and Brian Aldiss’s Dracula Unbound (1991).1 The shift toward a natural, sociobiological, biomedical, and animalised representation of the vampire in vampire literature has been acknowledged by critics including Joan Gordon, Nina Auerbach, Margaret L. Carter, Jules Zanger, David Punter and Glennis Byron, William Patrick Day, and Stacey Abbott.2 However,

1 Whitley Strieber, The Hunger (London: Bodley Head, 1981); Brian Stableford, The Empire of Fear (1988; repr. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2011); Brian Aldiss, Dracula Unbound (New York: HarperCollins, 1991). In this period, the vampire is also framed biologically, rather than supernaturally, in texts including Lee Killough’s Blood trilogy (1987–2001); Barbara Hambly’s Those Who Hunt the Night (New York: Del Rey, 1988); and Dan Simmons’s Children of the Night (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992). 2 Gordon, “Rehabilitating Revenants”; Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves; Margaret L. Carter, “The Vampire as Alien,” 31–33; Margaret L. Carter, “Vampire-Human Symbiosis in Fevre Dream

37 38 the long-term impact of this shift in the representation of the vampire for literature (and also film) has yet to be explored in any sustained critical investigation. In the 1980s, the new representation of the naturalised vampire emerges as part of a broader shift to a new posthumanist conception of the vampire. Both UFPR and PAVNs explore how humans might coexist and cohabit with drastically different Others. Central to this exploration is the problem of vampiric feeding: How can vampires and humans peacefully coexist if vampires must prey on humans, must feed on human blood, in order to survive? Vampire texts in the 1980s respond to this ethical dilemma in different ways.3 One response that continues to have a significant impact on vampire literature is the concept of the ethically abstinent vampire—that is, of a vampire who abstains from feeding on humans for ethical reasons. If the vampire is most drastically Other in its lustful desire to feed on human blood, then surely by rejecting these desires and refusing to feed in this way, the vampire can become more human. This chapter develops a close reading of George R. R. Martin’s novel Fevre Dream, one of the earliest novels to represent the vampire as a natural, biological rather than supernatural entity, and the first novel to feature a vampire who for ethical reasons successfully abstains from drinking blood.4 Fevre Dream is a significant pre-text for more recent vampire literature because, in humanising the vampire, it introduces key conventions that enable the new form of posthuman vampire found in literature from the 1980s onward. While the vampire novels of the 1970s “humanised” the vampire, in the following decade, Martin’s novel tests the validity of those humanist ideals, making the radical suggestion that the only way to survive and thrive is by accepting Others within an inclusive social ecology. For his vampires, this means abstaining from human blood and The Empire of Fear,” in The Blood is the Life: Vampires In Literature, ed. Leonard G. Heldreth and Mary Pharr (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press, 1991), 165–76; Zanger, “Metaphor into Metonymy,” 19; Punter and Byron, The Gothic, 270–71; Day, Vampire Legends, 7, 54, 82–83; Abbott, Undead Apocalypse, 40–61. 3 For example, Anne Rice’s Lestat assuages his conscience as a good vampire by feeding only on bad humans in The Vampire Lestat (New York: Ballantine Books, 1985). And in The Vampire Tapestry, Charnas’s vampire Weyland feeds only a little from humans, usually leaving them alive. 4 In Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976), the vampire Louis initially attempts to abstain from drinking human blood for moral reasons, instead feeding on animals, but he eventually succumbs to the influence of his vampire maker Lestat and begins to feed from humans. The protagonists identified by Nina Auerbach as “reversible” or “half-vampire” (see 168–70 and 189–92) protagonists in The Lost Boys (1987) and Near Dark (1987) also fit the model of the ethically abstinent vampire. These half-vampires exist in a liminal state between vampire and human precisely because they refuse to feed on human blood. They are rewarded for this abstinence by being restored to a fully human state, suggesting that vampiric feeding is evil and both human morality and mortality are preferable.

39 in order to join the human world. Martin’s representation of a social ecology in which vampires might peacefully coexist with humans opens the way for later cohabitations with the monstrous and supernatural posthumans of UFPR. Fevre Dream thus offers an example of how, in an innovative new sociobiological framework, vampire literature may use the vampire to consider the ethics of cohabitation with Others. The first part of this close reading will use historical, biological, and philosophical theories of species, evolution, and the human to analyse how Fevre Dream represents the vampire as an animalised, natural species. My focus here will be on how Fevre Dream uses the idea of a natural vampire to challenge the boundaries that divide vampires from animals, vampires from humans, and humans from animals. The second part of this close reading studies how Fevre Dream uses its animalistic vampire species and its historical setting to evoke and contest historical constructions of race. In this regard, Fevre Dream draws on a number of key historical and literary frameworks: categorisations of race in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science; the history of race relations in the nineteenth-century United States; and the literary context of the American (Southern) Gothic novel. Fevre Dream thus uses its vampire to highlight how categories of species, race, and monstrosity relate to one another and, moreover, how these categories historically have been constructed to facilitate the exclusion and exploitation of the Other. In this sense, Fevre Dream registers ongoing cultural anxieties about the colonial history of the United States. The third part of this chapter suggests that Fevre Dream also registers the political concerns of the late twentieth-century period in which it was written. Drawing on critical discussion of the Imperial Gothic, I will argue that Fevre Dream uses its historical setting to explore contemporary anxieties about colonisation and imperialism in the later twentieth-century United States. Specifically, Fevre Dream registers Cold War fears over invasion, imperialism, and new technologies. Though Martin’s vampire protagonist ultimately upholds humanist ethical ideals, his novel nonetheless raises the question of what it means to coexist ethically with Others in an increasingly posthuman world.5 Fevre Dream is set in the mid-nineteenth-century American South. It tells the story of Abner Marsh, a steamboat captain down on his luck. At the novel’s beginning, a mysterious man named Joshua York appears and offers to finance a new steamboat for

5 An abridged version of analysis from this thesis chapter has also been published in Leigh McLennon, “The Red Thirst Is on This Nation: Vampiric Hauntings and the American Civil War,” in War Gothic in Literature and Culture, edited by Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet and Steffen Hantke (New York: Routledge, 2016), 3–21.

40

Marsh. Desirous of reviving his business, and above all dreaming of owning the fastest steamboat on the river, Marsh takes up York’s offer and agrees to his strange demands. The two name their boat the Fevre Dream and begin to transport cargo and passengers up and down the Mississippi River. However, Marsh soon discovers that York is a vampire, and that he is using their steamboat to contact other vampires along the riverbank. York believes himself to be the “pale king,” a vampire destined to free his people from the biological rule of the “red thirst,” their uncontrollable craving for human blood. Through a series of pseudoscientific experiments, York has created an alchemical potion that suppresses the red thirst. When York confronts rival vampire leader Damon Julian in New Orleans, he attempts to persuade Julian to stop feeding on humans. York loses the battle for dominance between the two, and Julian, an ancient and violent vampire who delights in drinking blood, takes control of the vampire population and the Fevre Dream. Marsh flees to safety. However, he is unwilling to let go of his ambition to dominate the river with Fevre Dream, and he soon begins to search for his boat. Years pass, and finally York decides that he must end Julian’s reign of cruelty. York asks Marsh for help, and together the two are able to defeat Julian through an act of consensual feeding: Marsh allows York to drink his blood, giving York the supernatural strength to defeat Julian in combat.

The Vampire as Species: The Ethics of Predation Fevre Dream uses and critiques eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theories of biological science and evolutionary development to demonstrate that the boundaries separating the animal from the human are easily transgressed. In this series, vampires are animalistic and yet capable of conscious, humanist moral choices. Fevre Dream thus explores conceptions of the human and of humanist ethics, as found in the work of René Descartes, Jeremy Bentham, Charles Darwin, and Darwin’s nineteenth-century contemporaries.6 By destabilising historical biological and philosophical assertions about

6 René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations (Dover Publications: Mineola, NY: 2003); Discourse on the Method was first published in 1637, Meditations on First Philosophy first published in 1641. See also Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, eds. J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart (1789; repr., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: John Murray, 1869; Google eBook); Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: Appleton and Company, 1872; Google eBook).

41 what it means to be human, Fevre Dream reconsiders what it means to be a good human. In Fevre Dream, for the first time, ethical vampirism becomes possible. Through its representations of vampiric feeding, Fevre Dream uses the act of consuming others to contest the ethics of interspecies relationships. By situating the human as part of an interspecies network of predation and consumption, the text dramatically destabilises the boundaries between human and vampire, and human and animal. The vampires of Fevre Dream challenge a definition of “human” made in opposition to the animal (and in opposition to the animalistic vampire); by framing the vampire as a kind of humanoid animal, Fevre Dream innovatively renegotiates the boundaries that define what is animal, vampire, and human. As outlined in the preceding chapter, the nineteenth-century vampires of authors such as John Polidori, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, and Bram Stoker were primarily represented as demonic, supernatural beings. Martin’s Fevre Dream departs from these representations, suggesting that it is not supernatural for the vampire to feed on humans, but rather, as Day writes in Vampire Legends in Contemporary American Culture, that “post-human vampires are thoroughly naturalised beings.”7 As York tells his history to Marsh, he explains that though some vampires are “accepting [of] the vampire tales they had heard, believing themselves to be undying avatars of evil,” York instead believes this is merely .8 Fevre Dream frames the vampire as a naturally occurring species that has coexisted alongside humans since prehistory. York relays to Marsh an oral history that represents the vampire as an ancient predator, driven by thirst and slave to its own predatory instincts: “Millennia passed in the cold and the darkness. We were savage, the stories say, cunning naked animals, one with the night, swift and deadly and free. Long- lived beyond all other beasts, impossible to kill. . . . All that lived was but food for us” (173). In this history, the vampire is more physically powerful but also more bestial than humans. It is an “animal,” a “beast” that kills humans, physically superior but intellectually primitive: “You had minds, but we never had cause to use ours, so strong were we” (174). Yet vampires lose their place as “the masters and lords of creation” (173) when they are threatened by another evolving species, modern humans: “Your kind brought . . . armies, bows and spears and clothing, art and writing and language.” Continuing, York

7 Day, Vampire Legends, 83. 8 Martin, Fevre Dream, 174–75. Further references to this novel will be given parenthetically, citing the page number.

42 tells how in becoming “civilized, you [humans] were no longer prey. You hunted us down” (174). York notes that as humankind evolved, other prehistoric hominid species were threatened—for example, just as humans overran vampires in this fictional history, contact with primitive Homo sapiens likely contributed to the real-world extinction of the Neanderthal, both through direct violent contact and through a more indirect competition for resources.9 Fevre Dream thus creates an alternative history of evolution in which humans and hominid nonhumans (i.e., vampires) struggle to coexist, each species fighting for power over the other. In this way, Fevre Dream frames the relationship between humans and vampires as an interspecies struggle, one in which each species is at times the victim of the other. Separated from other vampires at an early age and ignorant of his own kind, York himself has wondered if he is “something unnatural, a beast, a soulless monster” (162). But he rejects the idea that vampires are innately evil, concluding instead that because religion and prayer have no effect on him, he must be a natural predator, not an innately evil being (163). York argues that his fellow vampires “were not the evil, empty vampires of legend” (176); rather, the red thirst is what robs vampires of all rational self- control. As York tells Marsh, “My will, so strong normally, was nothing when the red thirst was upon me” (163). The thirst reduces him to screaming “incoherent sounds like an animal” (165); it is a “compulsion” (178). The red thirst, the desire for human blood, reduces the vampire to an animal without the capacity to make ethical choices. But York explains, “I have killed countless times, have done many terrible things, but I am not evil. I did not choose to be the way I was. Without choice, there can be no good nor evil. My people have never had that chance” (184). York thus argues that because the actions of vampires are driven by their animalistic, predatory nature, they are not free to make ethical choices—and therefore they cannot be evil. Among the vampires in Fevre Dream, Damon Julian, the rival vampire leader, represents the predatory extreme. Julian embraces vampire’s animalism. In York’s words, he is “the strongest and most terrible predator ever to walk the earth” (354). The name Damon recalls two Greek roots. The first is “daemon” or “daimon,” the root word of modern-day “demon,” which suggests Damon’s utter inhumanity (or nonhumanity), even in a narrative where the vampire is not supposed innately evil. This

9 See Clive Finlayson, Neanderthals and Modern Humans: An Ecological and Evolutionary Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

43 second is “damao” meaning to master, to conquer, or to subdue,10 which suggests Damon Julian’s status as “bloodmaster” and his desire to have total dominion over humans. Moreover, given Fevre Dream’s nineteenth-century historical setting, this name also aligns Julian with the role of a “master” of African American slaves. Damon Julian is a hungry animal, lacking all human sense of morality, operating only on base desire. Marsh sees him as inhuman, as a “thing” that had nothing of humanity, was nothing of humanity, had only the thirst, the fever, red, red, ancient and insatiable. It was primal and inhuman and it was strong. . . . and it was old, oh so old, older than man...... There across the table from him was an animal, a tall handsome animal in burgundy, and there was nothing the least bit human about it and the lines of its face were the lines of terror, and its eyes—its eyes were red, not black at all, red.” (211) As the language used in this passage implies, Marsh here is in the position of prey, paralysed by the appearance of a terrible predator. Sentences run together and yet are fragmented by commas and repetition, conveying to the reader Marsh’s internal fear and shock. York later describes Julian in similar terms: “the humanity of him is all hollow, a mask . . .11 he is only an old animal . . . that is all it is, the beast” (309–310). And so too does Julian himself: “I am pleasure . . . I am power” (105); he claims that pleasure and power are “the essence of what I am” (ibid.). If Julian and those who willingly follow him are predators, humans are in their eyes merely “cattle.”12 Through Julian’s repeated use of this term, the text frames humans as stock bred for vampiric consumption. This scenario inverts the biological and cultural hierarchy between human and animal. As Julian boasts, “I am the limit to

10 OED Online, s.v. “demon”; A Greek-English Lexicon, s.v. “δαµάζω.” 11 Ellipsis in original. Unless otherwise indicated in a footnote, ellipses in quoted material represent an omission for the sake of conciseness. 12 For further examples of this term in Fevre Dream, see pages 68, 105, 155, 159, 207, 233, and 377. Notably, the term “cattle” has been used in other vampire texts as a derogatory term for humans. For example, it is used by Weyland, the predatory vampire in Charnas’s Vampire Tapestry (48). In a more recent example from Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries, in Dead as a Doornail (New York: Ace, 2005), the vampire Eric describes humans as “edible like cows, but cute, too” (214). And in Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s The Fall (2010) and The Night Eternal (2011), the Master, an evil vampire who attempts to take over the world, describes humans as “cattle” and breeds them as a food source in concentration-camp-like facilities (see, for example, The Night Eternal, 8, 119–29). See also Ariadne Blayde and George A. Dunn, “Pets, Cattle, and Higher Life Forms on True Blood,” in True Blood and Philosophy: We Wanna Think Bad Things With You, eds. William Irwin, George A. Dunn and Rebecca Housel (Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons, 2010), 33–50, where Blayde and Dunn further analyse the politics of interspecies exploitation in relation to vampirism in True Blood (2008–2014).

44 these cattle, I am the end of all their hopes, of all their possibilities” (105). Because they are predators, he considers vampires to be physically and therefore ecologically superior. Julian’s human thrall, Sour Billy, cautions Julian to be wary of humans, but Julian remains dismissive: “Trouble?” he asks. “What can the cattle do to us?” (68). To Julian, humans “are animals, our natural inferiors” (207). By applying the term “cattle” to humans, Fevre Dream suggests that what is “natural” in the food chain is not necessarily ethical. Damon Julian compares his appetite to that of humans: “That roast you so enjoyed was once part of a living animal. Do you suppose that, if that beast could talk, he would consent to being eaten?” He continues: “But you eat him anyway, do you not?. . . . Of course you do, Captain, don’t be ashamed of it.” “I ain’t ashamed,” Marsh said stoutly. “It’s only a cow.” “Of course it is,” said Julian, “and cattle are cattle.” He looked back at Joshua York. “But the cattle may see it differently. However, that ought not trouble the captain here. He is a higher order of being than his cow. It is his nature to kill and eat, and the cow’s to be killed and eaten.” (207) Julian’s conception of the world is starkly Darwinian, and he maintains that in the competitive natural world, “it is fitting that the strong should lead” (208). This claim echoes the misuse in social Darwinism of Darwin’s famous “survival of the fittest” maxim.13 By calling human morality merely “cattle words,” Julian denies humans the rights of speaking subjects, and thereby also denies the validity of human morality. With this speech, Julian argues that natural (animal, biological) appetite, combined with strength, defines one’s rights and therefore defines what is ethically right. However, his argument has the opposite effect on its listeners. Marsh sympathises with the human “cattle,” and by putting himself in the position of the animal, he sees the disconnect between nature and ethics in his own utilitarian consumption of others. This passage also challenges the boundaries between vampire (predator) and human (cattle), and human (Marsh) and animal (here, a cow roasted for dinner), by

13 “Survival of the fittest” was first used as a phrase by Herbert Spencer in Principles of Biology (London: Williams and Norgate, 1864; Google eBook), for example, on page 453. Darwin first used the phrase in The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (London: John Murray, 1868; Google eBook) with credit to Spencer on page 6. Darwin also used this phrase in On the Origin of the Species for the first time in its fifth edition in 1869. In this sense, Fevre Dream echoes the phrase for twentieth-century readers; however, its use in this novel is anachronistic, historically preceding these works (this chapter is set in August 1857; see 198).

45 suggesting that we might read the human Marsh as a mirrored double of the vampire Julian. Both characters are ambitious, seeking dominion over those around them—Julian as bloodmaster and Marsh as captain of the Fevre Dream (named for his dream of dominating the other steamboats on the river). And while the desire to feed characterises Julian, appetite and gross corporeality characterise Marsh. At the beginning of the novel, we are told: “Abner Marsh was a massive man, six foot tall and three hundred pounds heavy” (3). When Marsh accepts an invitation to dine with York, the limited third person narration reveals his own awareness that “there was no man on the river could outeat him” (4). Marsh’s voracity recalls Julian’s delight at drinking blood and eating human flesh (105). Just as Julian is almost always depicted killing and consuming humans (22–23; 62–71; 103–112, 209–211; 346–48), Marsh too is frequently depicted eating, delighting in a variety of nineteenth-century Southern foods (46–47; 79; 124; 140; 205–207; 245; 264; 289; 316; 340). Marsh, feeling the effects of a hangover, is restored by food much as any thirsting vampire is restored by blood: “After he’d eaten, Abner Marsh felt like his old self again” (46). Throughout the novel, Marsh’s appetite seems almost insatiable, suggesting a verve for the act of eating that rivals Julian’s own. Marsh’s appetite diminishes only toward the end of the novel, after he gives up his ambition to dominate the river. At this point, Marsh has also fought on the Union side in the Civil War, and we are told, “He didn’t eat like he used to, not since the war. Food just didn’t seem to taste the same. He was still a big man, but he had lost at least a hundred pounds” (340). Death sates Marsh’s own appetite, the deaths of many in a war for which he has no taste (335), in a way it that can never satisfy Julian’s. Nevertheless, the parallels drawn between Marsh and Julian challenge the boundaries between vampire, animal, and human: Marsh’s appetite is almost vampiric, and a vampiric appetite is an animal appetite. Humans, however, can choose to reject or redirect their appetites. Animals and vampires cannot. When Julian compares Marsh’s consumption with vampiric feeding, he argues that ethical approaches to practices of eating are culturally imposed. He tells Marsh: “Your errors rise from being raised among cows, who have taught you not to consume them. Evil, you talk about. Where did you learn that concept? From them, of course, from the cattle. Good and evil, those are cattle words, empty, intended only to preserve their worthless lives. They live and die in mortal dread of us, their natural superiors.” (207)

46

Julian here suggests that in a utilitarian, post-Darwin society, the natural is ethical, and nature therefore is an ethical guide. Julian’s argument echoes the classical utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham, who argued in the opening lines of An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation that “nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do.”14 Julian’s earlier insistence that he is guided by his own “pleasure” also suggests his utilitarianism (105).15 In Fevre Dream, animals are neither good nor evil because they cannot make ethical choices but must follow their biological compulsions. According to Descartes, this vampire would be considered an animal because it is nonhuman, an automaton: “it is nature which acts in them according to the disposition of their organs, just as a clock, which is only composed of wheels and weights.”16 As Kelly Oliver summarizes, in Descartes’s argument, the animal is considered like a machine, “merely able to react to stimuli,” unable to make “any true responses” or rationally choose its own actions.17 The same argument is implied when William Patrick Day asserts that “post-human vampires are material beings without the need for ethical choice, because their needs and desires define their behaviour.”18 But the vampires in Fevre Dream are not posthuman because they are defined by their needs and desires: In evolutionary terms, they are prehuman. They are nonhuman. They are animal. And their potential to become a truly responsive, ethical posthuman figure is realized with a potion: York’s special potion to repress the vampiric thirst. Whether or not to take this potion is an ethical choice about how to live with humans—to abstain ethically or to continue to feed predatorily. Julian considers the vampire superior to humans because it is a biologically superior predator. But York rejects the argument that the relationship between species should be that between predator and prey. He instead subscribes to a humanist ethics that defines the human against the animal, suggesting that vampires must reject their animal instincts to become moral subjects. York argues that Julian must resist his urge to

14 Jeremy Bentham, Principles of Morals and Legislation, 11. Emphasis in original. 15 Despite the implications of this utilitarian attitude for interspecies relations, Bentham was also one of the earliest proponents for animal rights. In this same text, Bentham also questioned the humanist view that denied rights to animals, famously suggesting that “the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” (ibid., 283nb; emphasis in original). Julian echoes Bentham’s utilitarianism in defiance of, and therefore in tension with, Bentham’s argument for animal rights and interspecies empathy. 16 Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations, 39. 17 Kelly Oliver, Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 26. 18 Day, Vampire Legends, 83.

47 prey on humans: “They think, they dream, and they have built a world, Julian. You are wrong. We are cousins, both sides of the same coin. They are not prey” (207). Here echoing the sentiments of Romantic humanism, York believes that the human ability to imagine and create differentiates them from the animal. He believes that it is only the overriding animal compulsion of the red thirst that prevents vampires from developing the same abilities. By rejecting their bloodlust, these vampires can become more like human subjects, no longer ruled by animal instinct. York’s rejection of the belief that humans are merely prey and vampires are predators began the very first time he killed a man. In that moment, he explains, “I felt stronger and healthier than ever in my life. Yet I was sick and horrified as well. I was no animal, no monster” (161). York here identifies both the animal and the monstrous as creatures Other to the human, and himself as neither. He refuses to believe that it is “natural” to consume people for his own thirst and pleasure, stresses the need for vampires to make ethical choices, and chooses not to feed on humans. York tells Marsh of his “great resolve; to change my way of life and that of my people, to free us from the bane of the red thirst” (167). In this text, then, ethical behaviour is not a question of which actions are instinctive and natural but the exercise of choice in our actions; it is the ability to respond ethically, not merely to react instinctively. When York laments, “I did not choose to be the way I was. Without choice, there can be no good nor evil” (184), he implies that whether one is good or evil depends on the power to choose between them. Abner Marsh also accepts that ethical behaviour depends on the ability to make choices, and he therefore accepts that York cannot be held responsible for his appetites and instincts. But like York, he believes that humans can choose to control their compulsions and are therefore morally responsible for their actions. For example, when Sour Billy loses a fight with Marsh, he begs for his life. But Marsh insists that, unlike animals, humans have the capacity to make ethical choices, and therefore humans like Billy have no excuse for selfishly preying on others. Billy defends his role as an accomplice in Damon Julian’s murders, pleading, “I never had no choice, ain’t never had nothing, no family, no money, got to do like I’m told.” Marsh retorts, “You ain’t the only one ever growed up poor. . . . It ain’t no excuse. You made up your own goddamned mind to be like you are” (300). Because they can exercise choice, the text distinguishes the humans as morally superior to vampires, despite their physical inferiority. In doing so, Fevre Dream subscribes to a humanist philosophy that positions

48 the human in opposition to the animal, and raises the latter above the former. In this system of thought, the category of the animal is constitutive of the category of the human, in the sense that to be “human” is to be what the animal is not. And, therefore, it is possible to become human by consciously choosing to reject the animal, even if one is a vampire. York seeks to end the predator-prey relationship between vampires and humans by giving vampires the power to choose whether or not to feed on humans. He hopes this will be the beginning of a more symbiotic relationship in which humans and vampires can be of benefit to each other: “We can help each other so much, Abner! We can tell you your own histories, and from us you may learn how to heal yourselves, how to live longer. . . . with help I dream some day of conquering the very sun. . . . and men of medicine could help our females in childbirth” (177). Though York’s vision of this happy symbiosis suggests the potential for interspecies cooperation in the posthuman future, this vision of the future nonetheless depends on the vampire embracing a human morality. For this reason, Fevre Dream remains a primarily humanist text. In order to realize his vision, York studies human medicine. At first, he learns from books and from medical experiments on human cadavers and samples of his own flesh (167–68). Eventually, through chemical experimentation York devises an elixir that suppresses his thirst for blood: “sheep’s blood in large measure, mixed with a strong portion of alcohol. . . . Plus potassium salts and iron and wormwood, and various herbs and alchemical preparations long disused” (169).19 With the help of this elixir, he reports, “I accomplished what none of my race had ever done before me, though I did not know it then. . . . I had begun a new epoch for my people, and yours as well . . . An end to hunter and prey” (170). By enabling vampires to choose whether or not to suppress their thirst with York’s “special drink” (170), Fevre Dream gives vampires a new ethical agency. These vampires can choose whether to embrace their animalism or to reject it. They thus become ethically responsible for their own actions. This is a significant innovation in vampire literature: it frees the vampire from the demands of its own appetite and allows it to behave like a human. And in this text, by behaving as a human, the vampire can, for the first time, become morally good.

19 Of course, in Fevre Dream, though the vampire can abstain from drinking human blood, it must still drink animal blood. In this way, the text looks forward to those vampires of the late 1980s and 1990s who subsist on animal blood for moral reasons.

49

In Fevre Dream, the “good” ethical choice is to abstain from feeding on humans. When York laments that Valerie, his vampire female companion, died because she followed him away from Julian’s tyrannical rule, Marsh tells him, “She didn’t have to come with us. She wanted to. We all got to choose, you said. I think she picked right” (319). For Marsh, Valerie has done the “right” thing by following York’s dreams of a harmonious interspecies relationship, by wanting to free herself from an existence based on need rather than choice.20 York believes he must return to the Fevre Dream because he needs his “special drink” to ensure he does not become a killer once more, but also because his loyalty must ultimately be with his own species (“they are blood of my blood, my people. I belong with them. I thought I was their king,” 322). But Marsh admonishes him: “We all got to make choices. . . . Someday you’re goin’ to have to choose, I think. Between your night folks and . . .21 well, we call it good. Doing right. You know what I mean. Make the right choice, York” (323). York offers his potion to Julian as a way to coexist peacefully with humans. At first Julian seems persuaded, and following Joshua’s orders, he drinks a glass of it. But before long he challenges York, grotesquely asserting his dominance over him and Marsh by forcing them to watch as he lays a slave baby on the ship’s dining table and mutilates it by chopping off its hand with a table knife—then kills it “with a terrible wet crunch” by squeezing its head in one hand (209–211). Through this appalling act, Julian reasserts that humans are no more than food. The horror of this scene is that by treating the human as animal and as food, Julian erases the boundaries that set apart the human and animal.22 As Julia Kristeva argues, “food . . . designates the other (the natural) that is opposed to the social condition of man.” According to Kristeva, “food becomes abject only if it is a border between two distinct entities or territories”—that is, when it no longer signifies the distinction between the self and the Other.23 In this passage from Fevre Dream, Julian creates a horror that is abject, in Kristeva’s sense of the word. By representing humans

20 Day defines the posthuman vampire as exactly characterised by an existence based in need, an atavistic, animal existence. But as this thesis will show, from the 1980s onwards, the biological vampire does not merely react to the needs that drive it: it seeks to understand the role of its needs in the human world and in supernatural communities. 21 Ellipsis in original. 22 This passage also recalls the passage in Dracula (1897) where Dracula offers “a half-smothered child” in a bag to his three vampire brides, horrifying Jonathan into unconsciousness (Stoker, Dracula, 43–44). 23 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 75.

50 as food, the text here foregrounds that the limit between human and natural Other is culturally determined. In a world of predators and prey, humans can become food. Thus, in this passage, Martin challenges the boundaries that define the human (society, culture) and animal (nature, the Other).24 In Fevre Dream, for both humans and vampires, to choose animal impulse over ethical goodness is an evil act because it abdicates ethical responsibility and rejects ethical humanism. York is horrified, for example, that Julian still feels the desire to kill humans even after drinking his special elixir. He tells Marsh, “‘I asked myself, over and over, how it could have happened. Julian had drained a full glass of my . . . my potion . . .25 it should have been enough, it should have killed the red thirst” (309). York later comes to understand that as an ancient vampire, Julian is so old that he has outgrown his vampiric thirst. The red thirst no longer controls him. Instead, York realises, “‘he fed, because he chose to, because of those things he said that night, you remember, strength and weakness’” (309). In other words, Julian chooses to drink blood because this act confirms his predatory power over humans. In Fevre Dream, to commit evil is to pursue unethical, animalistic “pleasure and power” (105) instead of making an ethical choice to respect other beings’ subjectivity. Fevre Dream thus uses the natural, animalistic vampire to explore how the boundaries between human and nonhuman (the animal) are continually renegotiated. In this novel animals possess no moral autonomy and therefore cannot be evil. However, though York characterises Julian as “an old animal,” this contradicts his own realisation that Julian is not ruled by animal desire at all. York’s true horror, and Julian’s true evil in this novel, is not that Julian is an animal without choice but that he chooses to be an animal, chooses to embrace his predatory nature, chooses to kill others not for need but for pleasure. Thus, although Fevre Dream challenges the superiority of man as a rational subject, it ultimately confirms this view. And though this text continually renegotiates categories of human, vampire, and animal, the animal is still used as a base, inferior form of being that is deployed in opposition to the human. Humans and vampires alike must reject animalism to be good.

24 And as shall be further discussed below, these boundaries also engage with racial politics. 25 Ellipses in original.

51

Reading the Animalised Vampire through the Discourse of Race Fevre Dream represents the vampire as a naturally occurring humanoid species to foreground the biotechnical and social construction of Otherness. In doing so, this novel also evokes and explores the historical construction of race. Its nineteenth-century setting is important in this regard because it enables Martin to explore how racial difference has historically been constructed as natural, biological, and animal difference. Furthermore, as Martin represents his vampires as a raced social group struggling for power in the antebellum American South, he participates in a broader genre shift. Martin’s vampires are not the first to be marked by race. Critics have frequently noted the role played by race in Stoker’s representation of Dracula.26 Seen in this light, a key precursor to Martin’s novel is Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954).27 Written in the mid-1950s, at a time when segregationist policies (such as Jim Crow laws) in the United States began to be seriously challenged by the early civil rights movement, Matheson’s novel is often read as racially charged. His vampires, who cause a vampire apocalypse in midcentury America, have been read as figures for the African Americans who at this time threatened to overturn the dominant, white social order of America. For example, Sean Moreland argues in “Shambling Toward Mount Improbable to be Born” that I Am Legend “interweaves notions of biological evolution with popular American fears about racial integration and political revolution.”28 Whitley Strieber’s The Hunger, published the year before Fevre Dream, provides another example; it presents its vampire, Miriam Blaylock, as a surviving member of a race from the ancient world. However, these earlier representations of the racialised vampire nonetheless represent this vampire as a monster that destroys humans and human social order. In contrast, Martin’s vampires represent a significant innovation because they are used to explore how humans and vampires might coexist together. This representation of the vampire as

26 See, for example, Stephen D. Arata, “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization,” Victorian Studies 33, no. 4, (1990): 621–45; Jules Zanger, “A Sympathetic Vibration: Dracula and the Jews,” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 34, no. 1 (1991): 33– 44; Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows. 27 Richard Matheson, I Am Legend (1954; repr. London: Gollancz, 2007). 28 Sean Moreland, “Shambling Toward Mount Improbable to be Born: American Evolutionary Anxiety in Matheson’s I Am Legend and Romero’s Dead Films,” in Generation Zombie: Essays on the Living Dead in Modern Culture, eds. Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz (Jefferson: McFarland and Company, 2011), 80. See also Kathy Davis Patterson, “Echoes of Dracula: Racial Politics and the Failure of Segregated Spaces in Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend,” Journal of Dracula Studies 7 (2005): 19–26; and Mathias Clasen, “Vampire Apocalypse: A Biocultural Critique of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend,” Philosophy and Literature 34, no. 2 (2010): 313–28.

52 a social minority and an outsider struggling to live within a broader community becomes a key convention of UFPR in the decades to follow. Fevre Dream draws on both the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century context of race in the United States and the literary context of the American Gothic to frame its vampire as a figure for racial Otherness. The novel locates its biologically naturalised vampire in the antebellum South, using this setting to explore the historical construction of race and racial tensions in the USA. In the nineteenth century, the South was a region of intense linguistic and cultural diversity. Louisiana in particular was a disputed territory, colonized and fought over by France, Spain, and Great Britain in the eighteenth century, then purchased by the fledgling United States. European settlement displaced Native American inhabitants and brought in slaves from Africa, often by way of the Caribbean. The Mississippi was also a major trade route both within the United States and for the export of goods to Europe. This flow of peoples, goods, and commerce made nineteenth-century Louisiana home to a rich yet unequal blend of cultures, languages, religions, and superstitions. In Martin’s novel, the vampire, coming from Europe to resettle in the Americas (“where the savagery and endless forests and rude colonial conditions promised easy prey,” 179), is merely another race found in the region’s volatile cultural mix during this period. Through its Southern setting, Martin’s novel also draws on a literary-historical context, in particular the tradition of American Gothic literature. In “Vampire Gothic,” Teresa Goddu urges critics to be alert to how American Gothic uses representations of the monstrous to evoke and construct race. She argues that when analysing this literature, “it is important to show how deviant racial identities are historically produced in order to defamiliarise the gothicisation of racial difference.”29 Martin’s novel uses the “deviant” social identity of the vampire to explore the reciprocal relationships between representations of the monstrous other, the animal other, and the racial other. These discursive relationships are grounded in the historical representation of racial difference, and they continue to resonate in twentieth-century representations of social difference. Martin’s novel connects vampirism and race in the historical South, and in the literary imaginary of the South, to contemporary issues of race, imperialism, and postcolonialism in the United States. To explore this set of concerns, I begin by returning to the scene where Julian demonstrates his animal dominance at the steamboat’s dining table by killing “a small

29 Teresa Goddu, “Vampire Gothic,” American Literary History 11, no. 1 (1999), 134.

53 brown infant,” a slave baby (209). When Marsh returns to his boat in an attempt to overthrow Julian, he explains to his crew, “’Specially ain’t no calling in no New Orleans police. They ain’t goin’ to care about no coloured slave baby anyway” (217). Both Julian and Marsh are aware that in antebellum New Orleans, the dominant white class sees some humans as cattle at their personal disposal. This scene therefore implies that by disregarding the subjectivity of slaves, the dominant white humans are also predators; they are merely lower on the food chain than vampires. Earlier in this passage, when Julian again criticises humans, he makes explicit the link between vampiric predation and slavery: “We are the masters. Masters do not labour. . . . They burn to be like us, just as the darkies dream of being white. . . . To play at being masters, they even enslave their own kind” (208). In this racial context, the biological vampire serves as a metaphor for the human slaver who preys on other humans. By transgressing the boundaries of species and race, Martin’s vampires further destabilise our conceptions of biological and social Otherness, as well as what it means to be good or evil. Martin complicates his biological and ecological representation of the vampire with an extensive, complementary, and highly resonant observation: vampires treat humans as animals, just as white humans treat black slaves as animals. For their own pleasure, vampires drain the lives of humans, just as white humans drain the lives of black slaves. In this unsettling socioecological hierarchy, the vampire is a superior master who consumes inferior human animals. White humans in turn consider themselves superior masters of dehumanised black “animals.” This hierarchy of predation foregrounds the similarities between vampire and human, suggesting that humans are vampires to other humans. It thus further destabilises the conception of the vampire as evil in opposition to the good human. By representing the vampire as a racialised social figure, Fevre Dream participates in a new trend in later-twentieth-century vampire literature that more explicitly uses the vampire to explore forms of social Otherness, and in particular the Otherness of the social minority. Zanger writes in “The Vampire Next Door” that “No longer embodying a metaphysical evil, the vampire has become, in our concerned awareness for multiculturalism, merely ethnic, a victim of heredity, like being Sicilian or Jewish.”30 Zanger speaks of these vampires as “merely ethnic” and suggests that, because the vampire in the later twentieth century is represented as a social figure, its metaphoric potential to represent evil has diminished. However, an analysis of the vampire’s

30 Zanger, “The Vampire Next Door,” 19.

54 sociobiological representation in Fevre Dream demonstrates that this social, “ethnic” representation can be used to explore the complex contemporary ethical problems of a world in which the distinction between the self and the Other becomes increasingly blurred. Zanger disparages the vampire as a figure for a contemporary “concerned awareness for multiculturalism.” But Fevre Dream uses its historical setting to explore America’s troubled nineteenth-century racial history. The novel frames slavery in the antebellum South as a predatory evil similar to vampirism. In doing so, Fevre Dream deploys this vampire as a vehicle for exploring the way in which the monstrous and evil past haunts the contemporary struggle in the United States for multiculturalism and racial equality. In Fevre Dream, despite the vampire’s representation as an animalistic species, the word “species” is rarely used to refer collectively to vampires. In fact, the novel carefully uses the performative act of categorising vampires to explore the ethical standpoints of its protagonists. York insistently uses the term “race” to refer to his own nonhuman kind. He refers to, for example, “the only others of my race” (159); he states “my race was very long-lived” (173; see also 174–175); “We are different races” (274); “Our races are not so very different” (321); “I must turn to you to save our race” (363); and so on. Elsewhere, York speaks of “your people” (e.g., 159, 174) and “my people” (e.g., 176, 322): “when it comes to bloodshed, Abner,” he remarks, “my people have very little to teach your own” (344). By using the terms “race” and “people” to refer to either humans or vampires, York brings the two species closer together. His language mirrors his ethical standpoint: he refuses to regard humans and vampires as drastically different or to label either species as animal. Questions of race are also foregrounded in Fevre Dream by drawing on the taxonomic racial categorisations of the nineteenth-century American South. These categorisations foreground the notion that the act of labelling species and race is both constructive and constitutive. In Fevre Dream the biological, social representation of the vampire (and the human) draws on historical categories of race. As Charles L. Crow writes in American Gothic, “The racial heritage of Louisiana and New Orleans is even more complex than that of the rest of the South. While other slave-holding states had a binary racial system (a person was legally either black or white), Louisiana’s laws long recognized mixed-race people as a separate category.”31

31 Charles L. Crow, History of the Gothic: American Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), 89.

55

The way that racial identity was once classified is prominent in Fevre Dream, foregrounded by the complex racial milieu of New Orleans. For example, Billy despises “young Creole dandies” (14) yet lustfully dreams of vampirically killing “a sultry Creole beauty” (71). To satisfy Julian’s thirst, at the French exchange Billy will buy “dusky octoroon beauties” but no “dark-skinned” slaves (15). When Marsh arrives in New Orleans, he too distinguishes between “free men of color and lovely young quadroons and octoroons and griffes who dressed as fine as white women” (132). “Creole” originally referred to the offspring of French and Spanish colonials, but the term was soon extended to include their multiracial offspring. “Quadroon” and “octoroon” were terms of ratios: “quadroon” technically referred to an individual of one-fourth black ancestry, three-fourths white; “octoroon” to an individual one-eighth black ancestry, seven-eighths white. “Griffe” variously referred to a mulatto female; the child of a mulatto and African American parents; or the child of mixed white, African American, and/or Native American parents. In Louisiana, these categories, designed to keep racial “types” separate from one another, became unwieldy through imprecise application and through the complex navigation of the rights to freedom and property. In the consequent confusion, these taxonomic categories began to blur the boundaries of racial difference. For the contemporary reader, such outmoded historical categories seem contingent and arbitrary.32 When deployed in Fevre Dream, they make it possible to see vampire as merely another kind of human to be categorised. Fevre Dream’s historical context also foregrounds the link between biological conceptions of species and of race. The specific racial classifications of the nineteenth- century American South have their origins in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific debates about the evolution of humans, including the taxonomic classification of “species” of mankind. In the eighteenth century, Carl Linnaeus attempted to categorise various races of humans in scientific, biological terms in a comprehensive taxonomy of life forms.33 From this period and continuing throughout the nineteenth

32 Though such categorisations persisted into the twentieth century, the United Nations first offered a condemnation of racism, both moral and scientific, in “The Race Question” (Paris: UNESCO, 1950, http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001282/128291eo.pdf). Since this time, scientific definitions of separate “races” have been consistently debunked. 33 Linnaeus distinguished between Americanus, Asiaticus, Africanus, and Europeanus “species” of Homo sapiens, as well as monstrous subraces, in Systema Naturae Per Regna Tria Naturae, 10th ed. (Stockholm, 1758), 20–22. Such distinctions continued to be debated throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For example, Georges Cuvier subsequently divided humans into black, white, and yellow “races,” and Julien Joseph-Virey determined six such divisions. See John P.

56 century, scientific debates attempted to determine whether the supposedly different human races possessed a common ancestor (monogenism) or if they evolved independently, as entirely separate species (polygenism). Though Darwin argued in The Descent of Man that all humans were of a monogenist origin, with only superficial racial differences, he argued contra to much contemporary evolutionary theory about race. Georges Cuvier, Christoph Meniers, Louis Agassiz, Charles White, and other contemporary scientists and philosophers insisted that Asian and African races were biologically distinct from and inferior to white Europeans. According to this argument, African peoples were closer to monkeys and apes than to white humans. In Fevre Dream, York notes that humans exploit this supposed correlation between species and race in the institution of slavery: “You enslave your own kind, whip them and sell them like animals simply because of the darkness of their skin” (177). Historical and scientific debates about evolution and race frame the history of mankind in taxonomic, evolutionary, and biological terms. In the antebellum period, this frame justified the practice of slavery.34 Fevre Dream explores the difficult ethics of biological predatory vampirism and, through vampirism, of race relations, by exploring the unethical nature of nineteenth- century slavery in the American South. The text uses the vampire as a metaphor for the white slave owner in a comparison that moves the vampire closer to the human. Yet this metaphor also animalises the white slave-owning human as a predator by moving this figure closer to the text’s “evil” vampire. Here again the book foregrounds how, in this system, black slaves are dehumanised as cattle and victims. Julian justifies his slaughter of the slave baby by defining it as “property, by the laws of your own nation. Inferior, according to your own people” (291). Marsh opposes vampirism as evil, but Julian counters: “More slaves die every day in New Orleans, yet you do not work against slavery” (293). The vampire argues that “there is no good and evil, only strength and weakness, masters and slaves” and that in comparison to the vampire, humans are only “animals, our natural inferiors” (207); further, that humans “to play at being masters . . . even enslave their own kind” (208). Julian has no ethical opposition to slavery; he notes only that it is incompatible with a humanist ethical

Jackson and Nadine M. Weidman, eds., Race, Racism, and Science: Social Impact and Interaction (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004): 41–42. 34 For more on the history of scientific racism, taxonomy, polygenism versus monogenism, development and evolutionary theory, and the relationship of these practices and theories to slavery, see Jackson and Weidman, Race, Racism and Science; and Tania Das Gupta, ed., Race and Racialization: Essential Readings (Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press, 2007).

57 system that equates “evil” with the choice to harm others for pleasure. He justifies his embrace of his predatory nature by arguing that “good and evil are silly lies” (293)— social constructions—and that the immorality of his predatory vampirism is only a cultural perception. In contrast, as a “good” vampire, York reviles all forms of slavery. He is disgusted with the slave market in New Orleans: “You wander through the St. Louis and cast your eyes upon all that marble and that delightful dome with the light pouring through it down onto the rotunda, and then you learn it is a famous slave mart where humans are sold like cattle” (133). For York, the St. Louis Hotel serves as a metonym for the South in this period: it has a veneer of sophisticated European finery, a patina of Enlightenment properties, but beneath this the reality is a predatory animalism in the white man and an animal dehumanisation of the black man. Over the course of the novel, Abner Marsh steadily becomes stronger in his opposition to slavery. From the outset, Marsh’s language differentiates his attitude to race from those of Sour Billy and Damon Julian. Fevre Dream uses a third person limited perspective in its narration. This limited perspective normally belongs to Marsh, but occasionally the narrative leaves Marsh to describe events centred on Sour Billy and Julian.35 Whenever the narration focuses on Marsh, it uses the terms “negroes” and “coloureds” to describe African Americans, which might be considered less offensive in the novel’s historical context. But when the narration concerns Sour Billy, and when he or Julian speak, it frequently uses the more derogatory terms “darkie” and “nigger.” The use of the highly offensive “nigger” in particular establishes a moral contrast between Marsh, who will not use the term, and Sour Billy and Julian, who do. This difference in terminology implies for the contemporary reader that Marsh is not a racist character. In New Orleans, Marsh further suggests that he is racially tolerant when he complains explicitly about slavery: “I don’t like it none . . . It ain’t clean. And I tell you, I won’t have none of it on the Fevre Dream” (132). Through the character of Toby Lanyard, Marsh’s cook on the Fevre Dream, the novel also suggests that Abner Marsh believes in a form of racial equality. Lanyard is first introduced as “a coloured man . . . who had been with Marsh fourteen years, ever since Marsh tasted his cooking down in Natchez, bought him, and gave him his freedom” (35). It is significant that Lanyard is Marsh’s cook: unlike Julian, who is happy

35 The only other instances of narration not from Marsh’s perspective are chapter 14 (157–180), told from the first person perspective of York as he relates his history to Marsh, and the novel’s epilogue (388–390), which appears to be a third person omniscient perspective.

58 to kill humans to satisfy his vampiric hunger, Marsh is unwilling to exploit Lanyard, a slave cook, to quell his human hunger. Instead, Marsh sets Toby Lanyard free, and his willingness to buy and immediately free a slave again indicates his disapproval of slavery. This incident also suggests that Marsh does not accept the scientific racism of his period. Toby’s surname, “lanyard,” evokes the chains that tethered many slaves and hints that his status as a free man is precarious. This connotative play foregrounds that Lanyard’s identity as a black free man is socially constructed. Lanyard will be forever connected to his identity as a former slave in ways beyond his control or definition: “slave” or “free man” are labels that can be given to him but not claimed for himself. Later in the novel, when Marsh attempts to reclaim his steamboat from Julian, he realises that Lanyard has been reenslaved by Sour Billy: “Mister Billy says I is a slave agin, never mind I got no freedom papers. He chains us all up when we ain’t workin’” (297). Shortly after, Lanyard explains again, “Tole me I was a slave agin, Cap’n Marsh, and when I shows him my freedom papers, he done rip ’em up an’ burn ’em” (299). In this passage, Lanyard’s tenuous identity as a free man foregrounds again the constructed nature of racial difference: whether or not a human was considered free or a slave in the antebellum era might depend solely on words on a piece of paper, and in this respect may be seen as a matter of semantics. When Billy labels and categorises Lanyard as a “nigger” slave (297), he forces him into that role: Lanyard becomes a slave once more. Similarly, when Julian uses the label “cattle,” humans to him become cattle and nothing more. Fevre Dream thus suggests that to label or categorise race is a constructive and destructive power, a power that objectifies, that erases subjectivity. It is a power that is not descriptive, as Billy or Julian might insist, but inscriptive: it overwrites the feeling subjectivity of the Other. Fevre Dream uses Marsh’s language and his relationship with Toby Lanyard to demonstrate that his attitude toward race is “ethical.” However, it is not until Marsh hears York’s history of the vampire and learns how the vampire feeds on humans that he really questions his own attitude toward slavery. An analysis of a scene that follows this history demonstrates the complex way that Fevre Dream uses vampiric predation to renegotiate categories of the human and the nonhuman as well as categories of race. The scene foregrounds the way the text uses these categories to navigate the complex problem of understanding the Other, a problem that also destabilises the boundary between the Other and the self. Sour Billy has visited the steamer and informed Marsh

59 that Julian will be visiting that evening. Apprehensive, Marsh visits the kitchen, and tells Lanyard that he wants the crew safely off the boat after dinner is served. He finds that The cook had been killing chickens. Three headless birds were piled up by his elbows, and a fourth was on the block in front of him, struggling fitfully. Toby had the cleaver in hand. “Why, Cap’n Marsh,” he said, smiling. He brought the cleaver down smartly, with a solid thunk. Blood spurted, and the headless chicken thrashed crazily when Toby released it. His hard black hands were drenched with blood. He wiped them on his apron. “What kin I do fer you?” (201) When Marsh sees Toby Lanyard killing chickens, the slaughter reminds him of the bloody reality that underlies consumption: the chickens that are slaughtered remind him of the slaughter of humans at the hands of the vampire. This passage complicates our understanding of the relationships between race, ethics, and representation by depicting a former slave decapitating an animal. The description of Lanyard’s “hard black hands” that are “drenched with blood” gothicises his dark skin, literalising ethical uncleanness as “dirty hands,” hands that are both black and bloody. Lanyard’s nonchalant slaughter of chickens prefigures Damon Julian’s equally uncaring slaughter of the slave baby (which occurs later in this chapter, on pages 209–11). The similarities are striking. Neither Lanyard nor Julian heeds the cry of his victim. York beheads the chicken with a cleaver; Julian slices off the baby’s hand with a knife. The chicken “thrashed crazily”; the baby “thrashed feebly” (210). Lanyard’s black hands (and Julian’s black countenance—see 211) is an example of how this text engages with, as Goddu notes, the way that “deviant racial identities are historically produced” in American Gothic literature.36 Here, Fevre Dream challenges the way that the racial difference of dark skin might seem to signify a moral blackness. Lanyard is cast in the position of the man who masters the animal Other. As such, he is capable of the brutal and violent domination of the Other, as evinced in his slaughter of the chickens. Yet simultaneously, Lanyard is also a victim of the institution of slavery. The slaughter of chickens by the black-skinned Lanyard evokes the slaughter of humans at the hands of morally black vampires, but it also recalls the slaughter of slaves at the hands of white men (who are also like morally black vampires). Associating blackness with evil in this passage complicates the representation of race in this novel. In Fevre Dream, slave ownership is consistently equated with moral

36 Goddu, “Vampire Gothic,” 134.

60 evil. Slavery is aligned with vampirism because both practices result in the selfish and predatory consumption of human life. Yet in this passage, Lanyard, a black former slave, also seems capable of facilitating the violent consumption of others. The text thus suggests that neither whiteness nor blackness serve as a clear signifier of moral goodness or moral evil. In this way, Fevre Dream reflexively challenges conventions of American Gothic. Instead of using monstrosity to construct race, it suggests that both monstrosity and race are socially constructed and are not reliable indicators of good or evil. This passage foregrounds the significance of Marsh’s ability to see that the boundaries between the self and the Other do not necessarily correspond with those between good and evil. Marsh must overlook constructed categories of Otherness such as race; he must distinguish right from wrong by assessing the ethical choices that motivate actions. Lanyard’s Gothicised monstrosity here startles Marsh, yet he is able to look beyond racial boundaries to the central problem of ethics. No matter how gruesome he appears here, in the act of slaughtering chickens, Lanyard is a victim of slavery. Marsh thus here sees Lanyard not simply as an animal, a slave, or a black man, but as an individual. This ability to overlook the boundaries that delimit the self from the Other allows Marsh to recognise the potential for ethical goodness and full human subjectivity in York. Through York and Lanyard (as respective representatives of an Othered, nonhuman species and of an Othered race), Marsh sees the potential for ethical goodness and human subjectivity in all individuals, whether they are vampires or slaves. Because he is able to overlook conventional categorisations, he can identify with both the vampire and the black man. Further, he understands that individuals are not confined to narrowly defined, stereotypical roles in a community where the Other can coexist with the human. Marsh here recognises that slavery is a kind of vampirism: slave owners “use” people as if they are not people—in other words, as if they are animals to be fed upon. Marsh finally tells Toby Lanyard: “You know I never held much with slavery, even if I never done much against it neither. . . . Only I been thinkin’, and it seems to me maybe they was right after all. You can’t just go . . .37 usin’ another kind of people, like they wasn’t people at all. Know what I mean? Got to end, sooner or later. . . . Some things is just wrong. They got to be ended.” (201)

37 Ellipsis in original.

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Marsh’s ability to identify with the Other (both Joshua York as a vampire and Toby Lanyard as a black former slave) allows him to understand his own potentially vampiric role as a white man who tolerates slavery. Rejecting this vampiric role means rejecting the laws of the South and, ultimately, taking the side of the North in the Civil War. After York and Julian disappear with the Fevre Dream, Marsh uses his remaining steamboat to ferry runaway slaves to freedom as part of the underground railroad: “it made him feel good to help, kind of like he was hurting Damon Julian somehow” (328). Julian here is aligned with the slave owners responsible for harming other humans. Just as Julian is evil because he makes the choice to live selfishly and predatorily, so, the reader must infer, are the slave owners. The role of the Civil War in this text is inextricable from the text’s representation of slavery. Slavery in the South, the domestic colonisation of the raced Other within the United States, was the driving factor behind political tensions leading to secession and war. From the 1990s onward, studies such as Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease’s Cultures of United States Imperialism and Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt’s Postcolonial Theory and the United States have argued that the history and literature of the United States have been constructed through imperialist and (post-)colonial discourses. Such studies see the conflicts between settlers and Native Americans on the frontier and the practice of slavery in the South as examples of imperial power exercised within the United States. 38 As Kaplan argues, the colonial tropes of “conquest, conflict, and resistance . . . have shaped the cultures of the United States and the cultures of those it has dominated within and beyond its geopolitical borders.”39 Moreover, Kaplan also argues, “imperialism as a political or economic process abroad is inseparable from the social relations and cultural discourses of race, gender, ethnicity, and class at home.”40 As a defining event in US history, the Civil War is a key site for the interrelatedness Kaplan identifies between political and cultural conflict on the one hand and, on the other hand, the dominion of the United States within its own contested borders.

38 Amy Kaplan, “Left Alone with America: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism. eds. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 3–21; Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt, “On the Borders Between US Studies and Postcolonial Theory,” in Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature, eds. Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 3–67. 39 Kaplan, “Left Alone with America,” 4. 40 Ibid., 16.

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These borders are both geographical and symbolic. Singh and Schmidt argue that “while the US defended itself as the world’s first independent and anti-colonial nation-state it simultaneously incorporated many of the defining features of European colonial networks—including the colour line—into its economic and cultural life.”41 The “colour line,” a term referring to the continued racial segregation following abolition, also evokes the geographic and symbolic lines that divided the North from the South during the war, the Mason-Dixon and the Missouri Compromise lines. The term thus suggests how the oppositions at stake during the Civil War (slave and master, , North and South) have haunted the colonial history of the United States long since. Viewed in this way, the history of the Civil War as a martial conflict is inextricable from the history of racial conflict in the United States. Marsh does eventually fight on the Unionist side of the Civil War. However, the Civil War itself remains understated as a significant event in the novel, glossed over though Marsh’s own reluctance to discuss it: “There was a war. . . . We won. Now it’s done with, and I don’t see why we got to yammer about it endlessly, like it was something to be proud of. The only good thing to come out of it was endin’ slavery” (335). In this way, Fevre Dream frames the Civil War as an unspeakable Gothic trauma in American history. The politics of the Civil War thus haunt the fringes of this novel in a way typical of classic American Gothic literature. The primary plot of this text revolves around vampires, not slavery or the war itself. As Fevre Dream mutes the significance of this formative event in US history, race in this novel becomes what Toni Morrison in “Unspeakable Things Unspoken” calls the “ in the machine,” the spectral yet resonant and historically real presence that underlies the fantastic narrative.42 Marsh’s insistence that the Civil War was an unspeakable horror is at odds with contemporary discourses surrounding the conflict. Today narratives of the Civil War are in fact told and retold, often in commemoration of the “glorious” deaths of those who fought. Civil War battles are even reenacted regularly.43 Through Marsh’s refusal to retell his experiences at war, Martin rejects a contemporary, twenty-first-century glorification of the Civil War. As David Blight has written,

41 Singh and Schmidt, “On the Borders Between US Studies and Postcolonial Theory,” 5. 42 Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” Tanner Lectures on Human Values (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor: October 7, 1988, http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/m/morrison90.pdf), 135–36, 138. 43 For a discussion of how historical reenactments make meaning out of the trauma of war, see, for example, Randal Allred, “Catharsis, Revision, and Re-enactment: Negotiating the Meaning of the American Civil War,” Journal of American Culture 19, no. 4 (1996): 1–13.

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For Americans broadly, the Civil War has been a defining event upon which we have often imposed unity and continuity; as a culture, we have often preferred its music and pathos to its enduring challenges. . . . Deeply embedded in an American mythology of mission, and serving as a mother lode of nostalgia . . . the Civil War remains very difficult to shuck from its shell of sentimentalism.44 As a definitive event in American history, the Civil War is the subject of a nostalgic mythologising that occludes the very real horror of the conflict. As historian William Fitzhugh Brundage has noted, at times it seems that the American nation has “decided that the Civil War was a ‘good war’ because it destroyed slavery.”45 Marsh acknowledges that ending slavery is a “good thing,” but nonetheless refuses to celebrate the violence of the war that ended it: “Shooting a man ain’t nothin’ to build a brag on, goddamnit” (335). Martin’s emphasis on the ethical issues of slavery rather than a detailed account of the martial conflict of the Civil War is itself a way of engaging with the war in this novel. As a historical novel, Fevre Dream rewrites American history during the period of the Civil War and yet refuses to glorify the war as a definitive event. In this way, the text mediates both historical and present anxieties about the Civil War in the United States. It engages not only with the Civil War but with how war and its ethical dilemmas are remembered and retold in American cultural discourse. Though Marsh refuses to recount his experiences of the war, his choice to fight with the Union—to fight against slavery and for the rights of the Other—is the definitive ethical choice he must make in this novel. Martin thus uses his vampire novel to explore the ethical conflicts of this key period in American history. In doing so, he fantastically and Gothically interrogates both slavery and the Civil War that ended it.

44 David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 4. 45 Quoted in Tony Horwitz, “150 Years of Misunderstanding the Civil War,” The Atlantic, June 19, 2013, accessed November 19, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/150-years-of-misunderstanding-the- civil-war/277022/.

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Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Contexts: Interconnection and American Empire As the preceding section suggests, Fevre Dream is concerned with more than the historical construction of categories of Otherness and how this Otherness is used to define the human. As a historical novel, Fevre Dream’s fictional construction of the past refracts anxieties about Otherness that are prevalent in the real, contemporary United States. Fevre Dream explores anxieties about species, race, technology, and empire during the Cold War period in which it was written. At this time, there was an increased sense of the world as globally interconnected. Although the Cold War conflict was framed as a conflict between East and West, the spectre of global nuclear catastrophe overwhelmed this neat division. The Cold War also served as a catalyst to develop new technologies (such as the internet) that have contributed significantly to our still more heightened sense of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century world as globally interconnected. In “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization,” Stephen D. Arata analyses Stoker’s Dracula through the context of nineteenth-century British imperialism. Building on Arata’s work, in this section, by reading the United States as an imperial power, I will suggest that Fevre Dream registers both historical and contemporary anxieties about race, empire, and colonisation. By framing imperialism and colonialism in the United States as cultural and racial, we are able to apply Arata’s concept of “reverse colonisation” to a reading of the historical contexts of species and race in Fevre Dream. This contextual reading highlights the extent to which the vampire’s representation as an animal and racial Other has shifted dramatically in the later twentieth century. Arata argues that Stoker’s Dracula reflects a contemporary anxiety about colonisation in the British Empire abroad. He locates Dracula in relation to the decline of Britain as a world power at the close of the nineteenth century; or rather, the way the perception of that decline was articulated by contemporary writers. . . . examining . . . how that perception is transformed into narrative, into stories which the culture tells itself not only to articulate and account for its troubles, but also to defend against and even to assuage the anxiety attendant upon cultural decay.46 In these circumstances, according to Arata, there arises a fear of “a terrifying reversal”: a reverse colonisation, whereby “the colonizer finds himself in the position of the

46 Arata, “The Occidental Tourist,” 622–23.

65 colonized, the exploiter becomes exploited, the victimizer victimized.” But, Arata continues, these literary reversals are “more than products of geopolitical fears.” They are “also responses to cultural guilt. In the marauding, invasive Other, British culture sees its own imperial practices mirrored back in monstrous forms.”47 In Dracula, he concludes, it is “the notion of racial development that is the real source of the vampire’s threat.” Accordingly, “Dracula can himself stand in for entire races, and through him Stoker articulates fears about the development of those races in relation to the English.”48 Fevre Dream builds on a roughly similar historical anxiety: slavery as a form of colonisation within the United States. In Dracula, according to Arata, “the exploiter becomes exploited, the victimizer victimised.” In Fevre Dream, the animalistic predator, Julian, threatens to exploit and victimise the dominant white class in the American South. If Dracula allows its readers to see “imperial practices mirrored back in monstrous forms,” when Marsh rejects Julian, and the system of exploitation and predation that Julian represents, he experiences an analogous moment of self-recognition and all the attendant horror of seeing the monster in the mirror.49 In Dracula, although the vampire challenges the boundaries of species and race through reverse colonisation, it is defeated, and those boundaries are reasserted. As Arata notes, in Dracula “the potential for powerful critiques of imperialist ideologies . . . remains unrealised.”50 In contrast, at its conclusion Fevre Dream does not reassert racial and species boundaries. Marsh and York defeat the “evil’ vampire of Fevre Dream, but the Civil War ends slavery, and Marsh and York live on as friends. Vampires and humans learn to live together, to coexist. In this text, the vampire is not destroyed. One evil vampire, Julian, is killed, but as a species they live on. Fevre Dream suggests that the ability to empathise with and even to adopt the Other’s point of view is crucial for successful coexistence. Julian is killed because he cannot identify with or empathise with those he believes are Other to himself. The potential for empathetic coexistence between vampires and humans is another significant development in vampire literature in the 1980s, one that is already evident in Fevre Dream. In Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, Patrick Brantlinger writes that the threat of “going native” is a source of anxiety and fear in

47 Ibid., 623. 48 Ibid., 640. 49 Ibid., 623. 50 Ibid.

66 imperial Gothic literature.51 As argued by Brantlinger and Arata, Dracula explores this anxiety by representing the vampire as a racial other who is also a colonizer, converting humans to his own primitive vampire race.52 In contrast, Fevre Dream represents the ability to empathise and identify with the racial Other as something ethical and good. York is a good vampire because he believes that vampires and humans can live together in ecological harmony. York has in fact “gone native,” growing up among humans, and the text represents his consequent ability to empathise with humans as morally good. Similarly, Marsh’s ability to empathise with York and with slaves like Lanyard suggests that the ability to empathise with the Other is a desirable trait in the increasingly global and posthuman world of the later twentieth century. Fevre Dream, as I noted above, ultimately conforms to a humanist model for ethical goodness, framing human morality in opposition to base animal instinct. However, to the extent that its “good” vampires destabilise the boundaries that divide the human from the vampire, the text also looks forward to a posthumanist future that more radically challenges the superiority of the human. The novel uses its historical setting and historical discourses of race and species to offer a late twentieth-century view of the Other as an entity to be respected and even incorporated into the mainstream world. In Fevre Dream, horror does not derive primarily from the threat of becoming a victim of evil, but from the evil of being a victimiser, of being a coloniser, and of refusing to see from the point of view of the Other. Fevre Dream thus uses its historical context to register and explore contemporary cultural anxieties about race, imperialism, and postcolonisation in late twentieth-century America. In her introduction to Cultures of United States Imperialism, Amy Kaplan notes that in the twentieth century much American history “speak[s] from within a cold war discourse, which defines American exceptionalism as inherently anti-imperialist, in opposition to the empire-building of either the Old World or of communism and fascism.” 53 This discourse, she suggests, is one of “denial,” “displacement” and “projection,” masking the United States’ own imperialist agenda.54 In its revisionist history of nineteenth-century America, Fevre Dream too speaks from within this

51 Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 230. 52 As an Eastern European. See Arata, “The Occidental Tourist,” 628. 53 Kaplan, “Left Alone with America,” 12. 54 Ibid., 13. Kaplan continues her critique of the United States, which she argues is imperialist, in The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

67 discourse. However, it also uses the vampire to reflect on this discourse and to suggest, like William Appleman Williams’s contemporary history text Empire As A Way of Life, that the global political agenda of the United States may easily become an agenda of imperialism and colonisation—and moreover, that it always has been.55 Fevre Dream thus participates in what Johan Höglund has recently termed an “American Imperial Gothic”: a Gothic mode that “maps . . . the ideological and territorial boundaries that the United States has established, and the profound anxiety connected to the experience that these borders are, indeed, constantly challenged, that the gothic Other is at the door, and that the apocalypse is imminent.”56 Though the United States has often cast itself in the role of a benevolent, anti- imperialist world leader, acting to defeat the fascist imperialism of World War II, this self-representation became less convincing during the Cold War. Military campaigns in North Korea and Vietnam irreparably damaged the image of the United States as a state that would only deploy its military defensively. The Cold War attempted to reinforce the boundaries that separated the East from the West (most visible in the literal boundary line of the Berlin Wall). Yet at home in the United States, McCarthyism and fear of communism implied that this boundary was impossible to maintain because outsiders and their sympathizers could always be hiding on the inside. Moreover, in its extreme attempts to stop communism, McCarthyism suggested that the US government might be capable of the same kind of totalitarianism that it opposed in Eastern Europe. In the 1960s and 1970s, the civil rights movement insisted that the subjugation of African Americans and Native Americans continued into the twentieth century in a different form, and that it was necessary to break down social boundaries of racial exclusion. The civil rights movement also suggested that those who were once on the outside could move into the social mainstream, a phenomenon that represented the potential for a new social harmony. However, it also played on fears of what Cary Wolfe, analysing the relationship between species and race in Michael Crichton’s Congo (1980), calls “deeply held of racial identity that were alive and well at the dawn

55 William Appleman Williams, Empire as a Way of Life: An Essay on the Causes and Character of America’s Present Predicament Along with a Few Thoughts About an Alternative (1980; repr., New York: IG Publishing, 2007). 56 Just as this thesis does, Höglund’s work draws on Arata, Brantlinger, Williams, and Kaplan to make this argument. Johan Höglund, The American Imperial Gothic: Popular Culture, Empire, Violence (Burlington: Ashgate, 2014), 3.

68 of the Reagan era.”57 In his literary analysis, Wolfe links the animalistic representation of race in the 1980s to Reagan-era racist fantasies of the animalism of the racial Other and to fears of social atavism stemming from the assimilation of this Other. Fevre Dream explores these same anxieties. The fear of social assimilation was also negatively mirrored in Cold War America as a fear of domestic communists and of Soviet spies— of invasion and destruction from without and within. Martin’s Fevre Dream draws on the role of Eastern Europe in vampire folklore and in Dracula as the birthplace of the vampire. It uses this geopolitical origin to signal that in the twentieth century, the vampire may still be used to represent a political conqueror and invader. In doing so, Fevre Dream evokes the perceived threat from the East during the Cold War. However, in their capacity for good and evil, Martin’s vampires suggest two possibilities: they might either destroy the American human population or quietly assimilate into it. York traces his people from the Rhineland, to Poland, and then to the Urals (a mountain range of Russia), in a history that also maps the regions under fascist control in twentieth-century Europe (170, 173). Eventually York finds his own kind in the Carpathians, the same mountain range, where it crosses Transylvania, that is home to Dracula (171). Arata notes that in the late nineteenth century, Transylvania “was known primarily as part of the vexed ‘Eastern Question’ that so obsessed British foreign policy”: “the region was first and foremost the site, not of and Gothic romance, but of political turbulence and racial strife.”58 He also suggests that as an Eastern European, Dracula is ambiguously raced: “He refers at once to his Szekely warrior past and to his vampiric present. The ambiguity underscores the impossibility of untangling the two aspects of Dracula’s essential nature, since his vampirism is interwoven with his status as a conqueror and invader.”59 Just as the British Empire feared invasion from the East in the late nineteenth century, Martin’s text registers American fears of a similar invasion from the East in the later twentieth century. Arata argues that Dracula also harbours an anxiety that imperialism itself is savage and predatory.60 Brantlinger and Arata both suggest that the animalism of the nineteenth-century vampire registers an anxiety that imperialism is an atavistic practice,

57 Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 173. 58 Arata, “The Occidental Tourist,” 627. 59 Ibid., 628. 60 Ibid., 623, 634.

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“a retrograde social development, a backsliding towards barbarism.” 61 Julian’s evil vampirism similarly suggests that slavery is a practice that is atavistic, that threatens degradation and death. When Julian embraces his predatory nature, he becomes more animal-like. Similarly, when white men enslave black men, this predatory and amoral behaviour renders the white man more bestial. When read in relation to late twentieth-century concerns, Martin’s text similarly evokes the fear that, like the veneer of sophistication on the St. Louis Hotel slave market, American imperialism during the Cold War similarly relies on a veneer of benevolence to cover an agenda of mastery and domination. The vampires in Fevre Dream suggest both the fear of a colonizing Other from the East and the concern that the American imperialism opposing the East is also evil. Fevre Dream thus suggests an anxiety about the imperial agenda of the United States during the Cold War—an anxiety that, through its aggressions, the United States might prove as threatening to the globe as the Soviet Union. Fevre Dream uses the steamboat to explore the potential breakdown of geopolitical and ethical boundaries in the Cold War era. In the nineteenth century, the steamboat offered the possibility of mobility and mastery. In Fevre Dream, its power arises from its ability to transgress physical and metaphorical boundaries while also tracing the border line of the river (which divided not only banks but states). This is why the steamboat can ferry runaway slaves to freedom and reunite isolated vampires, but it can also carry slaves into servitude—and at its most threatening, it can become a nightmarish weapon, bringing death wherever it goes: “a boat as dark as death and black as sin, a shadow moving through moonlight and fog, hardly seen, quiet and fast” (326). The relation between race, technology, colonisation, and imperialism is foregrounded through Marsh’s pervasive obsession with steamboat racing. Marsh wishes to build a grand steamboat able to beat the fastest boat on the river, the Eclipse, in a steamboat race. This, he believes, will prove him to be the master of the Mississippi river. His steamboat, the Fevre Dream, is a work of technical and mechanical mastery: “the shadows of the hulking machines seemed to shift and jump ominously, as if they were things alive” (26). Marsh proudly lists the technical superiorities of his ship: “Eighteen boilers. . . . Three more than the Eclipse. Thirty-eight-inch diameters, twenty-eight-good long, each of ’em. . . . Furnaces are all done up with firebrick and sheet iron, got ’em up on brackets clear of the deck, cuts

61 Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, 236.

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down on the chance of fires.” He traced the path of the steam lines overheard, running from the boilers back to the engines, and they all turned toward the stern. “We got thirty-six-inch cylinders, high pressure, and we got ourselves an eleven-foot stroke, same as the Eclipse. This boat is goin’ chew up that old river something terrible.” (27) When Marsh is about to resign himself to the loss of his boat, after it has been commandeered by Julian, it is the thought of racing that ignites his determination to regain control of it: “He stood there. . . . Remembering how she’d left the Southerner far behind her, how she’d gulped down the Mary Kaye” (247–48). Later, Marsh will not destroy Julian by blowing up his boat because he still cherishes the dream that he can regain the Fevre and race her (261). And years on, when York finally decides to rebel against Julian’s predatory rule, he entices Marsh with the lie that Julian intends to race the Fevre himself: “He will let the Natchez and the Robert E. Lee depart first, and then he will take the Fevre Dream upriver after them. When darkness falls, he will close in on whichever boat is leading, pull alongside her, and . . .62 well, you know what he intends” (357)—that is, he intends a massacre. In the 1980s, this obsession with steamboat racing is likely to have evoked the two great technological “races” of the Cold War: the Space Race and the nuclear arms race. Like the steamboat, the rockets of the Space Race and the nuclear arms race represented the technological ability to cross boundaries—to traverse vast distances but also to transgress the physical and political boundaries of nations. Martin’s novel was published in 1982, soon after a nuclear rearmament late in Jimmy Carter’s presidency, after nearly a decade of détente. It suggests that, just as Marsh refuses to let go of his dream of winning a grand steamboat race, so in the 1980s the United States could not easily leave behind its desire to triumph over the Soviets, even at a time when the war was finally winding down. Through Marsh’s obsession with steamboat racing, the novel also highlights that in an increasingly posthuman world, the human, the animal, and the technological are interconnected. Fevre Dream highlights the relation between the polysemic meanings of “race,” revealing that racial difference is cultural, biological, political, and competitive. It suggests that the technological, environmental, and the social are coconstitutive. It is interesting in this regard that even Marsh’s boat and the river have an organic, predatory existence. When Marsh proudly declares that his boat will “chew up that old river

62 Ellipsis in original.

71 something terrible,” his metaphor brings to mind vampiric feeding: “Suddenly I had plunged my face into his neck, ripping with my teeth, sucking up the blood, tearing, swallowing” (161). And while Marsh’s steamer “chews” up the Mississippi River and “gulps” down other steamboats, the river itself is described as haunted, as bloody. On one occasion, for example, “the Mississippi turned to blood, and there was bleeding in [Marsh’s] dreams as well” (94). York explicitly draws the connection between technological race, biological race, and the threat of extinction: he argues that if Julian succeeds in his final plan to race the Fevre Dream, it “will mean the end of my race” (357). In this way, the novel links technological superiority (so crucial in the Cold War conflict) to postcolonialism and imperialism.

Looking Forward to the Vampires of the New Millennium Yet Marsh never wins his race. In fact, he doesn’t even compete. Instead, Fevre Dream concludes that the contemporary vampire must find a way to coexist with humans. This conclusion is highly innovative in the vampire novels of the 1980s and perhaps reflects the growing sense of the world in that period as global and interconnected. Martin’s novel challenges the historical discourses that construct racial Otherness as inherently monstrous by suggesting monstrosity is the result of a choice rather than of race or nature. Moral choice thus offers the possibility that the monstrous Other can choose to be ethically good. The vampires of Fevre Dream challenge the boundaries that divide vampire, white man, and black man. At the same time, in Fevre Dream the white self is as likely to be as monstrous as the Other.63 In this way, as previously noted, the most monstrous figure in the novel is the white slave owner in the American South. Fevre Dream is thus an innovative late twentieth-century vampire novel because it draws a clear analogy between the predatory vampire who exploits humans and those

63 This suggestion can be seen in other popular vampire texts in the 1980s and 1990s. For example, one might argue that Max, the conservative vampire patriarch in The Lost Boys, performs a similar function in rendering the father figure in Reagan’s America as monstrous; that the white-trash vampires of Near Dark monstrously refract the white lower-to-middle class in the United States; and that the teen monsters of Buffy the Vampire Slayer serve to comment on the potential monstrosity of white middle-class adolescents. This argument diverges from analysis by critics such as Auerbach, Gelder, and Rickels, who assert that vampire literature and film after approximately 1970 “humanises” the vampire and makes it sympathetic; they do not consider in depth how such vampires negatively refract mainstream whiteness. They do suggest this possibility, however, in their analyses of The Lost Boys and Near Dark, in which all three critics do suggest that the vampires in these texts frame the mainstream patriarchy and patriarchal family values of the 1980s as monstrous (see Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves; Gelder, Reading the Vampire, and Rickels, The Vampire Lectures).

72 dominant white humans who exploit Others. It refigures the boundaries between self and Other by depicting a protagonist able to identify with the oppressed black minority and to see from the point of view of the racial and the vampiric Other. The ethical framework implied by Fevre Dream suggests that to choose to drain the lives of others for one’s own pleasure is evil. This definition of ethical (and unethical) behaviour encourages Marsh to reject his own potential for evil and to recognise the humanity of black slaves. Similarly, Joshua York is a “good” vampire because he can identify and empathise with humans. As I shall argue in the following chapters, this ability to identify and empathise with the Other becomes crucial in UFPR fiction that frames the vampire as affirmatively posthuman. Fevre Dream thus represents a significant step not only for the humanisation of the vampire but for a new form of posthuman vampire. Martin’s novel challenges limits of species, race, and technology by representing the vampire as a humanised and potentially posthuman biological entity. Its emphasis on contingency and relationality between species—and its dismissal of the supposed preeminence of the white, human, male subject—is arguably posthumanist. Further, Fevre Dream establishes the possibility of coexistence and symbiosis between the human and the nonhuman Other, an idea that is a central concern explored in later UFPR fiction. This potential for symbiosis is made clear in the novel’s conclusion. Though for ethical reasons he has strived to abstain from drinking blood, ultimately York can only find the power necessary to defeat Julian by drinking Marsh’s blood, which Marsh volunteers. Thus, only through an act of voluntary interspecies sharing is it possible to defeat the novel’s selfish and predatory antagonist. But though feeding on Marsh gives York the power to defeat Julian, it is a one-time act, and York resumes his ethical abstinence from feeding thereafter. Fevre Dream thus hints at the possibility of a new cooperative coexistence between humans and vampires, but it holds back from truly allowing the act of vampiric feeding to become a positive one. In Fevre Dream and in other vampire texts published in the 1980s, such as Charnas’s The Vampire Tapestry, Strieber’s The Hunger, and Stableford’s The Empire of Fear, it is possible to trace the development of the posthuman vampire that later emerges in UFPR. Critics including Auerbach, Gelder, and Rickels have suggested that vampire literature in the 1980s is conservative because it represents the vampire as evil.64

64 See Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, 162, 168, 192; Gelder, Reading the Vampire, 104–105; and Rickels, The Vampire Lectures, 201.

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However, Fevre Dream demonstrates that at least some vampires in this period are able to make ethical choices, and are actually capable of both good and evil, arguably for the first time in vampire literature. Nonetheless, Fevre Dream and other 1980s texts that represent the vampire as a natural (rather than supernatural) entity generally still define goodness in human terms. To be a “good” vampire, one must behave like a human, follow human morality, and, whenever possible, abstain from feeding on humans. The following chapters will map how, from the 1990s onward, the new genre of UFPR more dramatically transforms vampire literature and the ethics of vampiric feeding. In urban fantasy and paranormal romance, a new form of posthuman vampire emerges as this genre further tests conceptions of what it means to be a “good” vampire. Consequently, as seen in the figure of the vampire, urban fantasy and paranormal romance develops a new conception of what it means to be a good (post-)human. What happens when humans and vampires establish meaningful alliances and relationships? And how can humans and vampires successfully and ethically interconnect? By providing an original and comprehensive genre survey of urban fantasy and paranormal romance, the following chapter will show how the innovations seen in Fevre Dream develop as central conventions in this new genre. Chapter 3 surveys a variety of the UFPR texts that develop from the 1990s onward and suggests some of the ways in which these texts engage with the potential of a posthuman ethics. It is important to add that though Fevre Dream admits the potential for an affirmative, posthuman future in which humans and Others learn to engage ethically with one another, the anxiety about these interactions that is still evident in this novel can also be read as a precursor to the post-apocalyptic vampire narratives that first emerge circa 2005. In PAVNs, the natural or biological vampire imagined by Charnas, Strieber, Martin, and others comes to threaten the still-imperial, global politics of the contemporary United States. Martin’s novel is thus also a significant pre-text for this second strand of vampire literature because it suggests the dangers that might attend the dissolution of the boundaries between self and Other. Seen in this light, Fevre Dream suggests that humans are still threatened by the spectre of atavistic degeneration even as they are threatened by dangerous new technologies in the global world. These are the same threats explored in the post-apocalyptic vampire narratives of the new millennium. Consequently, while chapters 3, 4, and 6 primarily analyse how the vampire becomes affirmatively posthuman in urban fantasy and paranormal romance, chapters 5 and 7

74 explore the potentially negative consequences of posthuman interconnection, as they are framed in post-apocalyptic vampire literature.

CHAPTER THREE

Defining Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance: Crossing the Boundaries of Genre, Media, Self, and Other in New Supernatural Worlds, 1985–2015

The Emergence of Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy Although it emerged only in the late 1980s, the urban fantasy and paranormal romance (UFPR) genre now exerts a powerful influence on representations of monsters and the supernatural in popular culture. Over the last thirty years, UFPR has developed into a new, easily recognisable genre formula: sympathetic vampires (and/or other monsters) join -wielding (often leather-clad) heroines to solve mysteries and/or consummate transgressive romances. This genre is now prevalent not only in popular fiction but in broader popular culture, including television, film, comics, role-playing games (RPGs), and pop culture and conventions. Yet prior to the publication of an earlier version of this chapter in 2014, there was no detailed history of how this genre has emerged in the later twentieth century, nor a comprehensive account of its genre conventions.1 This chapter seeks to fill a gap in current academic research by providing an original genre history and definition of urban fantasy and paranormal romance. Academics, members of the publishing industry, and readers alike have noted the prevalence and the commercial success of UFPR. For example, Angela Ndalianis writes in The Horror Sensorium that “paranormal romance erupted as a runaway success in the 1990s.”2 While the romance genre began to produce a number of paranormal titles

1 An earlier version of this chapter was published as “Defining Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance: Crossing Boundaries of Genre, Media, Self, and Other in New Supernatural Worlds,” in Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media 23 (2014), http://refractory.unimelb.edu.au/2014/06/26/uf-mclennon/. 2 Ndalianis, Horror Sensorium, 76. Ndalianis cites the work of authors including Rebecca Paisley, Nora Roberts, Laurell K. Hamilton, Susan Sizemore, Christine Feehan, and Maggie Shayne as evidence of this new romance genre. In Twilight of the Gothic, Crawford additionally names Lori Herter as a significant author of early paranormal romance. For more on early paranormal romance from a reader’s perspective, see also Jane Little, “The Pioneers of Paranormal Romance,” Dear Author (blog), September 8, 2009, accessed October 23, 2013, http://dearauthor.com/features/letters-of-opinion/the-pioneers-of-paranormal-romance/.

75 76 and even dedicated imprints in the 1990s (such as the Silhouette Shadows imprint from Silhouette), as this chapter will argue, UFPR crystallised into its now-common genre conventions following the year 2000, rising dramatically in popularity after the turn of the millennium. Book critic and reviewer Paul Goat Allen argues that “a boom in paranormal fantasy” began in 2001 following the success of Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series (1993–).3 In 2006, Belinda Luscombe noted in Time that “more than 170 sagas of paranormal amour hit the shelves in 2004, twice as many as two years before” (that is, in 2002) and that popular author Christine Feehan at that time was selling approximately five hundred thousand copies of each of her new paranormal romance releases.4 Also in 2006, Carol Memmott of USA Today observed the continuing boom in paranormal romance, noting that “nearly 20% of all romance novels sold in 2005 had paranormal story lines, compared with 14% in 2004, according to Romance Writers of America figures.”5 Tim Holman, publisher at Orbit Books, remarked that by 2008 urban fantasy accounted for 45 percent of best-selling science fiction and fantasy fiction, commenting that “the rise of urban fantasy has without any doubt been the biggest category shift within the SFF market of the last 10 years in the US.”6 These figures suggest the rapid growth of this genre during this decade. In 2009, Tor Publishers officially began to use “urban fantasy” as a spine label for books in this genre, suggesting that though Tor has long published popular fantasy and horror titles, the term “urban fantasy” had by this time gained enough popular traction to be a useful marketing label.7 In “P is for Paranormal—Still,” Lucinda Dyer of Publishers Weekly professed in 2010, “Paranormal is le dernier cri in the romance category—its hold on readers and publishers alike defies any logic or explanation. In its first year it was a

3 Paul Goat Allen, “In LKH’s 21st Anita Blake Novel, Her Iconic Heroine—and Her Saga— Continue to Evolve,” Barnes and Noble Reads (blog), accessed October 23, 2013, http://bookclubs.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Explorations-The-BN-SciFi-and/In-LKH-s-21st- Anita-Blake-Novel-Her-Iconic-Heroine-and-Her-Saga/ba-p/1347550; page now deleted. 4 Belinda Luscombe, “Books: Well, Hello, Suckers,” Time, February 27, 2006, accessed 23 October 2013, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1161234,00.html. 5 Carol Memmott, “Romance Fans: Vampires Are Just Our Type,” USAToday.com, June 28, 2006, accessed October 23, 2013, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2006-06- 28-vampire-romance_x.htm. 6 Quoted in Roy Hogan, “Urban Fantasy: Science Fiction’s Future?” Media Bistro, last modified August 25, 2009, accessed October 23, 2013, http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/urban- fantasy-science-fictions-future_b9904. 7 “ Now Offering Urban Fantasy Novels, but They Always Have, Too!” PRWeb, last modified July 20, 2009, accessed October 23, 2013, http://www.prweb.com/releases/2009/07/prweb2639804.htm.

77 phase, then it became a definite trend. Now, it’s a sea change, with no evidence that the tide’s waning.” 8 In 2012, bloggers at allthingsuf.com claimed that the number of paranormal texts released each year had risen to over 750, a significant leap from the approximately 170 cited by Luscombe in 2004.9 And Paul Goat Allen argued in 2013 that “the last ten years, specifically, in genre fiction have been nothing short of landscape-changing,” suggesting that the first decade of the twenty-first century was part of “a glorious Golden Age of paranormal fantasy.”10 This data from the publishing industry and from online reviewers and fans unequivocally demonstrates the strong impact of this new genre on the popular fiction industry and its consumers. Yet UFPR remains surprisingly underappreciated as a coherent body of genre texts. This is in part because although UFPR has developed its own set of recognisable genre conventions (including character types, literary motifs, and specific themes), these conventions have not been adequately defined or described. Pop culture industries have disseminated and at times parodied this new genre,11 yet confusion remains for both fans and academics over how to distinguish between genre labels and between genres and subgenres. It is therefore difficult to decide whether particular texts should be categorised as urban fantasy, paranormal romance, or something else altogether. This confusion is evident in the abundance of new genre labels used to describe the same set of texts: should we label this genre “urban fantasy,” “,” “dark romance,” “paranormal romance,” “paranormal thriller,” or “paranormal procedural”? An online search for genre labels such as “urban fantasy” and “paranormal romance” reveals a plethora of author- and fan-based blogs and websites debating the merits and niceties of using each term. As Lenny Picker notes in Publishers Weekly, developing “a universally accepted definition of the boundaries of ” is a serious

8 Lucinda Dyer, “P is for Paranormal—Still,” Publishers Weekly, May 24, 2010, accessed November 7, 2013, http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/new-titles/adult- announcements/article/43272-p-is-for-paranormal-still.html. 9 It should be noted, however, that allthingsuf.com don’t provide a source for this statistic. See “Paranormal Picks: The 10 Best Urban Fantasy Series,” All Things Urban Fantasy (blog), November 19, 2012, accessed October 23, 2013, http://allthingsuf.com/2012/11/paranormal- picks-uf.html. 10 Paul Goat Allen, “The 20 Best Paranormal Fantasy Novels of the Last Decade,” Barnes and Noble Reads (blog), March 20, 2013, accessed November 7, 2013, http://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/the-20-best-paranormal-fantasy-novels-of-the-last- decade/. 11 For examples of UFPR parodies, see the series Death Valley, created by Eric Weinberg, Curtis Gwinn, and Spider One, MTV Production Development, 2011; the novel Team Human, by and Justine Larbalestier (New York: HarperTeen, 2012); and Ghost Ghirls, a Yahoo-based web series created by Jeremy Konner, Amanda Lund, and Maria Blasucci, Yahoo! Screen, 2013, http://screen.yahoo.com/ghost-ghirls/.

78 challenge. He laments that “there’s just nothing even remotely resembling a consensus, even among some of the top authors with works included in the genre.”12 As this suggests, even for those who write this fiction, it is difficult to define what can be categorised as UFPR. The relationship between UFPR and other popular genres of fiction is also unclear. In Fang-tastic Fiction, Patricia O’Brien Matthews notes that critics are unclear as to how this new genre relates to other, preexisting genre categories. “Whether you search online, at a bookstore, or in a library,” she writes, “you will find no consensus as to where paranormal fiction titles are shelved.”13 Angela Ndalianis similarly remarks that “anyone can now walk into a bookshop” and find paranormal titles “in their very own paranormal romance section, but also under romance, horror, science fiction and fantasy, and crime—all in one store!”14 If UFPR is shelved in multiple sections in libraries and bookstores, do we understand this fiction as a genre, a subgenre, or a hybrid genre? Given the newness of UFPR and these confusions over what UFPR itself actually constitutes (or is constituted by), it is unsurprising that to date few critics have provided a truly comprehensive and clear history of this genre. But (as I shall discuss below) when critics analyse individual UFPR texts, unless framed by a history of the genre, their analyses too often remain disconnected from significant intertextual and pop-cultural influences. Such intertextual influences extend across different forms in different media (for example, from novel to film or novel to television). Yet studies of UFPR in one textual medium often do not expand their inquiry to transmedia adaptations and iterations. Consequently, existing studies do not recognise which conventions of this genre are transmedia or how different media formats may influence the conventions and content of UFPR. The result is a critical failure to recognise or analyse the significant textual influence of generic hybridity and transmedia formats in UFPR. Critics subsequently fail to address how individual UFPR texts operate as iterations that both uphold and subvert the strictures of genre. It is thus difficult to analyse how this popular genre is inflected by and being used to explore contemporary culture.

12 Lenny Picker, “The New (Para)Normal,” Publishers Weekly, April 6, 2012, accessed October 19, 2013, http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/new-titles/adult- announcements/article/51394-the-new-para-normal.html. 13 Patricia O’Brien Matthews, Fangtastic Fiction: Twenty-First Century Paranormal Reads (Chicago: ALA Editions, 2011), 2. 14 Ndalianis, Horror Sensorium, 80.

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This chapter will establish a methodological framework for its genre study of UFPR, drawing on Rick Altman’s reading of genre as an ongoing, diachronic process. It will critique several earlier attempts to define this genre, arguing that they are problematic for three reasons: First, critics tend to exhibit a genre bias, reading UFPR through the frame of one specific “parent” genre rather than as a hybrid genre. Second, they often ignore how UFPR is discussed and defined by the publishing industry and by the readers who buy texts belonging to this genre. Third, critics and readers alike often overemphasise the significance of the distinction between urban fantasy and paranormal romance. Having identified these problems in previous attempts to define this genre, I will then offer my own original history and definition of UFPR.15 I will identify the key conventions of this emergent genre and then return to Rick Altman’s methodology for genre analysis, which I use to establish a syntactic and a semantic definition of urban fantasy and paranormal romance. As I will conclude, UFPR is defined by generic hybridity. Most significantly, it is both formally and thematically concerned with destabilising boundaries—boundaries between genres, forms of media, and those dividing the self from the monstrous Other. Understanding how UFPR transgresses the boundaries of both genre and media is crucial to understanding its current popularity and commercial success. The conclusion to this chapter draws on Henry Jenkins’s work in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and on his web blog, Confessions of an Aca-Fan in order to analyse how UFPR functions as a highly adaptive genre across multiple platforms of text and media. In thus giving a structural overview of the UFPR genre, this chapter builds a foundation from which specific UFPR texts can be analysed in the close literary analyses continued in the chapters that follow.

Problems in Defining UFPR: Competing Histories and Definitions Before offering a history and definition of UFPR, it is useful to summarise how this genre has previously been defined by academics, the publishing industry, and the fans who consume UFPR texts. Critically assessing competing genre histories of UFPR will enable me to suggest in this chapter a more comprehensive definition and history. As Rick Altman suggests, the work of the genre theorist is “to adjudicate among conflicting approaches, not so much by dismissing unsatisfactory positions, but by constructing a

15 This genre history complements those offered by Ndalianis and Crawford, who already detail UFPR’s relationship with Romantic literature, the Gothic and horror traditions, and the popular romance genre. See Ndalianis, Horror Sensorium, and Crawford, The Twilight of the Gothic.

80 model which reveals the relationship between differing critical claims and their function within a broader cultural context.”16 By critically assessing previous definitions of urban fantasy and paranormal romance, this chapter will then be better positioned to reveal, and consequently provide evidence to confirm, dispute, and revise the conventions of this genre that have previously been proposed. Altman identifies a problematic tendency to view genre as existing in a perfect form at a fixed point in time, what he terms a “synchronic” approach to genre: “Genres were always—and continue to be—treated as if they spring full-blown from the head of Zeus.” They are therefore too often analysed, he continues, as though they are “fundamentally ahistorical in nature,” existing in an abstract, perfect form that he likens to “platonic categories.”17 Without an ideal model for a genre, it is difficult to decide whether individual texts uphold or subvert generic conventions. Yet such models are misleading because they suggest the structures of any given genre are “ahistorical” and static. Altman also draws attention to the tendency to view genre history as an inevitable and linear development of a fixed set of conventions. To address this problem, he argues that a diachronic approach to genre history ought to focus “on chronicling the development, deployment, and disappearance of this same structure.”18 In other words, genre history should note that what may seem at a particular point in time to be a fixed generic structure is always a dynamic interplay of conventions and therefore is subject to change. As Altman writes in Film/Genre, genre is not a static state but a “process of genre creation,” a “process of genrification” that is “continuous” and “ongoing.”19 A diachronic approach therefore demands that critics understand genre as a developing structure or set of structures that evolve, cohere, and dissolve over time. Further, rather than writing genre history as the linear development of a single form, which is then followed by a catalogue of variations on that form, critics should recognise that alternative histories of genre structures are always possible. Unfortunately, critics of UFPR tend to propose linear histories and static definitions of this genre, often describing it as a subgenre that has been influenced by a single “parent” genre. In doing so, both critics and fans often exhibit a genre bias, filtering their genre history and definition through the lens of the genre that they

16 Rick Altman, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre,” 6. 17 Ibid., 8. 18 Ibid. 19 Rick Altman, Film/Genre, 70.

81 perceive as the primary influence on UFPR. Accordingly, they represent UFPR as primarily influenced by one or two other genres in particular: fantasy or romance or Gothic or horror. For example, Ndalianis offers an excellent analysis of “what happens when romance and horror meet” in the paranormal romance genre.20 However, she primarily approaches paranormal romance as a “subcategory” of the broader category of romance fiction, disregarding significant influences on UFPR from other genres such as fantasy or crime fiction.21 In their critical fan discussion of romance in Beyond Heaving Bosoms, Wendell and Tan also suggest that UFPR is a “subgenre” of paranormal romance.22 Conversely, The Cambridge Companion to includes “urban fantasy” and “paranormal romance” as genre categories in its study of fantasy fiction, suggesting that one might consider urban fantasy and/or paranormal romance primarily as fantasy genre texts.23 In “Dark Fantasy and Paranormal Romance,” Kaveney defines a genre she categorises as “dark fantasy,” which includes paranormal romance as one of its subcategories.24 However, her definition of dark fantasy fails to distinguish it from Gothic and horror more broadly.25 Moreover, her insistence that dark fantasy is a blend of fantasy and the Gothic is contradicted by the fact that her more specific definition of popular dark fantasy in fact relies on invoking conventions from a third genre entirely, that of detective and crime fiction.26 Kaveney maintains that paranormal

20 Ndalianis, Horror Sensorium, 80. Though favouring the label “paranormal romance,” Ndalianis discusses the importance of horror and the Gothic in this genre. She gives a useful, detailed history of paranormal romance filtered through the lenses of both the history of the romance genre and the history of Gothic fiction. 21 Ibid., 78. Ndalianis does acknowledge that texts categorised as “urban fantasy” and the “paranormal thriller,” which she differentiates from paranormal romance, draw on genre tropes from mystery and action. 22 Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan, Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels (New York: Touchstone, 2009), 280. 23 Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 24 Roz Kaveney, “Dark Fantasy and Paranormal Romance,” in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, eds. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 220. 25 Ibid., 215 26 Ibid., 219. In fact, the influence of crime and detective fiction generally is underestimated even in texts where the influence of the mystery genre is overtly referenced. For example, author Charlaine Harris considers her popular Southern Vampire Mysteries series to be mystery fiction. Harris stated in an interview with Sfsite.com, “All the Sookie books are mysteries, too. I never think of them as horror, and I’m always astonished when they’re shelved with horror”; see Alisa McCune, “A Conversation with Charlaine Harris,” SFSite.com, last modified April 2004, accessed 23 October 2013, http://www.sfsite.com/05a/ch175.htm. For more on UFPR as a detective and crime genre, see Linda Holland-Toll’s analysis of the Anita Blake series in “Harder than

82 romance is a subcategory of dark fantasy that is defined by “the extent to which its plot is determined by its erotic dimensions.”27 This definition, however, problematically conflates “erotic” fiction with romance fiction, a distinction that is in fact highly significant for many readers.28 In attempting to frame UFPR texts as a subgenre of fantastic fiction, Kaveney fails to recognise in any nuanced way how the fantasy, Gothic/horror, romance, and crime genres intersect in UFPR.29 Her categorisations of “dark fantasy,” “template dark fantasy” (i.e., urban fantasy), and “paranormal romance” are thus unconvincing. The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature offers an example of another problem common to conventional critical assessments of UFPR; namely, that academic definitions of UFPR are often alarmingly disconnected from industry and consumer definitions of the same texts. Critical attempts to define UFPR often overlook the fact a genre develops through what Altman terms “a transactional process whereby conflict and negotiation among user groups constantly transform generic designations.” The formation of a genre, Altman writes, is a process that is engaged in by “user groups,” groups that influence both the “production” of texts and their “reception.” These groups include members of industry, popular and academic critics, and general audiences.30 While Altman focuses on the film and television industry, Ken Gelder argues that when analysing popular fiction, it is important to consider both production and reception. Genre fiction is “not just a matter of texts-in-themselves,” he writes, “but of an entire apparatus of production, distribution . . . and consumption.”31 He thus suggests that the processes of commercial development and of consumption also play important roles in developing genre. Taking into account the “transactional” nature of the process whereby genre emerges through an “apparatus of production,” my genre definition and history differs sharply from previous critical attempts to define UFPR because it seeks to include the observations and analyses of various significant “user

Nails, Harder than Spade: Anita Blake as ‘The Tough Guy’ Detective,” Journal of American Culture 27, no. 2 (2004); and the MA thesis of Caroline Stikkelbroeck, “Monstrum: The Vampire in the Detective Study” (Brock University, 2007, http://dr.library.brocku.ca/bitstream/handle/10464/1408/Brock_Stikkelbroeck_Caroline_2007 .pdf?sequence=1). 27 Kaveney, “Dark Fantasy and Paranormal Romance,” 220. 28 Writing predominantly from a fan perspective in Beyond Heaving Bosoms, Wendell and Tan emphasise that fans and readers may perceive a marked distinction between romance novels and erotica in this genre (112–14). 29 Kaveney, “Dark Fantasy and Paranormal Romance,” 215. 30 Altman, Film/Genre, 166. 31 Ken Gelder, Popular Fiction, 2.

83 groups”: academic critics, authors, members of the publishing industry, and the audiences who consume these texts. The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature disregards the ways in which the terms “urban fantasy” and “paranormal romance” are used by those who produce and consume UFPR texts.32 For example, Kaveney’s use of “dark fantasy” as a genre label is problematic because it no longer a term used or even recognised by current fans of UFPR.33 Irvine’s chapter titled “Urban Fantasy” similarly disregards popular usage of this genre label. He offers a very precise definition of urban fantasy as “a group of texts . . . in which the tropes of pastoral or were brought into an urban setting,” noting that the genre “quickly grew to encompass historical novels and overlap with . . . new wave fabulism or the .” And he emphasises heavily the role of the city in urban fantasy as both setting and actor in the narrative. But Irvine laments that “the writers of ‘paranormal romance’ have all but co-opted” the term “urban fantasy,” using it for an entirely different set of texts. He thus acknowledges that his focus on fabulist

32 For examples of author histories and definitions of their own genre, see: Kerri Arthur, “Paranormal Romance & Urban Fantasy: Defining Two Popular Subgenres,” Romance Writers of Australia, last modified 2008, accessed October 23, 2013, http://www.romanceaustralia.com/articles/urban.htm; , “The Long and Diverse History of Urban Fantasy,” Filling the Well (blog), April 16, 2012, accessed October 23, 2013, http://carriev.wordpress.com/2012/04/16/the-long-and-diverse-history-of-urban-fantasy/, and “Carrie’s Analysis of Urban Fantasy Part I,” Filling the Well (blog), May 1, 2009, accessed October 23, 2013, http://carriev.wordpress.com/2009/01/05/carries-analysis-of-urban-fantasy- part-i-the-formula/; and Laurell K. Hamilton, “Vampires and Paranormal Thrillers,” Laurell K Hamilton (blog), August 3, 2009, accessed October 23, 2013, http://www.laurellkhamilton.org/2009/08/vampires-and-paranormal-thrillers/. For more fan- based definitions of UFPR, see blog entries such as: Larissa Benoliel, “Defining Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance: What’s the Difference?” Heroes and Heartbreakers (blog), May 14, 2011, accessed October 23, 2013 http://www.heroesandheartbreakers.com/blogs/2011/05/defining- urban-fantasy-and-paranormal-romance; Marsha A. Moore, “Urban Fantasy vs Paranormal Romance,” Fantasy Fiction (blog), October 12, 2013, accessed November 7, 2013, http://fantasy- faction.com/2013/urban-fantasy-vs-paranormal-romance; and Sue Grimshaw, “Paranormal vs Urban Fantasy, What is the Difference?” Romance at Random (blog), September 3, 2011, accessed 23 October, 2013, http://www.romanceatrandom.com/paranormal-vs-urban-fantasy-what-is- the-difference/. 33 For example, in 2013 the organisers of *Con, the largest science fiction and fantasy convention in the United States, divided their “dark fantasy” fan track into two separate tracks, “horror” and “urban fantasy,” because these terms were more easily recognisable for genre fans. On the former Dark Fantasy Track Blog, the organiser states, “Simply put, I got tired of explaining what I meant by ‘Dark Fantasy.’ There are several different subgenres that are described as ‘dark fantasy,’ and it became necessary to pick one.” This statement suggests that today fans of both urban fantasy and the horror genre more broadly do not utilise or recognise “dark fantasy” as a genre label, and that Kaveney’s use of this label is therefore archaic. See “FAQ: Dark Fantasy Fan Track,” Dark Fantasy Fan Track, last accessed 23 October 2013, http://darkfantasy.dragoncon.org/dark-fantasy-faq/. See also “New Tracks for 2013,” Daily Dragon (blog), July 8, 2013, accessed October 23, 2013, http://dailydragon.dragoncon.org/dc2013/new-tracks-for-2013/.

84 and “weird” urban fictions is starkly at odds with author and consumer definitions of UFPR.34 (In fact, Kaveney’s definition of “template dark fantasy” better aligns with the popular conception of “urban fantasy” as a genre category.) The third critical problem common to existing critical definitions of UFPR is the way that these definitions consistently attempt to establish urban fantasy and paranormal romance as separate taxonomic categories. For example, by separating urban fantasy and paranormal romance taxonomically, the editors of The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Fiction strongly suggest that urban fantasy and paranormal romance are distinct modes of popular fiction. Yet the way that readers and the popular fiction industry distinguish between these taxonomies of genre is quite different from the distinctions made in the Cambridge Companion. For readers and publishers, one way of distinguishing between urban fantasy and paranormal romance is to determine whether action/mystery or romance primarily drive the narrative. For example, Gwenda Bond notes that in the publishing industry, “the terms urban fantasy and paranormal romance are often used interchangeably. But . . . while the two frequently cross over among audiences, there is a key distinction.”35 She writes, quoting Avon Publications’ executive editor Erika Tsang, that “in paranormal romance the relationship between the couple is the focus of the main plot. In urban fantasy, the world that the couple exists in is the focus.” In other words, the extent to which the romance constitutes the primary narrative of the text determines whether or not it can be categorised as “paranormal romance”; texts in which a horror- or mystery- based narrative take priority may be more properly considered “urban fantasy.” In the same article, Bond also quotes Heather Osborn, a romance editor at Tor Books, in another attempt to distinguish urban fantasy from paranormal romance. Osborn argues that a genre distinction between urban fantasy and paranormal romance depends on what romance fans and readers commonly term the “Happily Ever After” convention:36 “My number one consideration is if there’s a resolution of the romance at the end of the book. If there’s no resolution of the romance, and it’s in the romance section, readers will let their anger be known.” Bond suggests that for readers, a high

34 Alexander C. Irvine, “Urban Fantasy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, eds. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 200. 35 Gwenda Bond, “When Love Is Strange: Romance Continues Its Affair with the Supernatural.” Publishers Weekly, May 25, 2009, accessed October 23, 2013, http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/print/20090525/12458-when-love-is-strange-romance- continues-its-affair-with-the-supernatural.html. 36 Wendell and Tan, Beyond Heaving Bosoms, 142–43.

85 romance content and a romantic resolution play a crucial role in defining a genre text as paranormal romance and not urban fantasy. Bond’s article thus emphasises that definitions of genre must negotiate between competing influences from consumers and the publishing industry.37 Fan outrage over the perceived misuse of these terms also suggests that some distinction can be made between “urban fantasy” and “paranormal romance.” For example, author Laurell K. Hamilton sparked a long-lasting controversy among readers of UFPR when, in the series’ tenth novel, Narcissus in Chains (2001), she abruptly transformed the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series (1993–) from urban fantasy into paranormal erotica. 38 For more than a decade, Hamilton has endured significant criticism from fans and antifans whose genre expectations are disappointed by the genre shift within her series.39 Yet Hamilton’s series is also important evidence that even texts by the same author, in the same series, may be difficult to categorise as either urban fantasy or paranormal romance. The prominence of and interplay between generic elements within one text may change dramatically, making that text difficult to categorise. The centrality of the romantic or erotic plot in a text or series seems to be the primary means of distinguishing between urban fantasy and paranormal romance. However, as I argue in the pages that follow, the significance of any distinction between urban fantasy and paranormal romance is often overemphasised. A holistic approach to urban fantasy and paranormal romance is more productive when analysing the texts that both labels reference. Reading urban fantasy and paranormal romance as slightly different iterations of the same popular genre allows for a more complex and nuanced analysis of how this genre has emerged, and what role it plays in contemporary popular literature and culture. The above examples demonstrate that critics, authors, and fans may offer differing and competing histories and definitions of UFPR as a genre. Though these histories and definitions are often inadequate, it is important to recognise that they are not necessarily incorrect. Rather, they fail to be comprehensive, and in that sense, they

37 Bond, “When Love Is Strange.” 38 Laurell K. Hamilton, Narcissus in Chains (2001; repr. New York: Jove, 2002). 39 For a summary of the controversy, see Paul Goat Allen, “The Controversial Saga That’s Good for Genre Fiction—and Society,” Barnes And Noble Reads (blog), July 19, 2013, accessed October 23, 2013, http://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/the-controversial-saga-thats-good-for-genre- fiction-and-society/. See also Hamilton’s response to critical fans in her own blog entry, “Dear Negative Reader,” Laurell K Hamilton (blog), December 29, 2006, accessed November 7, 2013, http://www.laurellkhamilton.org/2006/12/dear-negative-reader/.

86 may be misleading. By attempting to categorise and understand UFPR as a subgenre of horror or fantasy or mystery or romance, and by distinguishing between urban fantasy and paranormal romance as separate subgenres, these definitions obscure the complex generic interplay that actually constitutes UFPR.

An Original Genre History of UFPR Rather than attempting to distinguish between urban fantasy and paranormal romance or trace a genre history that begins with specific parent genre, this chapter focuses on how UFPR has emerged as a hybrid genre. “Urban fantasy” first emerged as a genre label in the early 1980s. The term then referred to a new form of popular fantasy fiction that dramatised a magical incursion into a fictional version of the contemporary urban world. In this fiction, the action commonly involved a human protagonist who confronted and from an alternative, magical world. In the 1980s and early 1990s, this early urban fantasy was produced by North American writers such as , , , and . The early urban fantasy texts of these authors share similar plots and similar thematic conventions. First and foremost, these works destabilise the boundaries between reality/fantasy and self/Other. Consequently, the protagonist is forced to question his or her own identity and social role in relation to those boundaries. In effect, the protagonist must decide to reject the fantastic Other and maintain conventional binaries and boundaries, or to embrace the possibilities of a multiplicitous identity in new worlds no longer constrained by such binaries and boundaries.40 Over time, however, the term “urban fantasy” has been more broadly applied (sometimes retroactively) to describe other popular speculative fictions.41 Today it is also a label commonly applied to “new ” by authors such as China Miéville;42 by authors such as ; and fiction by

40 Other recurring themes in early urban fantasy include the disruption of the distinction between the pastoral and the urban as traditional pastoral elements of fantasy intrude on contemporary cities. Some texts explicitly take an ecocritical approach to this breakdown between the pastoral and the urban. For example, Mercedes Lackey’s Knight of Ghost and Shadows (Wake Forest: Baen, 1990) pits an evil real estate developer in contemporary Los Angeles against the elves who reside in that city’s last remaining park spaces. 41 See also Irvine, “Urban Fantasy,” who prioritises and analyses these forms of urban fantasy. 42 produced from the 1990s onward that combines horror, fantasy, and science fiction, reminiscent of the work of authors such as H. P. Lovecraft, Mervyn Peake, and M. R. James.

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authors including Tim Powers, Scott Westerfield, and . 43 It is also commonly used to categorise much popular fiction centred on supernatural beings, including , witches, , and the seemingly omnipresent vampire. Certain examples of vampire fiction in particular had already begun to merge into urban fantasy in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Many texts from this period can be retroactively labelled as UFPR owing to the way they blend fantasy, horror, mystery, and action genre conventions—for example, Lee Killough’s Blood Hunt (1987) and Bloodlinks (1988), P. N. Elrod’s Vampire Files series (1990–), the television series Forever Knight (1992–1996), Tanya Huff’s Blood series (1992–1997), and Laurell K. Hamilton’s early Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter novels (1993–).44 Early versions of vampire-centred urban fantasy (including Forever Knight and novels by Killough and Elrod) typically follow a male protagonist who is transformed into a vampire and subsequently struggles to solve a series of mysteries. To date, few studies have adequately accounted for the connection between -centred early urban fantasy by authors such as de Lint, Bull, Windling, and Lackey and this early vampire crime fiction. Instead, critics tend to separate the two kinds of fiction into “traditional urban fantasy” and “contemporary urban fantasy”45 or suggest that the labels have been “co-opted” and incorrectly applied.46 But if we consider formal and thematic hybridity and the transgression of boundaries to be the distinguishing elements of UFPR texts, this explains how two apparently disparate elements in popular fiction (elves and vampires) merged into the broader category of “urban fantasy” after the year 2000.47 For example, in early urban fantasy fiction, a human protagonist from

43 Alternative-history fiction that combines anachronistic (often steam-power-based) new technologies with a historical milieu. Most commonly, steampunk texts are set in an alternative version of Victorian England or the American Old West, but they may also be set in an alternative future or other . “Steampunk” also refers to the related subcultural fashion and roleplaying movement. Members of this subculture often adopt ahistorical, Victorian-inspired fashion and design elements, such as corsets and top hats, combined with technological junk items, such as cogs, gears, and metalwork. 44 Lee Killough, Blood Hunt (New York: Tor, 1987) and Blood Links (New York: Tor, 1988); Forever Knight, created by Barney Cohen and James D. Parriott, TriStar Television, 1992–1996; P. N. Elrod, the Vampire Files, 13 novels (1990–2009); Tanya Huff, the Blood series, 5 novels (1991–1997). 45 See Nanette Wargo Donohue, “The City Fantastic,” Library Journal 133, no. 10, 64–67. 46 Irvine, “Urban Fantasy,” 200. 47 Early urban fantasy is a hybrid genre because it combines elements of traditional , such as elves, with elements from horror, including supernatural monsters and graphic violence. It also combines the fantasy narrative of the hero with the mystery narrative of the investigator who must solve a mysterious problem, usually involving a crime. Contemporaneous vampire crime fiction is a hybrid genre because it combines established tropes from vampire literature with elements of detective and crime novels, including the lone tough-guy protagonist,

88 the contemporary world is confronted with supernatural knowledge that challenges his or her understanding of reality and identity; similarly, in early vampire crime fiction, a human protagonist who discovers the existence of vampires faces a similar challenge to his or her world view. The presence of a specific supernatural character (such as an or vampire) is less significant than its combination with the broader generic structure of hybridity, a structure which inflects both form (transgressing genre conventions) and content (destabilising the power structures of self/Other).48 Vampire literature in the 1980s and 1990s primarily explores this destabilisation of the boundaries between fantasy and reality, and self and Other, through the trope of the “humanised” vampire. As noted in the preceding chapters, the figure of the humanised, ethically and spiritually self-conscious vampire first emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in fictions by Fred Saberhagen, Anne Rice, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Suzy McKee Charnas, and George R. R. Martin. David Punter and Glennis Byron describe how the vampire’s role as a figure for the social Other has changed with “the modern humanisation of the vampire.”49 They argue that “in nineteenth-century fiction, the representation of the vampire as monstrous, evil and other serves to guarantee the existence of good, reinforcing . . . formally dichotomized structures of belief which . . . still constituted the dominant world view.”50 But in vampire fiction in the late twentieth century, the vampire becomes “more sympathetic, closer to the human and much less radically the ‘other,’”51 as “the oppositions between good and evil are increasingly problematized.”52 The vampires and other “humanised” monsters of UFPR have their origins in this earlier trend, first seen in the vampire literature of the 1970s. UFPR in the 1980s and 1990s likewise destabilises the assumed connections between monstrosity, evil, and Otherness. For example, vampires like Killough’s Garreth Mikaelian, Huff’s Henry Fitzroy, and Forever Knight’s Nicholas Knight struggle against their monstrous ontologies in order to be “good people.” Many of these protagonists face torturous ethical struggles similar to those of Anne Rice’s better- the femme fatale, and, again, the mystery narrative of the investigator who must solve a mysterious problem, usually a crime. 48 In this latter sense, “hybridity” is the focus of much postcolonial criticism. Key sources for this use of the term include the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); and Homi Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985): 144–65. 49 Punter and Byron, The Gothic, 272. 50 Ibid., 270. 51 Ibid., 271. 52 Ibid., 270.

89 known vampire aesthetes in Interview with the Vampire (1976). However, vampires in 1990s urban fantasy differ on one important point from Rice’s Lestat and Louis, who drink human blood: like Martin’s Joshua York in Fevre Dream, to be good vampires, they must refuse to feed on human blood. Through their determined abstinence, the vampires of these early urban fantasy texts become the first truly “good” vampires in fiction, television, and film. Thus, for the first time, vampire fiction in the 1990s broadly explored the concept of vampires who want to do and be good in the human world by acting as humanly as possible. Throughout this decade, the convention of the abstinent vampire remained popular. Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series and Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992 film;53 television series 1997–2003) follow this same humanist assumption that to be a good vampire means to abstain from vampirism and behave as much like a human as possible. In the early 1990s, Hamilton’s vampire-hunting, crime-solving heroine Anita Blake is attracted to vampires even though she believes they must be evil if they want to feed from her.54 Similarly, the heroine in Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer can only become romantically entangled with “good” monsters who do not feed on humans (for example, the vampire , who possessed his soul; and later the vampire Spike, who was forced to stop feeding on humans). The Anita Blake series and Buffy are also exemplary UFPR texts of the 1990s because they introduce arguably the most significant new genre convention to emerge in UFPR in this decade: a strong female protagonist in the role of an investigator and action heroine. Characters like Huff’s Vicki Nelson, Hamilton’s Anita Blake, and Whedon’s manifest the contemporary cultural significance of girl power and of the post- and third wave feminism that emerged in the 1990s.55 These heroines refuse the traditional position normally reserved for women in the horror genre, that of

53 Buffy the Vampire Slayer, directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui, 20th Century Fox, 1992. 54 See particularly Hamilton’s novels in this series from 1993–1997 and the analysis of these novels that follows in chapter 4. 55 As discussed further in chapter 4 of this thesis. For useful discussions of postfeminism and third wave feminism, see Sarah Gamble, “Postfeminism,” in The Routledge Companion to Feminism and Post-Feminism, ed. Sarah Gamble (New York: Routledge, 2001), 36–45; Angela McRobbie, “Post-Feminism and Popular Culture,” Feminist Media Studies 4, no. 3 (2004): 255–64; Yvonne Tasker and Dianne Negra, Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Stéphanie Genz, Postfemininities in Popular Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Stéphanie Genz and Benjamin A. Brabon, Postfeminism: Cultural Texts and Theories (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009); and Rebecca Munford and Melanie Waters, Feminism and Popular Culture: Investigating the Postfeminist Mystique (London: I.B. Taurus, 2014).

90 victim. In UFPR, they become the protagonists of their stories and the agents of their own lives.56 In new fictional worlds that challenge the boundaries between fantasy and reality, these heroines struggle in new ways with the destabilisation of boundaries between the self and the Other. As Elaine Graham writes in Representations of the Post/Human, “that which is different becomes pathologised as ‘monstrous’ and thus inhuman, disposable and dangerous. . . . So women . . . are designated inhuman by virtue of their non-identity to the white, male reasoning able-bodied subject.”57 For this reason, women in a patriarchal society are constructed as socially Other, which can be framed as monstrosity. Speaking of the role of the heroine in the horror text, Linda Williams argues, in “When the Woman Looks,” that the female protagonist in a horror text experiences “fear of the monster’s freakishness, but also recognizes the sense in which this freakishness is similar to her own difference,”58 the difference of female Otherness in patriarchal culture. Williams thus suggests that recognition of a shared Otherness can lead to new affinities between monsters and heroines. Female protagonists in UFPR texts of the 1990s struggle with the tension that arises from the collocation of three things: their role as heroines who must defeat monstrous Others; their romantic and sexual attraction to monstrous Others; and the recognition that they too are Othered in their role as feminist or postfeminist agents in a patriarchal society. In the years since 2000, female protagonists have dominated UFPR. In this era, the boundaries between self and Other, human and monster, and good and evil are further blurred. Rather than simply fighting monsters, heroines have themselves become

56 This is discussed at greater length in chapter 4 of this thesis. Buffy in particular has been much analysed as a figure of post- and third wave feminism. For example, see Irene Karras, “The Third Wave’s Final Girl: Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” Thirdspace: A Journal of Feminist Theory and Culture 1, no. 2 (2002), http://www.thirdspace.ca/journal/article/viewArticle/karras/50; Patricia Pender, “Kicking Ass is Comfort Food: Buffy as Third Wave Feminist Icon,” in Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration, eds. Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie, and Rebecca Munford (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan Press, 2004), 164–74; and Elana Levine, “Buffy and the ‘New Girl Order’: Defining Feminism and Femininity,” in Undead TV: Essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, eds. Elana Levine and Lisa Ann Parks (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007): 168–89. For an exploration of postfeminism in contemporary Gothic texts, see also Benjamin A. Brabon and Stéphanie Genz, eds., Postfeminist Gothic: Critical Interventions in Contemporary Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and Munford and Waters, Feminism and Popular Culture. The postfeminist figure of the female vampire slayer also owes a cultural debt to the horror-film figure of the “final girl” as identified by Carol Clover (see Men, Women, and Chainsaws). 57 Elaine Graham, Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens, and Others in Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 53. 58 Linda Williams, “When the Woman Looks,” in Re-Visions: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, eds. Linda Williams, Mary Ann Doane, and Patricia Mellencamp (Frederick: the University Publications of America and the American Film Institute, 1986), 87–88.

91 increasingly monstrous. Over time, even those who began as mostly human have become supernatural figures. For example, beyond 2000 Hamilton’s Anita Blake develops from a mostly human necromancer to a mostly monstrous carrier of the lycanthropy virus and a succubus who vampirically feeds on sexual activity. And in the twenty-first century, many other heroines are represented as supernatural creatures from the beginning (for example, ’s heroine, Elena Michaels, and Patricia Briggs’s Native American skinwalker, Mercy Thompson).59 As UFPR has further developed after 2000, the now-supernatural protagonists of UFPR often live in an innovative new supernatural, fictional world. Before 2000, supernatural horror generally depicted a protagonist who stumbled onto the secret existence of a supernatural being or even a secret, underground supernatural world. But since 2000, a new kind of fictional world has emerged in which the supernatural is openly acknowledged as a part of the everyday. In this supernatural-yet-everyday world, vampires, werewolves, and other supernatural beings live openly in human society, framed as social and cultural minority groups. Laurell K. Hamilton pioneered the everyday-supernatural setting in the 1990s, in her Anita Blake series. Since 2000, this setting has become increasingly popular as a fictional setting and is now used in series by many popular authors including , Charlaine Harris, , Carrie Vaughn, Patricia Briggs, Ilona Andrews, Chloe Neill, and Faith Hunter.60 In the everyday-supernatural world, monster hunters and slayers lose their moral certainty as protagonists, which further destabilises the binaries of real/fantastic, human/Other, and good/evil. As Graham writes, “One of the ways in particular in which the boundaries between humans and almost-humans have been asserted is through the discourse of ‘monstrosity.’ Monsters serve both to mark the fault-lines but also, subversively, to signal the fragility of such boundaries.”61 In texts that use everyday- supernatural settings, humans and monsters must constantly renegotiate the boundaries between self and Other in order to coexist successfully. In these fictional worlds, heroines are no longer able to simply uphold human law and protect the innocent

59 Kelley Armstrong, Women of the Otherworld, 13 novels (2001–2012); Patricia Briggs, the Mercy Thompson series, 10 novels (2006–); Kim Harrison, series, 13 novels (2004– 2014). 60 Jim Butcher, , 15 novels (2000–); Carrie Vaughn, Kitty Norville series, 14 novels (2005–2015); Patricia Briggs, Alpha and Omega series, 4 novels (2007–); Ilona Andrews, Kate Daniels novels, 9 novels, (2007–); Chloe Neill, , 13 novels (2009– 2017); Faith Hunter, Jane Yellowrock series, 10 novels, (2009–). 61 Graham, Representations of the Post/Human, 12.

92 because human law can no longer adequately account for cultural and ethical differences between the monstrous and the human inhabitants of society. At the same time, in many UFPR texts produced after the year 2000, vampires and other monsters often are no longer required to abstain from their predatory hungers (both literal and sexual) in order to be considered ethically “good.” Instead, they now seek fulfilling, posthuman interconnections with others. Sometimes a romantic attraction causes two potential lovers to reevaluate their identities and philosophies. As Helen Bailie writes in “Blood Ties: The Vampire Lover in the Popular Romance,” in paranormal romance “the taking of blood . . . becomes a necessary element of the sexual relationship” and the vampiric bite “is an affirmation of . . . acceptance of the vampire lover and his environment.”62 In UFPR beyond 2000, vampiric feeding is no longer inherently evil. Instead, the vampiric exchange of blood becomes repositioned as a positive act of interconnection that also demonstrates acceptance of the lover’s Otherness.63 The popularity of these new genre conventions in the years since 2000 suggests a significant posthuman shift in UFPR as a genre. David Held has suggested that “reason[ing] from the point of view of others” is a necessity in the “overlapping communities of fate” created by modern globalisation.64 Such overlapping communities are geographic and social, but they are also cultural, technological, and ecological. These communities exist in posthuman worlds, worlds which necessitate, in the words of Neil Badmington, “a careful, ongoing . . . rethinking of the dominant humanist (or anthropocentric) account of who ‘we’ are as human beings. In the light of posthumanist theory and culture, ‘we’ are not who ‘we’ once believed ourselves to be. And neither are ‘our’ others.”65 Posthumanist theory argues that the differences between the (white, patriarchal, dominant) humanist self and the (raced, gendered, queer, animal, technological, monstrous) Other have become destabilised in the contemporary world. Since 2000, UFPR increasingly explores the possibilities and the difficulties of thriving in iterations of contemporary, global, monstrous, and posthuman worlds. In the twenty- first century, UFPR uses its communities of monsters to suggest that in an increasingly

62 Helen T. Bailie, “Blood Ties: The Vampire Lover in the Popular Romance,” Journal of American Culture 34, no. 2 (2011), 145. 63 Chapter 6 of this thesis explores this idea in detail. 64 David Held, “Regulating Globalisation?” in The Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction to the Globalisation Debate, eds. David Held and Anthony McGrew (Malden: Polity Press, 2000), 425–26. 65 Neil Badmington, “Posthumanism,” in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science, eds. Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini (New York: Routledge, 2011), 374.

93 global and posthuman world, in order to thrive, one must be able to see the world from the point of view of the Other. Consequently, this global and posthuman world dramatically destabilises the boundaries that delimit the self from the other Other, the boundaries that determine who is included and who is excluded, and the boundaries that determine what is right and what is wrong.66

A New Definition for Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance As indicated by this history of UFPR, the primary elements of this genre can be articulated in a variety of ways. The foregoing chronological history of UFPR can be combined with Rick Altman’s syntactic and semantic framework for genre in order to give a more functional and specific set of definitions for UFPR. Altman proposes that genre can be defined both syntactically and semantically to build a more complex picture of how particular genres develop and operate. He argues that we can as a whole distinguish between generic definitions which depend on a list of common traits, attitudes, characters, shots, locations, sets, and the like—thus stressing the semantic elements which make up the genre—and definitions which play up instead certain constitutive relationships between undesignated and variable placeholders—relationships which might be called the genre’s fundamental syntax. The semantic approach thus stresses the genre’s building blocks, while the syntactic view privileges the structures into which they are arranged.67 In other words, a syntactic definition of genre outlines the broader narrative structure that repeats within it, and a semantic definition refers to that genre’s recognizable conventions, tropes, and motifs. Syntactic and semantic elements may interact in different ways to create a particular genre text. This model allows us to define UFPR as follows. In terms of its syntax, or its basic narrative paradigm, UFPR combines elements of romance, horror, fantasy, mystery, and/or thriller narratives to tell the story of a conflict and/or an alliance between a human (or human faction) and a supernatural monster (or supernatural faction). This story occurs in a world in which the boundaries between reality and the supernatural fantastic have been destabilised or reordered. As the plot progresses, the

66 Again, chapter 6 explores this argument in greater depth. 67 Altman, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre,” 10.

94 conflict and/or alliance between factions destabilises the boundaries that define and distinguish self from Other and good from evil within this world. This definition is necessarily broad because UFPR texts are highly flexible and may articulate this semantic structure in many different ways, hybridising it with a wide variety of conventions from other genre fiction. A more specific paradigm for UFPR as a genre can be established by identifying its most prominent semantic elements. These are as follows:

1. UFPR is paranormal fiction. Its stories contain paranormal, supernatural, fantastic, and monstrous entities. This paranormal element is usually found in excess: UFPR narratives today usually contain not one kind of monster or magic, but many kinds. 2. The monsters in UFPR are not categorically evil. Often, they are ethically complex, confusing the boundaries that define good from evil and the self from the Other. 3. UFPR constructs a specific setting for its fictional worlds. The fictional worlds of UFPR closely mimic our contemporary reality but contain additional supernatural content. There are two significant variants of this setting. In one, the supernatural elements of the world are secret, underground, and hidden from mainstream society. In the other, the supernatural is an accepted part of the everyday, existing openly as part of contemporary society. 4. UFPR commonly follows a mystery or thriller plot line. The protagonist (or his or her primary romantic interest) is usually positioned as a monster hunter, private detective, law enforcement officer, member of an organisation, or other kind of investigator who must work to resolve a conflict, crime, or other mysterious event. 5. The UFPR protagonist usually possesses a supernatural power or monstrous nature and often, as the narrative progresses, becomes increasingly supernaturally powerful or monstrous. If the protagonist does begin as human, he or she rarely continues as such, instead acquiring new knowledge of his/her own Otherness or experiencing a monstrous transformation. 6. The majority of protagonists in fiction UFPR are female. 7. The majority of protagonists in urban fantasy fiction narrate their adventures from the first person perspective. Paranormal romance narratives are more likely

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to alternate first person perspectives between male and female romantic leads or may use a shifting, limited third person perspective to the same effect. UFPR films usually follow the actions of one protagonist. UFPR television series often have an apparent main character but necessarily draw upon an ensemble cast. 8. UFPR is a hybrid and transmedia genre, combining elements from many other popular genres and crossing multiple media formats. In transgressing the boundaries of genre and media, the form of UFPR complements its content, which thematically transgresses the boundaries between reality and the fantastic, and the self and Other.

Over time, the semantic elements of genre that are hybridised in UFPR have become formulaic. However, not all UFPR texts use all of these semantic elements all the time. Furthermore, not all UFPR series blend these conventions in the same proportions. As noted, this interplay of generic conventions often leads to confusion in attempts to distinguish between urban fantasy and paranormal romance. However, the specific yet flexible definition of UFPR given above suggests that the significance of any distinction between urban fantasy and paranormal romance has been overemphasised. Urban fantasy and paranormal romance utilise the same syntactic and semantic genre motifs. Individual texts in this genre simply draw upon these genre motifs in different ways and different proportions. Even an apparently straightforward “urban fantasy” text with a male protagonist may nonetheless include romantic subplots. Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series (2000–) follows the supernatural adventures of protagonist Harry Dresden, a hardboiled detective and wizard.68 Harry is primarily focused on solving supernatural mysteries, yet he still has a number of significant romantic relationships. Conversely, even texts most commonly categorised as “paranormal romance” may utilise elements typically considered semantic motifs of urban fantasy. Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga (2005– 2008) bolsters its primary narrative of a love triangle between human Bella Swan, vampire Edward Cullen, and werewolf Jacob Black with other semantic and syntactic elements common to urban fantasy. For example, typical of most UFPR protagonists, Bella acquires her own monstrous and supernatural powers when she eventually becomes a powerful vampire herself. The Twilight Saga incorporates detailed supernatural world-building, including supernatural social conflicts that its heroine must

68 Jim Butcher, the Dresden Files, 15 novels (2000–).

96 resolve. Bella must mediate the broader supernatural feud between the vampires and werewolves of her world; she must also mediate between her good vampire family (the Cullens) and the dangerous, evil vampiric political hierarchy of the Volturi. It is for this reason that I suggest the distinction between urban fantasy and paranormal romance is unnecessary, and I refer throughout this thesis to the genre under the umbrella term “urban fantasy and paranormal romance,” or UFPR. Rather than imagining these two modes of fiction as distinct genres, or as distinct subgenres, it is more useful to consider urban fantasy and paranormal romance as two ends of the same broad genre continuum. The model of a genre continuum or spectrum allows a broad range of both urban fantasy and paranormal romance texts to be analysed in relation to the same syntactic and semantic elements of genre. It is almost impossible to account for all possible iterations, combinations, and subversions of genre convention in one genre model. For example, how to relate historical paranormal fiction or fairy-tale retellings to this spectrum is a matter for further analysis.69 However, a conception of UFPR as a genre continuum allows for a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between urban fantasy and paranormal romance and of the hybridisation of other conventions found in this genre.

Crossing Boundaries: UFPR as a Thematically Transgressive, Hybrid, and Transmedia Genre In understanding UFPR as primarily influenced by one or two other genres, critics, authors, and fans alike fail to consider the extent to which UFPR is constructed through and characterised by genre hybridity. UFPR transgresses traditional boundaries of genre by simultaneously hybridising, cannibalising, and parodying generic structures from numerous other genres. 70 For example, from fantasy fiction, UFPR may borrow

69 An example of historical paranormal fiction is Seth Grahame-Smith’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2010). Examples of fairy-tale retellings include popular television series Once Upon a Time (created by Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, ABC Studios, 2011–); the retellings of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber (London: Gollancz, 1979); and Marissa Meyer’s cyborg Cinderella novel, Cinder (New York: Feiwel and Friends, 2012). 70 Critics such as Jacques Derrida, Tzvetan Todorov, and Janet Staiger question the usefulness of the term “hybridity” in genre analysis. See: Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (1980): 65; Tzvetan Todorov, “The Origin of Genres,” New Literary History 8, no. 1 (1976): 160; Janet Staiger, “Hybrid or Inbred: the Purity Hypothesis and Hollywood Genre History,” Film Criticism 22, no. 1 (1997): 9, 15–16. In “Hybrid or Inbred,” Janet Staiger rejects the use of the term “hybridity” in genre analysis, arguing that “since poststructuralism hypothesises [the] breaching of boundaries and impurity to be features of every text, then any text located as an instance of genre would also,

97 conventions such as extensive serialised world-building, a quest narrative, and a band of unlikely companions as key characters. From the Gothic, it may borrow a vulnerable, emotionally sensible heroine. From American Gothic specifically, it assumes its fictionalised geographic locations, its challenge to puritan values through sexual deviance, and an anxiety about the government of society. Drawing from monstrous and body horror, UFPR explores the taboo and abject, the spread of contagion, and the loss of self-control. The prevalence of vampires in UFPR also results in texts that invoke conventions of vampire literature, such as the late twentieth-century convention of the morally conscientious vampire protagonist or lover. From romance, UFPR borrows the conventions of a forbidden love (interracial, interspecies, and across socioeconomic class) and/or the love triangle. Drawing from chick lit, female protagonists in UFPR may explore gendered tensions between career and romance or draw on the trope of the urban affective family. From detective and crime fiction, UFPR frequently borrows the generic structure of a mystery format, as well as detailed descriptive attention to procedures and forensics, to violent action, and to guns and other weaponry. Like noir detectives, UFPR protagonists are often social outcasts or loners: they emphasise the significance of toughness in the face of adversity, and they usually uphold a personal moral code that does not necessarily mesh with conventional morality. And UFPR also draws on science fiction in its speculative nature, its use of advanced technologies and ipso facto, breach generic boundaries” (9). Staiger thus argues that to some extent, any text may be read as hybrid. Staiger’s analysis echoes the genre criticism of Tzvetan Todorov. Todorov suggests that all genres may be distinguished by this breaching of boundaries: “transgression, in order to exist as such, requires a law that will, of course, be transgressed” (160). Todorov thus implies that the laws of genre are only able to be distinguished by comparing how specific iterations of genre transgress those laws. Staiger also echoes Derrida, who similarly argues that “every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text; there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts to belonging. And not because of an abundant overflowing or a free, anarchic, and unclassifiable productivity, but because of the trait of participation itself, because of the effect of the code and of the generic mark” (65). Derrida suggests here that genre is a process in which texts participate and, moreover, that it is common for texts to belong to multiple genres. Thus, as these critics suggest, it is common for individual texts to transgress the boundaries of genre or to attempt to recombine elements of multiple genres in new ways. It is, nonetheless, possible to define hybridity as a significant, distinguishing factor of UFPR because UFPR utilises these hybrid structures of genre overtly across the UFPR genre as a whole. As UFPR has developed, this hybridity has begun to be taken for granted. For example, hybridising conventions from romance fiction with conventions of vampire literature is now so common that the hybrid nature of such texts often goes without being noted critically—but this hybridity nonetheless remains crucial in the genre. And again, the prevalence of this hybridisation throughout UFPR is suggested by the compound labels given to this genre; two- pronged genre labels such “urban fantasy,” “popular romance,” and “paranormal procedural” imply that the combination of multiple popular generic structures in these texts is so prominent as to be a definitive element of their structure.

98 new medical procedures, and even in its construction of futuristic, post-cataclysmic, and somewhat dystopian societies. Kim Harrison’s Hollows series (2004–2014) provides a specific example of how these various conventions may blend together in one UFPR series. Harrison’s fictional world is a speculative alternative reality that is post-cataclysmic. Her protagonist, Rachel Morgan, lives in a fictional version of Cincinnati that exists after “the Turn,” a historical event in which a batch of genetically modified tomatoes generates a virus that wipes out a large percentage of the human population. The Turn exposes the existence of supernatural species such as witches, werewolves, vampires, elves, pixies, all of which are immune to this virus. Harrison’s fictional world thus draws on the conventions of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, creating a speculative alternate reality in which creatures from fantasy and horror mingle with advanced medical and scientific knowledge. As a protagonist, Rachel Morgan combines character tropes from the horror and detective genres. She is a witch/demon who uses her supernatural powers to work as a tough-talking private investigator. Rachel forms a detective agency with the vampire Ivy and the pixie Jenks. However, the series’ mystery format also blurs with the quest narrative structure of high fantasy fiction. Rachel, Ivy, and Jenks (and their miscellaneous comrades) constitute a band of unlikely companions who work together not only to solve crimes but also to save the city and/or the world from magical threats. Rachel’s band of unlikely companions is also another form of the urban affective family: Rachel, Ivy, and Jenks live together as housemates and gradually welcome other friends into their close-knit and trusted family group. In its interpersonal relationships, Harrison’s series also includes a number of romance subplots in which Rachel repeatedly falls for the wrong man—in noir parlance, an “homme fatale.” Rachel also experiments with a same-sex relationship with Ivy, pushing the boundaries of heterosexual romance fiction. Though Rachel eventually concludes she prefers romantic relationships with men, Harrison’s willingness to explore a bisexual or lesbian romance signals that UFPR may also engage with the contemporary genre of LGBT romance.71

71 Different from the lesbian pulp fiction or gay fiction of the twentieth century, a new form of LGBT romance fiction has emerged in recent years, one that is as concerned with a “Happily Ever After” for its LGBT characters as romance fiction traditionally has been for its heteronormative ones. See Kristen Ramsdell, Romance Fiction: A Guide to the Genre, 2nd ed. (Santa Barbara: Libraries Unlimited, 2012), 367–73; Julie Naughton, “Anything Goes: Focus on Romance: Fall 2012,” Publishers Weekly, November 14, 2012, accessed September 23, 2017, https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/new-titles/adult-

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Harrison’s titles also parody titles in the Western genre—for example, The Good, the Bad and the Undead (2005) and For a Few More (2007).72 These titles use intertextual reference to position her heroine as a reworking of the Western outlaw-hero. Harrison’s series is thus a complex blend of conventions from horror, fantasy, vampire literature, science fiction, crime fiction, romance, chick lit, and even the Western. These examples are not intended as a comprehensive catalogue of the various conventions deployed in UFPR: rather, the various conventions listed are intended to demonstrate that far from simply being a subgenre of fantasy, horror, and/or romance, UFPR is truly a hybrid genre. It draws broadly from the structures of a number of other genres and subgenres to both reinforce and subvert certain genre expectations. Individual UFPR texts and series may not utilise all of these structures, but across the UFPR genre, all these conventions and more are available for analysis. Genre hybridity is so prominent in UFPR that it perhaps should be considered the most significant distinguishing feature of this genre. In addition to crossing the boundaries between popular genres, UFPR also crosses the boundaries between media. In tandem with a general critical failure to give adequate attention to UFPR as a hybrid genre fiction, there has also been a failure to analyse UFPR as a transmedia genre. UFPR is most prolific as a category of popular fiction, usually formatted as serialised novels. But it also crosses into short story collections, world and series guides with exclusive new materials, e-book-only novellas and short stories (and other materials available via author websites), television, film, RPGs, graphic novels, web series, and even viral marketing and transmedia branding of consumer products. Yet critics often fail to consider how cross-media adaptation and transmedia storytelling might shape the content and reception of UFPR texts. In Convergence Culture and on his blog, Confessions of an Aca-fan, Henry Jenkins writes extensively on transmedia narratives. He defines “transmedia storytelling” as “a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple announcements/article/54762-anything-goes-focus-on-romance-fall-2012.html; Michael M. Jones, “Finding Love in All the Right Places: Romance 2015,” Publishers Weekly, June 5, 2015, accessed September 23, 2017, https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/new- titles/adult-announcements/article/67040-finding-love-in-all-the-right-places-romance- 2015.html. UFPR authors whose novels take an LGBT focus include Tanya Huff, Jordan Castillo Price, J. L. Langley, and Jacqueline Carey. Possible influences on LGBT UFPR might include Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles as well as fantasy fiction by authors such as Mercedes Lackey; however, a detailed history of LGBT fantasy and Gothic/horror is outside the scope of this thesis. 72 Kim Harrison, The Good, The Bad and the Undead (New York: HarperTorch, 2005); Kim Harrison, For a Few Demons More (New York: Harper Voyager, 2007).

100 delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience.” Transmedia storytelling, he adds, encourages “the production and circulation of knowledge within a networked society.” And “the encyclopaedic ambitions of transmedia texts,” he argues, “often result in what might be seen as gaps or excesses in the unfolding of the story . . . Readers, thus, have a strong incentive to continue to elaborate on these story elements.”73 In this respect, transmedia texts are participatory and performative. They encourage ongoing audience speculation and discussion, and allow for audience participation and performance, for example in fanfiction and via social media. Jenkins distinguishes transmedia texts from those that are simply adapted from one medium to another, arguing that “we need to distinguish between adaptation, which reproduces the original narrative with minimum changes into a new medium and is essentially redundant to the original work, and extension, which expands our understanding of the original by introducing new elements into the fiction.”74 However, he also emphasises the concept of multiplicity, “the possibility of alternative versions of the characters or parallel universe versions of the stories” that emerge as texts develop between media. Jenkins suggests that “Multiplicity allows fans to take pleasure in alternative retellings, seeing the characters and events from fresh perspectives.”75 The pleasure found in this multiplicity is also possible from more straightforward adaptations between media. If we consider UFPR as a genre rife with this multiplicity, an understanding of UFPR as highly adaptive and as transmedia becomes clearer. In the early 1990s, the tropes of UFPR began to cohere in a variety of media at the same time. For example, White Wolf’s roleplaying game Vampire: The Masquerade (1991) arguably has been influential as a UFPR transmedia text adapted across RPG, fiction and cinema. Vampire: The Masquerade pits various factions of vampires against one another and against other supernatural monsters, such as werewolves. In the 1990s and beyond, the game spawned a series of tie-in novels by Nancy Collins. Collins adapted the world of her Sonja Blue series (1989–2002), a series of novels about a half-vampire

73 Henry Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling 101,” Confessions of an Aca-fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins, March 22, 2007, accessed November 3, 2013, http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html. 74 Henry Jenkins, “The Revenge of the Origami : Seven Principles of Transmedia Storytelling (Well, Two Actually. Five More on Friday),” Confessions of an Aca-fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins, December 12, 2009, accessed November 3, 2013, http://henryjenkins.org/2009/12/the_revenge_of_the_origami_uni.html. 75 Ibid.

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vampire-slayer heroine, to write novelisations for White Wolf.76 In 1996, Vampire: The Masquerade was loosely adapted for television as Kindred: The Embraced.77 Moreover, the successful Underworld film franchise so closely resembles Vampire: The Masquerade, White Wolf’s related RPG Werewolf: The Apocalypse (1992), and the work of Nancy Collins that White Wolf filed for copyright infringement over the first film, Underworld (2003), and received a confidential settlement.78 These texts suggest some of the ways in which, since the 1990s, UFPR has been evolving as a cross-media and transmedia genre. It may seem at first as though UFPR involves primarily straightforward adaptations (or, in Jenkins’s term, extensions) in which texts are translated from one medium to another. However, on closer analysis, it becomes evident that UFPR actually blurs the distinction between adaptation and transmedia storytelling, exploiting the possibilities of multiplicity for its characters and fictional worlds. For example, L. J. Smith’s Vampire Diaries trilogy (1991–1992) has been adapted to a popular television series of the same name (The Vampire Diaries, 2009–2017).79 An extension of the original trilogy, the television series drastically changes the plot and characters of the original series. Moreover, far from being a straightforward process of translation of fiction to television, the popularity of the TV series has also resulted in the publication of a number of new novels in this series. There is therefore a measure of what might be considered “cross-adaptation” occurring here, where the television adaptation in turn influences the book series.80 And the success of the television series has led to the publication of online-only, tie-in short stories on L. J. Smith’s official website.81 Even more surprisingly, Smith, the series’ original author, no longer writes the official Vampire Diaries tie-in novels. However, she recently began publishing fanfiction of the series she created on Kindle Worlds, an .com fanfiction-publishing platform. Through the Kindle Worlds format, Smith thus offers fans yet another

76 Nancy Collins, Sonja Blue series, 5 novels (1989–2002). 77 Kindred: The Embraced, created by John Leekley and Mark Rein-Hagan, Fox, 1996. 78 Underworld, directed by Len Wiseman, Screen Gems, 2003; the Underworld film franchise, 5 films, Screen Gems, 2003–2017. For more on this controversy, see Rachel Mizsei Ward, “Copyright, Association, and Gothic Sensibilities: Underworld and World of Darkness,” in Twenty- First-Century Gothic, eds. Brigid Cherry, Peter Howell, and Caroline Ruddell (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 149–66. 79 L. J. Smith, the Vampire Diaries, 4 novels (1991–1992); The Vampire Diaries (created by Julie Plec and Kevin Williamson, The CW, 2009–2017). 80 L. J. Smith, The Vampire Diaries: The Return Trilogy, 3 novels (2009–2011); and The Vampire Diaries: The Hunters Trilogy, 3 novels (2011–2012); Aubrey Clark, The Vampire Diaries: The Salvation Trilogy, 3 novels (2013–2014). 81 L. J. Smith, “L. J. Smith—Stories,” L. J. Smith Official Site, June 19, 2011, accessed April 19, 2015, http://www.ljanesmith.net/stories/stories.

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alternative version of the broader Vampire Diaries narrative.82 Numerous other UFPR authors have also produced a range of works that spans novels, short story anthologies, world guides, online-only e-books and e-novellas, and graphic novels (for example, Laurell K. Hamilton, Kim Harrison, , Patricia Briggs, and Kelley Armstrong have produced texts across these media). Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries series provides an even more dramatic example of how one UFPR text can function as a transmedia text. Harris’s series traverses various fictional genres: novels, short stories, novellas, a Sookie Stackhouse Companion (2012) that includes new “facts” about Harris’s fictional world (and even recipes mentioned in her fiction), and an encyclopaedic series coda.83 But Harris’s series also crosses into other media. Most prominently, it has been adapted by Alan Ball as True Blood (2008–2014). True Blood adapts material from Harris’s series, but it also extends it, contributing substantial new characters, plot lines, and world-building to the series. True Blood itself has also crossed into e-books and graphic novels. In 2008, a graphic novel prequel was released at the 2008 San Diego Comic Con, after which it was released online. And a number of tie-in graphic novels further develop characters who are drawn in the likenesses of the actors from the television series.84 True Blood also had a wide transmedia viral-marketing campaign that extended beyond the boundaries of traditional narrative media. The True Blood viral campaign included extensive poster campaigns, tie-in advertising from real companies, functional websites promoting fictional settings and organisations from the series, social media campaigns, audience competitions, behind-the-scenes footage and bonus scenes made available online (and on DVD), and even a character blog supposedly produced by teen vampire Jessica Hamby.85

82 L. J. Smith, “Blogs from 2014: L. J. Smith’s new Vampire Diaries series,” L. J. Smith Official Site, January 15, 2014, accessed 15 April 2014, http://ljanesmith.net/blog/2014/635-l-j-smith-s- new-vampires-diaries-series. See also Alexandra Alter, “‘Vampire Diaries’ Writer Writes Back,” Wall Street Journal, April 17, 2014, accessed April 20, 2014, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304058204579495491652398358. 83 Charlaine Harris, The Sookie Stackhouse Companion (New York: Ace Trade, 2012) and After Dead: What Came Next in the World of Sookie Stackhouse (New York: Ace, 2013). 84 David Wohl, Jason Badower, and Blond authored the prequel comic True Blood: The Great Revelation (Los Angeles: TopCow Productions Inc., 2008). True Blood’s spin-off comic book series begins with Alan Ball et al., True Blood Volume 1: All Together Now (San Diego: IDW Publishing, 2011). 85 Baby Vamp Jessica (blog), accessed April 19, 2015, http://www.babyvamp-jessica.com/, includes written blog entries and video entries starring actress Deborah Ann Woll, who played vampire character Jessica on True Blood.

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In The Horror Sensorium, Ndalianis provides a useful analysis of True Blood’s transmedia viral marketing. Ndalianis writes that True Blood, as a transmedia text, “participates in a performance that’s about meta-horror—we take delight in the playful fiction that insists that, like the series, vampires are a part of our community . . . Transmedia fictions invite responses of amusement and cognitive play.”86 Ndalianis suggests here that metatextuality allows consumers to find pleasure in the blurred boundaries between reality and the fantastic. This suggestion resonates with the way that UFPR as a paranormal and hybrid genre also blurs these distinctions. For example, UFPR juxtaposes fantastic conventions from horror with the gritty realism of detective and crime fiction, or treats as mundane the fantastic, supernatural, and sometimes absurd hurdles that interfere with romantic relationship-building. This generic hybridity thus also invites “amusement” and “cognitive play.” An understanding of UFPR as a genre that crosses boundaries of both genre and media provides a crucial insight into the thematic preoccupations of this genre. The boundary-crossing form of UFPR is echoed in the thematic transgression of boundaries and binary configurations prevalent in its content. As these highly speculative texts transgress the boundaries between mystery, horror, fantasy, and romance, and between various media, they also transgress the borders between the real and the fantastic. Further, by unsettling normative reality to explore the non-normative supernatural worlds, they disrupt established social categories such as self/Other.

A Marketable Format with Content That Resonates Over approximately the past twenty-five years, urban fantasy has developed into a coherent and recognisable genre of popular fiction. It is likely that the popularity of this genre over this period stems in part from its potential to register and reflect contemporary sociocultural anxieties such as those produced by post- and third wave feminism, globalisation, and other dramatic technological, environmental, and social changes that were briefly registered in this chapter. I will explore further the relation between this genre and the context in which it has thrived in the chapters to follow. However, a comprehensive analysis of UFPR must also offer a commercial and industrial explanation for its popularity. As a highly adaptive and transmedia genre, UFPR is extremely accessible to consumers. As Jenkins argues, transmedia storytelling “reflects the economics of media consolidation” and as such “may expand the potential

86 Ndalianis, Horror Sensorium, 181.

104 market for a property by creating different points of entry for different audience segments.”87 In addition to a strong emphasis on fictional world-building, the deferred conclusions and other open spaces of the UFPR narrative invite consumers to seek out other points of access to the broader narrative. In short, the serial, hybrid-genre, adaptive, and transmedia formats of UFPR contribute strongly to its popular success as a new genre, creating numerous points from which it can be accessed by a broad audience of consumers and inviting their playful, participatory, and continuing engagement with its many forms. The serialised, hybrid, adaptive, and transmedia formats of UFPR are essential to its success in pop-culture industries. As a hybrid genre, UFPR becomes accessible to a broad number of fiction readers who may typically read fantasy, or romance, or crime fiction, and thus may become interested in how these genres blend with elements of the paranormal. The seriality of UFPR texts often defers conclusions, inviting continued consumption over a number of years, and sometimes decades. As Jenkins argues, the open ending of the serialised text creates “a strong enigma which drives the reader to continue to consume the story even though our satisfaction has been deferred.”88 Urban fantasy often follows the ongoing adventures of one protagonist, and therefore defers both the definitive conquest of evil and the “Happily Ever After” conclusion of the romance. However, paranormal romance still frequently leaves its narratives open-ended by introducing minor characters who will go on to become the primary couple in a follow-on novel. Of (paranormal) romance writer Nora Roberts, who “essentially pioneered the idea of doing linked series of novels in mainstream women’s publishing,”89 Christina A. Valeo argues that in serialised fiction, “All of the elements readers have come to expect from a stand-alone novel . . . are multiplied,” bringing a “particular pleasure” to the reader.90 Finally, both seriality and a transmedia format invite

87 Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling 101.” 88 Jenkins, “Revenge of the Origami Unicorn: The Remaining Four Principles of Transmedia Storytelling,” Confessions of an Aca-fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins, December 12, 2009, accessed November 3, 2013, http://henryjenkins.org/2009/12/revenge_of_the_origami_unicorn.html. 89 Denise Little and Laura Hayden, The Official Nora Roberts Companion (New York: Berkley Books, 2003), 319. 90 Christina A. Valeo, “The Power of Three: Nora Roberts and Serial Magic,” in New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction: Critical Essays, eds. Sarah S. G. Frantz and Eric Murphy Selinger (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2012), 229.

105 consumers to become invested and to participate in the open spaces of a narrative, spaces which Jenkins describes as “gaps or excesses in the unfolding of the story.”91 UFPR has become a dominant influence on representations of monsters and the supernatural in popular culture. By identifying the destabilisation of boundaries as a broadly recurring thematic element in UFPR, it becomes possible to consider how this genre might register real, contemporary social anxieties about unstable boundaries. And by identifying UFPR as a hybrid, serial, adaptive, and transmedia genre, we may better understand more generally how genre structures can be invoked in broad yet highly complex ways. The following chapters build on the genre study developed here by analysing, through close reading, how the conventions of UFPR are deployed in Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series. Hamilton’s series pioneers three of the key new conventions of UFPR identified in this chapter: the strong female protagonist, the everyday-supernatural world, and the ethically complex monster. Analysis of Hamilton’s long-running series will illustrate how these new conventions in UFPR have dramatically affected the representation of the vampire from the 1990s to the present. Through a detailed analysis of Hamilton’s novels, and in particular of her heroine, Anita Blake, I will chart the development of the posthumanist vampire literature that has become prevalent since the early 1990s. Chapter 2 of this thesis described how Martin’s Fevre Dream uses vampiric feeding to challenge the boundaries between the self and racial and animal Others. Chapter 4 shifts my analysis from racial Otherness to consider how gendered Otherness challenges the boundaries of self and Other in vampire fiction from 1990 onwards. As in Fevre Dream, the act of vampiric feeding continues to be the primary means of challenging the boundaries of the human and the Other in an increasingly posthuman world. Vampiric feeding is framed as predatory and evil in Fevre Dream. Yet as noted in the genre overview provided here, in UFPR texts written after 2000, feeding becomes the primary means of interconnection between heroines and vampires, an interconnection that is mutually beneficial and affirmatively posthuman. The longevity of the Anita Blake series means that it offers a unique insight into the shift from monstrous to ethical posthuman feeding. Hamilton’s eponymous heroine, Anita Blake, begins the series as staunchly opposed to the act of vampiric blood- drinking. Yet over the course of the series, she comes to accept and willingly participate

91 Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling 101.”

106 in acts of feeding. Anita Blake, a vampire hunter and slayer, becomes a new kind of living vampire herself. In this way, Hamilton’s character charts a striking shift in ideas about what it means to live with, to accept, and to be the Other.

CHAPTER FOUR

“I Don’t Date Vampires. I Kill Them”: Blood/Lust as a Threat to the Post-/Feminist Vampire Slayer in the Early Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Novels

Vampires, Feminism, and Feeding in the 1990s As I have shown in the preceding chapter, the genre known as urban fantasy and paranormal romance (UFPR) first began to cohere in its current form in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Two key innovations in the UFPR fiction of the 1990s have had a significant and lasting impact on vampire literature more broadly. These are the emergence of a strong female protagonist and of the “everyday-supernatural” fictional world, an alternate version of contemporary society in which monsters and humans openly coexist together. As this chapter will show, these new genre tropes allowed the UFPR of the 1990s to explore a number of contemporary sociohistorical issues, including the emergence of postfeminism, third wave feminism, and the rise of girl power; intersectional feminism and ongoing debates about race in the United States; the aftermath of Reagan’s “War on Drugs”; and the stigma of AIDS. This chapter focuses on the dynamics of the relationship between the heroine and the vampire in early UFPR texts in the 1990s. Specifically, it explores how the act of vampiric feeding foregrounds for this heroine the problematic boundaries that delimit gender, sexuality, monstrosity, and Otherness. The chapter will read one UFPR text as a key example of how the heroine in the early 1990s negotiates these boundaries through problematic encounters with vampiric feeding. As one of the earliest and longest-running UFPR texts, Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series (1993–) offers a useful example of how the heroine emerges and develops in UFPR. This series introduces many of the genre tropes that become conventional in UFPR texts beyond the year 2000. In particular, Hamilton’s blending of horror, crime fiction, vampire literature, and romance; her innovative “everyday-supernatural” world; and her feminist vampire-slaying heroine have had a marked impact on vampire literature beyond the 1990s. In a 2008 Q and A with the

107 108 author, Gilbert Cruz of Time even suggested that UFPR as a genre “owes everything to Laurell K. Hamilton.”1 For these reasons, her series is an appropriate text for an extended close reading of the evolving dynamics and shifting boundaries between the human (female vampire slayer) and the (vampiric) Other in UFPR. Close textual analysis in this and the following chapters will analyse how Blake’s changing attitudes to vampiric feeding and consumption interrogate significant shifts in contemporary constructions of Otherness. Hamilton’s series aligns the monstrous with the female by aligning the monstrous bloodlust of the vampire with female sexual desire. It conflates two kinds of hunger: sexual desire; and the vampire’s bloodlust, its appetitive hunger stemming from a biological need to feed. By conflating these hungers and aligning the female with the vampiric, the series constructs a complex intertwining of the fear of being consumed, the desire to be consumed, and the desire to consume others. By reading these fears about consumption through a feminist framework, I will show, here and in chapter 6, how Hamilton’s series performs a complex interrogation of what it means to be an active female subject in a post-/feminist and increasingly posthuman world.

The Emergence of the Post-/Feminist Female Vampire Slayer In the 1990s, two new strands of feminism emerged: postfeminism and third wave feminism. The concurrent emerging figure of the female vampire slayer registers the tensions between second wave, post-, and third wave feminism. This heroine does not represent a simple generational shift from the older values of the second wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s to the newer ones of postfeminism and third wave feminism of the 1990s. Rather, as the female protagonist in UFPR struggles to negotiate her identity as a heroine, she must also negotiate a feminist identity that is informed by broader cultural shifts. Postfeminism speaks from the position of the “post,” coming after the second wave feminist movement. For some, this suggests that in the decades before postfeminism emerged, second wave feminism had supposedly achieved its goals of equality for women. Postfeminism is often understood as part of the backlash against second wave feminism, a backlash that began in the 1980s and that negatively positioned second wave feminism as an obsolete radical movement. Sarah Gamble argues that in

1 Gilbert Cruz, “Vampire Novelist Laurell K. Hamilton,” Time, October 30, 2008, accessed April 20, 2015, http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1854991,00.html.

109 this respect postfeminism has often signified “joyous liberation from the ideological shackles of a hopelessly outdated feminist movement.” 2 Postfeminism sometimes regards the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s (with its focus on domestic labour, equality for women in the workforce, reproductive rights, and women’s sexuality within a patriarchal order) as no longer relevant for the feminists of the 1990s. Postfeminism thus advocates for new approaches to women’s rights for a new generation of women. Among other things, postfeminism has been aligned with “choice” feminism (which holds that whether or not ideology or actions are interpreted as “feminist” is the choice of the individual woman). It has also been aligned with the reappropriation of traditional femininity with a supposed feminist self-awareness, which involves the “recurrent reinvigoration of particular models of white, middle-class femininity that belong to the image repertoire of ‘pre-feminist’ cultural productions.”3 Third wave feminism is often said to build more overtly on the foundations of second wave feminism, rejecting the idea that the work of the feminist project has been achieved.4 Stéphanie Genz and Benjamin A. Brabon write in Postfemininism: Cultural Texts and Theories that third wave feminism “defin[es] itself more overtly as a kind of feminist politics that extends the historical trajectory of previous feminist waves.”5 The third wave recognises an ongoing struggle for gender equality, particularly for women of colour and women in undeveloped or non-Western nations. Nonetheless, like postfeminism, third wave feminism often seeks to distinguish itself from second wave feminism by attempting to find new pathways for the feminist movement in a new era. As Gillis, Howie, and Munford note in their introduction to Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration, like postfeminists, “third wave feminists have been extremely eager to define their feminism as something ‘different’ from previous feminisms.”6 The relationship between these two new forms of feminism is highly contested. As Genz and Brabon note, postfeminism is “loathed by some and celebrated by

2 Gamble, “Postfeminism,” 43–44. 3 Munford and Waters, Feminism and Popular Culture, 11. Postfeminists who take these positions include Rene Denfeld, Naomi Wolfe, and Katie Roiphe. 4 For key texts of the third wave, see also: Astrid Henry, Not My Mother’s Daughter: Generational Conflict and Third-Wave Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000); and Rebecca Walker, ed., To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism (New York: Anchor Books, 1995). 5 Genz and Brabon, Postfeminism, 161. 6 Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie, and Rebecca Munford, “Introduction,” in Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration, edited by Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie, and Rebecca Munford (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan Press, 2004): xxii.

110 others.”7 It is often seen as a superficial movement that endorses patriarchal ideals of femininity under the guise of feminist liberation. However, Genz and Brabon note that the “post” in postfeminism does not signify for all postfeminists the supposed achievement of the goals of the feminist project. Rather, they write, it may signal both a “process of ongoing transformation” that continues on from this project and “a contradictory dependence on and independence from the term that follows it.”8 They argue that postfeminism offers “a more complex and productive concept than many of its common usages suggest.”9 Gamble conflates postfeminism and third wave feminism, suggesting that postfeminism is also “a pluralistic epistemology dedicated to disrupting universalising patterns of thought, and thus capable of being aligned with postmodernism, poststructuralism and postcolonialism.”10 Gillis, Howie, and Munford note that this “conflation” between postfeminism and third wave feminism “is something which third wave feminists are keen to resist, despite the similarities.”11 Yet, Genz and Brabon argue, “the adoption of a binary logic to conceptualise the relationship between third wave feminism and postfeminism is misleading.” They argue that “in many cases” a straightforward opposition between third wave and postfeminism “does not account for the slippage between the two terms and often rests on an overly simplistic view of postfeminism as defeatism.”12 Though they may be explored from different critical perspectives, postfeminism and third wave feminism have many common concerns.13 Both postfeminism and third wave feminism are concerned with what Gamble terms “issues of victimisation, autonomy and responsibility” for women.14 Moreover, postfeminism and third wave feminism are arguably both potentially intersectional movements that recognise commonality in the marginalised positions of women and other groups oppressed by white patriarchal culture, including people of colour and the LGBT community. Finally,

7 Genz and Brabon, Postfeminism, 1. 8 Ibid., 4. 9 Ibid., 7. 10 Gamble, “Postfeminism,” 50, 53. 11 Gillis, Howie, and Munford, Third Wave Feminism, xxvii. 12 Genz and Brabon, Postfeminism, 156. 13 It should be noted that one of postfeminism’s primary concerns is that of women’s power as consumers in capitalist culture. Third wave feminism is concerned with the economic equality of women in the workforce and the way women are exploited internationally to provide minimum- wage labour. Both strands of feminism are thus concerned with issues of women, class, and economic power. However, as these issues in postfeminism and third wave feminism are not relevant to the analysis of vampire literature that follows, they have not been discussed in this brief overview. 14 Gamble, “Postfeminism,” 43.

111 both postfeminism and third wave feminism are concerned with new attitudes toward women’s sexuality. If it is difficult to define the limits of either postfeminism or third wave feminism, this is perhaps because these movements both recognise and advocate for, as Howie, Gillis, and Munford note of the third wave, a feminism that embraces “contradiction, multiplicity, and difference.”15 Genz and Brabon argue for “an active rethinking” of postfeminism and third wave feminism “that captures the multiplicity and complexity of twenty-first-century feminisms.”16 Significant for an analysis of the heroine in UFPR is the way that “both third wave feminism and postfeminism have drawn on popular culture to interrogate and explore twenty-first-century configurations of female empowerment and re-examine the meanings of feminism in the present context as a politics of contradiction and ambivalence.”17 Post- and third wave feminism manifested prominently in the popular culture of the early 1990s, from the “girl power” pop music of the Spice Girls to the Riot Grrrl punk-rock movement;18 from female action heroines such as Xena, Warrior Princess (1995–1999) to the sexually “liberated” protagonists of Sex in the City (1998– 2004).19 The heroines of UFPR emerge as part of this pop culture movement. Munford and Waters argue that “the Gothic has provided a suggestive language for postfeminist negotiations” of various issues in contemporary feminism, citing the supernatural and vampirism as key Gothic motifs in contemporary popular culture.20 They build on the earlier work of Brabon and Genz, who identify and define a “postfeminist Gothic” in contemporary popular culture. Brabon and Genz see the postfeminist Gothic as a contemporary continuation of, and break from, the Female Gothic, that Gothic literature written by women and engaging with the tensions between the female and the patriarchal, as first identified by Ellen Moers.21 Moreover, they suggest the need to “explore how Gothic changes when prefixed by the modifier ‘postfeminist.’” 22 In

15 Gillis, Howie, and Munford, Third Wave Feminism, xxiv. 16 Genz and Brabon, Postfeminism, 161. 17 Ibid., 162 18 See ibid., 76–84. 19 For further discussion of the relationship between post- and third wave feminism in popular culture, see Munford and Waters, Feminism and Popular Culture; Stéphanie Genz, Postfemininities in Popular Culture; Tasker and Negra, Interrogating Postfeminism; and McRobbie, “Post-Feminism and Popular Culture.” 20 Munford and Waters, Feminism and Popular Culture, 16. 21 Brabon and Genz, Postfeminist Gothic, 5–6. See also Ellen Moers, Literary Women: The Great Writers (London: W. H. Allen, 1977). 22 Ibid., 8.

112 analysing the heroine of UFPR, it becomes clear that this popular genre mobilises motifs from the Gothic as it explores tensions between different kinds of feminist identities and ideals. Previously relegated almost exclusively to the role of the victim in vampire literature,23 in the 1990s female characters in vampire literature began to take on new roles as heroines. In paranormal romance, this role was the female protagonist of a romance narrative.24 In urban fantasy, it was commonly that of a monster hunter and/or vampire slayer. Instead of being victimised by vampires and rescued by male vampire slayers, female characters in vampire literature became active as protagonists. They confronted vampires and emerged victorious, falling in love with, hunting, and sometimes even protecting and rescuing vampires. The best-known iteration of this heroine is Joss Whedon’s Buffy Summers. The 1992 Buffy the Vampire Slayer film scripted by Whedon (and directed by Rubel Kuzui) first introduced the character of Buffy, a cheerleader-cum-vampire-slayer. Her character is extensively developed in Whedon’s television series, also titled Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which ran from 1997–2003. As Munford and Waters note, “Whedon’s show . . . set out to overturn the conventions of the horror movie by transforming the default ‘victim’ of that genre—the little blonde girl—into a ‘hero.’”25 In the series, Buffy must follow her secret destiny to fight vampires and other supernatural evil as she negotiates relationships with friends, family, lovers, and authorities in both high school and university. Buffy and her series have been the subject of much critical debate, constituting the academic field known as “Buffy Studies.”26 Buffy’s significance as a feminist icon

23 Notable exceptions include, of course, the vampire aggressor of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1871), and Bram Stoker’s Mina Harker in Dracula (1897), who plays an integral role in defeating Dracula. See also Douglas Brode and Leah Deyneka, eds., Dracula’s Daughters: The Female Vampire on Film (Plymouth: Scarecrow Press, 2014). 24 For example, the early paranormal romance novels of Maggie Shayne’s Wings in the Night series (1993–2011) and the of L. J. Smith, including her original Vampire Diaries series (1991–1992). 25 Munford and Waters, Feminism and Popular Culture, 162. 26 As Pender noted in “Vampires Beware: Buffy is the Unslayable Pop Culture Text” (The Conversation, June 19, 2014, accessed June 21, 2014, https://theconversation.com/vampires- beware-buffy-is-the-unslayable-pop-culture-text-28142), Buffy Studies remains at the forefront of scholarship on popular culture more than a decade after the series ended. This ongoing interest in Buffy was recently marked with a spate of newspaper, magazine, and online articles commemorating the series on the twentieth anniversary of the date its first episode went to air, for example, Lucy Mangan, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer at 20: The Thrilling, Brilliant Birth of TV as Art,” The Guardian, March 10, 2017, accessed April 16, 2017,

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(including her relationship to second wave, post-, and third wave feminism) has been widely analysed. For example, Munford and Waters argue that Buffy “enact[s] a feminist fantasy of female agency and autonomy.”27 Elana Levine argues that “Buffy has become part of the discussion around television in a specific historical context, one in which the meanings of feminism and femininity are in tension with earlier meanings.”28 Irene Karras calls Buffy “third wave’s final girl,” positioning her as a 1990s reframing of Carol J. Clover’s final girl, the triumphant female character who survives in the slasher films of the 1970s and 1980s.29 The “final girl” of these earlier films often subverted expectations of gender in the horror film by adopting more masculine characteristics. She was also typically represented as sexually chaste. But Karras argues that Buffy, on the other hand, is “the prototypical girly feminist activist, intentionally slaying stereotypes about what women can and cannot do, combining sexuality with real efforts to make the world a better and safer place.”30 Karras thus argues that “by embracing the feminine,” third wave feminists and characters like Buffy “are sending the message to society that women are powerful on their own terms.”31 The general critical consensus is that Buffy is a significant feminist figure. As Patricia Pender concludes, “Buffy provides us with modes of oppositional praxis, of resistant femininity and, in its final season, of collective feminist activism that are unparalleled in mainstream television.”32 Buffy was not the only—or even the first—female monster slayer to emerge in the early 1990s. The figure of a tough female monster-slayer was also used by Nancy Collins in her Sonja Blue stories, a series of novels and short stories following the adventures of a half-vampire vampire hunter (1989–2002); by Tanya Huff in her Blood books, which followed the adventures of ex-cop Vicki Nelson, who teams up with a vampire to fight other, more evil monsters (1991–1997); and by Laurell K. Hamilton in the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series (1993–), which follows the adventures of Anita Blake, a legal vampire executioner. These heroines all take on the role of a monster hunter who must solve mysteries, protect her loved ones and fellow human citizens, and police the boundaries between good and evil. In each series, these boundaries are https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/mar/10/buffy-the-vampire-slayer-at-20-the- thrilling-brilliant-birth-of-tv-as-art. 27 Munford and Waters, Feminism and Popular Culture, 162. 28 Elana Levine, “Buffy and the ‘New Girl Order,’” 169. 29 Karras, “The Third Wave’s Final Girl”; Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws. 30 Karras, “Third Wave’s Final Girl.” 31 Ibid. 32 Pender, “Kicking Ass Is Comfort Food,” 225. See also Pender, page 226, for an additional summary of television critics and scholars that regard Buffy as a feminist character.

114 initially presumed to correspond with boundaries between the human and the monstrous Other. However, as heroines become more deeply entwined in supernatural conflicts, this hierarchy gradually becomes unsettled. The representations of female identity found in UFPR texts are not uncontested. Because they embrace multiplicity and even contradiction, post- and third wave feminist texts often pose a challenge for critics who seek to evaluate whether they can be deemed suitably “feminist.” As Genz notes, though the postfeminist Gothic “destabilizes and ‘unmoors’ the feminine construct itself, turning femininity into a space of resignification,” it is also nonetheless haunted by “the threat of phallocentricity, the spectre of heterosexism,” because this femininity “still function[s] within the same cultural imagery that transfers onto women the labels of inferiority and powerlessness.” 33 For example, texts like Buffy and the Anita Blake series can be problematic because they conflate strength and power with masculine ideals such as physical strength—yet also rely on superficial physical signifiers of femininity, such as their heroines’ small stature and their sexual appeal for male characters.34 More broadly, women’s pop culture texts can be problematic for those who argue that they uphold conservative patriarchal and heteronormative ideals for gender and sexuality. For example, Gina Wisker has recently suggested that in young adult and women’s popular fiction, “vampires have been reappropriated for conventionality (romantic bliss, heteronormativity) in late twentieth-, early twenty-first century writing.”35 She writes scathingly that much paranormal romance is “conformist,” and its vampires have become “sanitised and figuratively de-fanged.”36 I will not, however, debate whether specific UFPR texts are feminist or antifeminist.37 Rather, in the analysis that follows, I explore how UFPR texts like

33 Genz, “(Re)Making the Body Beautiful: Postfeminist Cinderellas and Gothic Tales of Transformation,” in Postfeminist Gothic: Critical Interventions in Contemporary Culture, eds. Benjamin A. Brabon and Stéphanie Genz (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 72, 73. 34 As I shall discuss further below, the Anita Blake series lauds the (masculine) toughness of its heroine; one unfortunate consequence of this is that its heroine is often positioned as atypical (and superior) to other women, and indeed, throughout the series, the text offers few examples of other strong female characters or strong female friendships. 35 Wisker, Contemporary Women’s Gothic Fiction, 188–89. 36 Ibid., 187. 37 In this regard, the most controversial UFPR text for feminist critics came in the decade after heroines like Buffy, Anita Blake, and Vicki Nelson first emerged: Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga (2005–2008). Joseph Crawford summarizes this controversy in Twilight of the Gothic, noting how the series and its adaptations have been criticized for being antifeminist, for upholding sexist gender roles, for “encouraging an unhealthy attitude towards sex,” and for its conservative

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Hamilton’s offer a means of staging and negotiating some of the possible feminist identities that have become available to women as feminism has evolved in recent decades. Moreover, as Mary Bly argues, “while gender will always be the crucial analytic category for feminist readings of romance fiction, that work needs to be grounded in an inquiry that addresses specific discourses and types of knowledges in play during a novel’s creation.” In analysing the ways in which contemporary UFPR texts contest the boundary between the self and the monstrous Other, I thus strive for the “more rigorous assessments of the complex and time-specific ways by which culture influences women’s lives” that are advocated by Bly.38

Introducing Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter and Her “Everyday- Supernatural” World Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake lives in an “everyday-supernatural” world, an alternative version of the contemporary United States in which vampires, werewolves, witches, and other monsters live openly alongside humans. In the early 1990s, the everyday-supernatural speculative world emerged as another significant genre innovation in UFPR fiction. This kind of fictional world enables humans and vampires to interact in dramatically different ways. In Blake’s alternate reality, monsters are no longer supernatural entities lurking in the shadows; they are members of minority groups within mainstream society. As Blake explains in Guilty Pleasures (1993), “It had only been two years since Addison v. Clark. The court case gave us a revised version of what life was, and what death wasn’t. Vampirism was legal in the good ol’ U. S. of A.” She adds, “There was even a movement to give them the vote. Times were a-changing.”39 Prior to Hamilton’s everyday-supernatural world, vampires in literature and film typically remained hidden from human society, masquerading as humans and/or living in exclusive coteries and underground communities.40 These vampires were outsiders to

messages about family, abortion, and religion. Crawford, Twilight of the Gothic, 195; see 181–236 for Crawford’s in-depth discussion of this controversy. 38 Mary Bly, “On Popular Romance, J. R. Ward, and the Limits of Genre Study,” in New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction: Critical Essays, eds. Sarah S. G. Frantz and Eric Murphy Selinger (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2012), 60. 39 Laurell K. Hamilton, Guilty Pleasures (1993; repr., New York: Jove, 2002), 3. Further references to this novel will be given parenthetically, citing the page number. 40 Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles (1976–) provide several examples of this phenomenon. In Interview with the Vampire (1976), her vampires Louis, Lestat, and Claudia live in the French Quarter of New Orleans, hiding in plain sight by pretending to be humans. In The Vampire Lestat (1985), Rice’s protagonist Lestat comes into conflict with a satanic cult of vampires who literally live underground, hiding in the Les Innocents cemetery in Paris. And in Queen of the Damned

116 the human world except when moving against it to satisfy their need to feed on human blood. In contrast, Hamilton’s vampires and humans live together in the same society. This cohabitation allows for new kinds of social interaction between individual vampires and humans and between vampire and human communities. By positioning her vampires as a legally recognised minority, Hamilton is able to use her series to refract a number of contemporary sociohistorical concerns through the lens of monstrous Otherness. The reference to “the vote” in the passage above, quoted from Guilty Pleasures, recalls the women’s suffrage movement. Blake’s reference to a landmark court case that changes the definition of “what life was” also evokes Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court case that set the precedent for legal abortion in the United States. Addison v. Clark changes the definition of what is an acceptable form of human life, just as Roe v. Wade changed the definition of when human life begins. Furthermore, by granting personhood to vampires, a social group previously denied that status, Hamilton recalls the history of slavery in the United States and the struggle to grant the right to vote to black citizens. The series’ setting in St. Louis, a city with a long colonial history and a still-ongoing struggle with racial segregation, also alludes to these racial tensions. Finally, Hamilton’s use of the phrase “times were a-changing” references musician Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’” (1964), a protest song that addresses the struggles for civil rights in the 1960s.41 Hamilton thus positions her vampires, werewolves, and other monsters as marginalised outsiders who, in the early 1990s, are still struggling to attain civil rights. As this chapter will further reveal, Hamilton also uses her marginalised monstrous Others to refract very real contemporary anxieties about sexuality, addiction, and contagion following the War on Drugs and the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1990s. Hamilton frames the coexistence of vampires and humans as a legal and ethical problem. By “legalising” and regulating vampirism, she constructs a world in which vampire behaviour is governed by the rules of the dominant, normative human faction. In this fictional world, the vampire is no longer a monster that is supernaturally evil; instead, “evil” is determined to be legally defined acts of wrong-doing. By legalising vampirism, Hamilton suggests that vampires are no longer necessarily evil because of their supernatural powers and urges; they are evil only if they break human law and

(1988), Anne Rice’s ancient vampire Maharet lives at a secret compound in the Sonoma Valley in California, visited by those other vampires in the know. 41 Dylan, Bob, “The Times They Are a-Changin,’” The Times They Are a-Changin’, 1964, Columbia.

117 commit a crime.42 “Evil” is therefore no longer an essential quality of the monstrous, the animal, the nonhuman; instead, evil is defined as immoral and/or harmful actions that break human laws. As Hamilton describes the laws that define immoral and/or harmful actions in her fictional world, it becomes clear that these laws continue to define vampiric evil as selfish, predatory feeding. The following analysis of Hamilton’s first Anita Blake novel, Guilty Pleasures, will show that as in Martin’s Fevre Dream (1982), in Hamilton’s series vampires are evil when they feed from or kill unwilling humans. At different points in the Anita Blake series’ overarching narrative, very different attitudes to vampiric feeding are evident. Initially, in the early 1990s, Blake believes that vampiric feeding is a predatory, spiritually and morally evil act that corrupts humans; consequently, she believes that humans who willingly consort with vampires are morally weak. Yet as the series becomes more complex in subsequent novels (in terms of both fictional world-building and character development), Blake’s attitude toward feeding shifts. In this respect, the Anita Blake series charts and refracts a contemporary cultural shift in attitudes toward Otherness in the posthuman and postfeminist (or third wave feminist) world that develops from the 1990s to the present time. In Guilty Pleasures, Hamilton establishes three key roles for Anita as heroine of the series: vampire hunter, law enforcement officer, and necromancer. Most significant of these is Anita’s role as a vampire hunter and slayer. Blake is a legally sanctioned vampire executioner. As Blake tells us, “If a vampire stepped over the line, they sent for me. There was no such thing as a life sentence for a vampire. Death or nothing. No prison can hold a vampire. . . . I was the vampire’s equivalent of an electric chair.”43 Blake’s role as vampire slayer thus positions her on the boundary between the human and the vampire communities. As a vampire slayer, her moral and professional duty is to uphold the human laws that restrain and restrict the vampire community. This situation is complicated by Blake’s role as a law enforcement officer, which positions her as an intermediary between the human and supernatural communities. In Guilty Pleasures, Anita works as an expert on retainer for the Regional

42 For a further discussion of the implications of legalising vampirism, see Melissa L. Tatum, “Trying the System,” in Ardeur: 14 Writers on the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Series, ed. Laurell K. Hamilton (Dallas: BenBella Books, 2010), 121–34. Joseph J. Foy also analyses the legal implications of the everyday-supernatural world, as utilised in television series True Blood, in “Signed in Blood: Rights and the Vampire-Human Social Contract,” in True Blood and Philosophy, edited by George A. Dunn and Rebecca Housel (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2010), 51–64. 43 Laurell K. Hamilton, The Laughing Corpse (1994; repr., New York: Jove, 2002), 104–5. Further references to this novel will be given parenthetically, citing the page number.

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Investigative Team, consulting on supernatural crimes. As the series progresses, her official role as an investigator and law enforcement officer expands. From the series’ eleventh novel, Cerulean Sins (2003), Blake works as a federal marshal.44 Because she strives to fulfil the strict moral and legal duties that come with this role, as well as defending humans from vampires, she must also enforce the legal rights of vampires and other supernatural entities. Blake is a monster-slayer in a world where the monsters are thinking, feeling subjects with rights. Rather than simply restricting the actions of the vampire community, in order to uphold the law, she must also defend it. For example, in Guilty Pleasures, the vampires themselves attempt to recruit Blake to investigate a spate of murders in which vampires are the victims. “We want somebody who knows the night life to be looking into these murders,” a vampire representative tells her (4). Blake’s role as an intermediary between the human and supernatural communities positions her to understand and defend the supernatural community. Complicating matters further, in addition to her other roles, Blake is also a supernatural practitioner herself. She is an “animator” or necromancer who is paid to raise zombies from the grave. In doing so, she must draw on her own innate supernatural power, her “affinity with the dead” (The Laughing Corpse, 41, 44). This affinity facilitates her role as a vampire slayer: “Being an animator gave you a partial immunity to vampires. It was one of the reasons that animators are so often vampire slayers” (ibid., 173). However, this ability also marks Blake herself as partly supernatural, which again brings her closer to the vampire community. Though Blake’s first two roles, vampire executioner and law enforcement officer, suggest that she polices the boundaries between human and vampire communities, her abilities as a necromancer suggest that she is not actually human. As a vampire slayer, law enforcement officer, and necromancer, Blake thus has a liminal position between the human and the supernatural communities. And as the following chapters will show, Blake’s own supernatural abilities allow her to engage with vampires on new posthuman terms. Importantly, Blake’s position as an outsider is further highlighted by her role as a woman working in the traditionally masculine field of law enforcement. Like other female vampire slayers who emerged in the 1990s, Blake is often subject to everyday gender discrimination. Female vampire slayers challenge the patriarchal assumption that women are passive because they assert themselves in a combative, violent role. As Linda

44 Laurell K. Hamilton, Cerulean Sins (London: Orbit, 2003). Further references to this novel will be given parenthetically, citing the page number.

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Holland-Toll writes in “Harder than Nails, Harder than Spade,” Anita Blake’s (physical and mental) “toughness” pushes her beyond the traditional limits of feminine behaviour. But despite her innovative role as a tough heroine in a vampire series, “Anita Blake is still a part of her society, and her society is still riddled with gendered assumptions. . . . Her biological gender is against her, societal gender expectations are against her, and her experiences with the softer, ‘feminine’ emotions are also against her.”45 Anita Blake is thus a part of, and yet an outsider to, the patriarchal society whose rules she strives to uphold. Hamilton routinely foregrounds Blake’s gender-defying “toughness.” For example, at a crime scene in The Laughing Corpse, Blake participates in a “gross-out” competition that requires her to fondle more of a corpse than a male detective is willing to fondle (214–16). And in Obsidian Butterfly (2000), an assassin friend describes Blake as “tougher” than his backup, who is an ex–special forces officer and a serial killer.46 But despite this “unfeminine” toughness, Blake is routinely discriminated against in the work place. Her agency and her perceived effectiveness in her profession are undermined by a prejudice that equates femaleness with a lack of power, both physical and social. For example, at a crime scene in The Lunatic Cafe (1996), a local Sheriff reacts with disbelief when they are introduced: “‘This little bit of a girl has over a dozen vampire kills under her belt?’ There was laughter in his voice, disbelief. . . . ‘I just don’t believe a little thing like yourself coulda done all the things I’ve heard.’”47 Blake’s toughness, her gender, and her perceived femininity are intertwined with her racial identity, yet another aspect of her identity that marks her as an outsider. In The Laughing Corpse, Anita describes herself thus: “black hair, eyes so dark brown they look black. They are my mother’s Latin darkness. But my skin is pale, my father’s Germanic blood. Put some makeup on me and I look not unlike a china doll” (15). Like Nora Helmer in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879), Blake resents her doll-like appearance and refuses to subscribe to a passive, traditional feminine role.48 Blake’s racial identity is

45 Holland-Toll, “Harder than Nails, Harder than Spade,” 181. 46 Laurell K. Hamilton, Obsidian Butterfly (2000; repr., New York: Jove, 2002), 255. Further references to this novel will be given parenthetically, citing the page number. 47 Laurell K. Hamilton, The Lunatic Cafe (1996; repr., New York: Jove, 2002), 52. Further references to this novel will be given parenthetically, citing the page number. 48 Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House, in Four Major Plays, trans. James McFarlane and Jens Arup (1879; repr., Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 2008). Ibsen’s Nora is famous for her rejection of her wifely role as a passive, doll-like figure who is objectified by patriarchal society. As she takes the radical step of leaving her husband, Nora laments, “I have been your doll wife, just as I was Daddy’s

120 nevertheless repeatedly linked to her identity as a woman by those who subscribe to a predominantly white, patriarchal culture. For example, in The Lunatic Café, Anita explains to her boyfriend that a former fiancé jilted her after she lost her virginity to him, on the grounds that “his mother didn’t like my mother being Mexican” (142).49 In response to this rejection, in the earlier novels in Hamilton’s series, Blake refuses to engage in sexual intercourse before marriage again. This abstinence is an attempt to control her identity as a biracial woman and a refusal to be viewed only as a sexual object. Hamilton makes it clear that Anita’s gender, mixed race, and supernatural powers are all elements of her identity that make her a target for discrimination. For example, in Incubus Dreams (2004), when Anita reports a murder to the local police, she is again treated with condescension and prejudice by her fellow law enforcement officers. At this point in the series, Anita is no longer celibate and is known to be dating both a shapeshifter and vampire. This leads the local sheriff to remark, “Bestiality and coffin- bait, that is pretty darn low for a white woman.” Anita retorts, “My mother was Hispanic, from Mexico, does that help?”50 Like the aggressive law enforcement officers in The Lunatic Café, one of whom repeatedly uses the racial slur “nigger” (45, 46, 47), this officer too responds with a racial insult: “Half spic” (608). Anita Blake is thus constructed as a character who not only crosses the boundary between the human and supernatural worlds but also those that prescribe gendered behaviour and delimit racial identity. Blake’s biracial position as a woman in a patriarchal society further facilitates her “affinity with the dead,” encouraging an empathy for the monstrous that stems from a recognition of the Otherness she shares. In “When the Woman Looks,” as I noted briefly in the previous chapter, Linda Williams analyses the gaze in horror cinema, arguing that in horror texts, when a female character is confronted with the monster she is supposed to fear, often she fears “the monster’s freakishness, but also recognizes the sense in which this freakishness is similar to her own difference. For she too has been constituted as an exhibitionist-object by the desiring look of the male.”51 Seen in this light, the Otherness of the monster is similar to the difference, or Otherness, of the

doll child. . . . I thought it was fun when you came and played with me. . . . That’s been our marriage, Torvald” (80–81). 49 Blake shares this memory again in Obsidian Butterfly, when another minority character accuses her of attempting to “pass for white” (131). 50 Laurell K. Hamilton, Incubus Dreams (New York: Berkley, 2004), 608. Further references to this novel will be given parenthetically, citing the page number. 51 Williams, “When the Woman Looks,” 88.

121 woman in patriarchal society, which leads to “a surprising (and at times subversive) affinity between monster and woman.”52 Williams suggests that this “strange sympathy and affinity” affords the heroine the ability to experience “sympathetic identification” with the monstrous.53 These complex politics of identification suggest that when the heroine of UFPR encounters a monstrous outsider, she experiences an often disturbing sense of self- recognition. For example, in the opening pages of Guilty Pleasures, when Blake swiftly evades the physical advances of a vampire, there is a moment of recognition in which each sees themselves in the other. The vampire, Willie, tells Blake, “no human coulda stepped outta reach like that” (4). When Willie moves closer to Blake, she describes the encounter as follows: “He stepped up close to me, plaid jacket nearly brushing mine. Pressed together like that, we were nearly the same height, short. His eyes were on a perfect level with mine. I stared as hard as I could at his shoulder” (4). Face-to-face with a monster who mirrors her physically, Blake gazes at Willie but actively avoids his hypnotic vampire gaze. Willie confronts her with the accusation, “You ain’t human, any more than I am” (4), and just as Blake avoids his gaze, she avoids answering him. Her silence suggests that she is unable to refute Willie’s observation that they are, in fact, both monstrously Other. The multiplicitous identity of the UFPR heroine—in this case, that of a monster hunter, tough law enforcement officer, and human with supernatural powers, who is a young biracial woman—allows her to question what it means to be Other and to question whether being Other necessarily means being inferior or evil. As Hilary M. Leon argues, the postfeminist monster slayer’s own “acceptance by society, or lack thereof,” drives her to empathise with “companions with similar experiences”—that is, with “monsters and other social exiles.”54 UFPR heroines like Anita Blake are uniquely susceptible to understanding the vampire as Other, as an outsider who wishes to thrive in the world without being forced to subscribe to an identity bounded by normative, patriarchal limits. This heroine is uniquely suited to exploring the challenges to identity that arise in a postfeminist (and increasingly posthumanist) era. This is why, though the

52 Ibid., 85. 53 Ibid., 88. 54 Hilary M. Leon, “Why We Love Monsters: How Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter and Buffy the Vampire Slayer Wound Up Dating the Enemy,” Slayage: The Journal of Whedon Studies 1, no. 1 (2001): http://slayageonline.com/Numbers/slayage1.htm.

122 female heroine was scarce in vampire literature before 1990, from then on she has dominated vampire texts in fiction, television, and film.

The Desire to Feed as Morally Corrupting: Vampire Strippers and Junkies In the Anita Blake novels written between 1993 and 1997, as I have noted above, Blake repeatedly rejects vampiric feeding as immoral and evil. In Guilty Pleasures, the first novel in the series, vampiric feeding is initially shown to be predatory, animalistic, and selfish. Consequently, those humans who willingly feed vampires are represented as morally weak and corrupt. However, close reading of Guilty Pleasures reveals that Blake’s rejection of vampiric feeding stems from her fear that it is an act that threatens her feminist subjectivity and agency. In Hamilton’s series, vampiric feeding is represented as intertwining appetitive hunger with sexual desire. For Blake, these hungers and the attempt to sate them through vampiric feeding threaten to corrupt her body, her subjectivity, and her agency as a heroine. In Guilty Pleasures, three characters suggest that vampires are brutal and predatory and that the humans who feed them are weak and morally corrupt: Monica Vespucci, a lawyer; Phillip, a human male stripper; and Robert, a vampire male stripper. Blake’s interactions with them reveal the extent of her fear of feeding as an act that threatens her integrity as a feminist subject. Under false pretences, Monica lures Anita to the vampire strip club that gives the novel its name. She betrays Anita to the vampires there, who then threaten and blackmail her. Anita is furious: “She’s human, and she betrayed other humans to nonhumans. . . . Monica betrayed her own kind. She also betrayed a friend. That is unforgivable” (115). Her anger at this betrayal suggests she considers humans who support vampires—who do not recognise vampires as Other from humans and so fail to ally themselves with humans against vampires—to be corrupt and untrustworthy. Phillip is a human stripper at Guilty Pleasures who allows vampires to feed from him on stage. He is consequently so scarred from vampire bites that, as Anita describes it, “his neck looked like a junkie’s” (15). This comparison implies that Phillip is addicted to the thrill of feeding vampires and that, like any other kind of junkie, his addiction renders him untrustworthy. Anita later wonders, “What did I know about Phillip? He stripped at Guilty Pleasures, not exactly a character reference. He was a vampire junkie, better and better. Was all that pain an act? Was he luring me someplace, just as Monica

123 had?” (117). Although Phillip has done nothing to earn Anita’s distrust, she is suspicious of him because he associates with and feeds vampires. As one of Anita’s informants later tells her, “‘Hell, Anita, he’s a junkie. Don’t matter what he’s strung out on, drugs, liquor, sex, vampires, no diff. No junkie is trustworthy, you know that’” (120). Sex is included in the above list of addictions, strongly suggesting a link between the supposed moral corrosiveness of both vampirism and sexuality. With this conservative caution toward sexuality, the early novels in Hamilton’s series play on the conventions of the American Gothic. As Alan Lloyd Smith notes, “Puritan inheritance” is one of the key “cultural pressures” to influence the American Gothic mode,55 where it is synonymous with sexual morality and repression.56 In the historical context of the early 1990s, Hamilton’s novel also registers a reactionary moral conservatism in response to the AIDS epidemic. In Our Vampires, Ourselves, Nina Auerbach writes that “The AIDS epidemic, widely publicised by the early 1980s, infected the decade’s already stricken vampires.”57 She notes that this association between vampiric infection and the contagion of AIDS continues in the early 1990s in novels that include Brian Aldiss’s Dracula Unbound (1991), Dan Simmons’s Children of the Night (1992), and Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula (1992). Auerbach suggests that post- AIDS, vampires find themselves “shrivelled in a plague-stricken, newly censorious culture.”58 This argument is developed by Xavier Aldana Reyes, who argues that “the figure of the vampire has been read alongside the AIDS pandemic because they have both been perceived as sexually excessive and as evil products of sin.”59 In this context, Anita Blake’s anxiety about Phillip’s sexualised male body evokes an anxiety surrounding sexuality and the male body post-AIDS. As a stripper who feeds vampires on stage, Phillip is a threatening figure because he conflates the biological act of feeding the vampire with the sexual act of removing his clothing to titillate an audience, suggesting sexual transgression tinged with the fear of infection. Phillip’s physical description renders visible the violence and corruption of the vampire’s bite. His body itself signifies the act of vampiric feeding: “the bend of each arm, until the skin had formed white mounds of tissue” (15); “there was a white mass of scars over his left collarbone, ragged and vicious. . . . A vampire had torn through his

55 Allan Lloyd Smith, : An Introduction (New York: Continuum, 2004), 4, 37. 56 For further reading, see John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 57 Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, 175. 58 Ibid. 59 Aldana Reyes, “Who Ordered the Hamburger with AIDS?,” 58.

124 collarbone, ripped at him like a dog with a piece of meat” (15). Through Phillip, Hamilton suggests that vampire feeding is brutal and dehumanising; the vampire is animalised as a vicious “dog,” and Phillip himself is no longer a human or animal but merely “meat.”60 As a human willing to participate in this brutal physical experience, Phillip seems to be emotionally and morally corrupted; he is an addict whose sense of morality has been eclipsed by his desire to experience the vampiric bite again. By representing vampiric feeding as addictive, and Phillip as an addict, Hamilton’s novel also suggests the continued influence of the “War on Drugs” on vampire literature of the late 1980s and early 1990s. This war was at its height in the late 1980s and early 1990s and was highly publicised by the Reagan administration during the 1980s through its “Just Say No” campaign. According to The Encyclopaedia of Drug Policy, the war on drugs in the 1980s sparked “a moral panic,” with the result that “public concern over drug use soared.” Between 1986 and 1989, the number of Americans who perceived drugs as the nation’s “number one problem” rose from 2 percent to 64 percent, a “disproportionate” anxiety arising from the “undoubtedly exaggerated” fears communicated by the Reagan administration: “during a nationally televised speech in 1986, President Reagan equated the threat to American freedom posed by drugs with the threat Nazi Germany posed in the 1940s.”61 Auerbach argues that the influence of the War on Drugs can be seen in The Lost Boys (1987). As that film’s protagonist, Michael, begins his transformation into a semivampiric state, he experiences an alternate state of consciousness. He is, Auerbach argues, “initiated into hallucinations like those of a bad drug trip.”62 More broadly, she writes, “the lost boys of 1987, dull-eyed, stunted, and pale, have become casualties of the Republicans’ war against drugs: they are so burned out that the antidrug message of official culture seems to have stifled all transformations or transforming perceptions.”63 Robert Latham echoes these views when he argues that in The Lost Boys vampirism

60 This image of the vampire as a vicious dog also resonates with the theory that the vampire in folklore can be linked to the spread of rabies. See Juan Gomez-Alonso, “Rabies: A Possible Explanation for the Vampire Legend,” Neurology 51, no. 3 (1998): 856–59. The relationship between vampires, rabies, and female sexuality is also explored in Keridiana Chez, “‘You Can’t Trust Wolves No More Nor Women’: Canines, Women, and Deceptive Docility in Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula,’” Victorian Review 38, no. 1 (2012): 77–92. 61 Mark A. Kleiman and James E. Hawdon, eds., The Encyclopedia of Drug Policy: “The War on Drugs,” Past, Present, and Future (London: Sage Publications, 2011), 532. 62 Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, 167. 63 Ibid.

125 metaphorically evokes drug addiction: the vampire gang “lures Michael into a nocturnal life of drugs.”64 Similarly, when Anita Blake describes Phillip as a “vampire junkie” (19), her negative reaction to him reflects the same moral panic surrounding drug usage in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As Aldana Reyes suggests in his analysis of vampirism, addiction, and sexuality in the television series True Blood (2008–2014), there remains today an ongoing anxiety over the interrelationship between intravenous drug use, gay sexuality, and the spread of AIDS.65 Phillip’s body, the sexualised body of a man addicted to vampiric feeding, evokes these same anxieties in the context of the early 1990s. For the audience at Guilty Pleasures, however, Phillip’s sexual appeal is precisely that his scars signify the act of vampiric feeding. They are a text that is revealed slowly as he undresses. Phillip’s scarred body as a vampire victim signifies and embodies the act of vampiric feeding. As Blake tells us: He grabbed the t-shirt with strong hands and pulled. . . . Screams from the audience. A few of them called his name. He smiled. The smile was dazzling, brilliant melt-in-your-mouth sexy. There was scar tissue on his smooth, bare chest: white scars, pinkish scars, new scars, old scars. I just sat staring with my mouth open. (15) The audience is invited to read Phillip’s scarred, bitten body as sexually appealing, which engenders conflicting feelings of fear and arousal in this series’ heroine. Anita is disgusted by his bite scars but admits that she finds him attractive. In this passage, the tension between fear and desire is so strong that it renders Anita physically immobile. Her ambivalence is suggested by her open mouth, which signals both sexual attraction and fear. Moreover, Anita’s mouth again evokes the acts of biting and feeding. Like the other members of the audience, Monica, the vampire flunky who has lured Anita to the strip club, is aroused by Phillip precisely because his scarred body signifies vampiric feeding. When Monica calls Phillip closer, she is so drawn to his scars that she attempts to simulate the sensation of a vampire bite: “She licked the newest bite scar, tongue small and pink, like a cat. . . . She bit him, mouth locking . . . Her jaws tightened, her throat worked. She was sucking the wound” (16). Of course, it is not a “wound” that Monica “sucks”: it is the scar left by a vampire bite. Her human biting and sucking here simulates the absent vampire’s bite. Although there are no vampires here,

64 Latham, Consuming Youth, 61. 65 Aldana Reyes, “Who Ordered the Hamburger with AIDS?,” 59–60.

126 there is a nonetheless sexualised vampiric feeding. By here exploring both biting and feeding without the presence of an actual vampire, the text suggests that it is the act of feeding that most deeply disturbs its heroine. When Robert, a vampire stripper, first appears in the novel, it is possible to see more clearly why this vampiric feeding sparks both fear and attraction in Blake. First, Robert’s vampiric hunger is framed as animalistic and inhuman: “The vampire looked out at the audience and hissed, fangs flashing in the lights. The hiss turned the beautiful face to something bestial” (18). Even more disturbingly for Blake, Monica responds to Robert’s bestial vampiric hunger in a way that suggests human desire is just as animalistic: she is a “cat” who licks him (16), an image that perhaps evokes the animalistic female sexuality of the classic horror film, Cat People (1942).66 Unlike the vampires of George R. R. Martin’s Fevre Dream, Hamilton’s vampires conflate hunger and sexuality. But as with Martin’s “good” vampire, Joshua, Hamilton’s heroine here refuses to be ruled by an “animal” (instinctive and nonhuman) need to feed. Second, Robert’s act of feeding drastically threatens Blake’s sense of self. When Robert feeds on Phillip as part of their stage act, he uses his powers of vampiric hypnosis to project his own emotions outward, onto the audience, making them feel what he feels: His hunger rode out over the crowd. His need so intense, it made my stomach cramp. . . . No, I would not feel this with him. I dug fingernails into the palm of my hand and concentrated. The feeling faded. Pain helped. . . . The hunger beat around me, filling the crowd, but not me, not me. (18). As shown here, Robert’s vampiric bite confuses Blake’s sense of herself as an independent human subject. By displacing Blake’s desires with his own Othered hunger, Robert transgresses the boundaries between vampire and human. If Blake can feel as a vampire feels, the vampire no longer seems so starkly Other or alien. This blurring of boundaries therefore threatens Blake’s conception of the human as morally good in opposition to the inhuman, evil Otherness of the vampire. Preferring self-inflicted pain (digging her nails into her skin) to vampiric pleasure, Blake rejects this empathetic connection: “I was apart from it, and glad” (19). She must remain “apart” from the vampire to preserve her own sense of self and her belief that vampires and humans are fundamentally “apart” in their natures.

66 Cat People, directed by Jacques Tourneur, RKO, 1942; remade as Cat People, directed by Paul Schrader, Universal/RKO, 1982.

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Monica, Phillip, and Robert together serve to highlight Anita’s opposition to the idea that she herself might hunger for and/or desire others. Monica’s actions in particular contrast with Anita’s rejection of vampiric hunger and feeding. Monica has already revealed her own desire to bite, to become vampiric, when she bites Phillip. After Robert feeds on Phillip, he next kisses Monica: “He pressed his bloody, fanged mouth to her lips. The kiss was long and deep, full of probing tongues. They were tasting each other” (19). Monica tastes Phillip’s blood on Robert’s mouth, again suggesting her desire to feed on others. By allowing Robert to place his “bloody fangs” on her here, she also signals her willingness to be bitten. This shared biting and feeding between Phillip, Monica, and Robert suggests that the vampiric bite corrupts by engendering the desire both to bite and to be bitten. In this way, the text again challenges the boundaries of what it means to either be a vampire or a human, showing that humans can be fed upon, but may also themselves desire to feed. Phillip similarly evinces a desire to be one who bites, as seen in a passage that further illustrates how the vampiric bite in the Anita Blake series intertwines contamination, sexuality, consumption, and ownership. Phillip takes Anita to a “freak party,” a gathering where vampires orgiastically feed on humans. The term “freak” is used by Hamilton as a slang term to describe those humans who willingly participate in these group feedings. She builds on the numerous connotations of freakishness, including that of a “freak of nature”; a circus or sideshow freak, who showcases physical abnormalities through performance (much as Phillip performs on stage as a scarred stripper); an addict who “freaks out”; and a sexual freak, someone who is sexually adventurous and potentially deviant. Similarly, it is “freakishness” that Linda Williams recognises as a sign of “difference” for both women and monsters.67 Hamilton thus uses this term to link the “unnatural” Otherness of the vampire to issues of species and nature, performance, addiction, physical corruption, sexuality, and immorality. At the freak party in Guilty Pleasures, freakishness is the result of a vampire contagion that destabilises the boundaries of human/Other, threatening to infect humans with vampiric Otherness. Once again, this Otherness is centred on the vampiric desire to feed. At the party, Phillip uses Blake’s undercover status to manoeuvre her into physical intimacy. He bites Anita on the neck, claiming that the “mark” he leaves will protect her from the other freaks and vampires present: “Now you’re marked. You’ve got the proof of what

67 Williams, “When the Woman Looks,” 88.

128 you are and why you came” (149). Phillip here suggests that his bite mark is evidence that Blake herself is a freak, that she is at the freak party for her own gratification. But Blake is distressed: “My neck was throbbing; a bite, a freaking bite!” (149). Blake here substitutes the word “freaking” for “fucking,” again conflating the freakishness of biting with a sexual act. She continues, “I tried to be angry and couldn’t. I was scared. Scared of Phillip and what he was, or wasn’t. . . . No more; I had had my first and last kiss from Phillip of the many scars” (149). As in the earlier scene in which Monica kisses Robert’s bloody mouth, the “kiss” here shows the deliberate conflation of feeding and eroticism in this series and again signals the characters’ willingness to bite and be bitten. Anita reacts as though Phillip’s human bite can contaminate her as successfully as a vampire bite, turning her into a “freak” and threatening her subjectivity by labelling her as his to consume. She therefore responds angrily to being “marked” as Phillip’s conquest or possession. She feels “dirty, used, abused, angry, pissed off” (151). Just as Phillip’s vampire-bite scars mark him as an object to be possessed and devoured, his bite mark on Blake similarly labels and objectifies her. This objectification is made clearer still when another freak at the party sees the bite mark and tells Anita that it is Phillip’s “trademark,” another word that implies ownership (150). Although Phillip is human, his bite clearly recalls the vampire’s bite, which evokes for Anita the threatening possibility that she will be possessed, contaminated, and (ultimately) consumed by the vampire. By absenting the vampire from these scenes, the text reveals how deeply Anita’s anxieties coalesce in the act of feeding.

Feeding as Consuming: Warner and the Question of Who Eats Whom Anita Blake’s anxieties about being owned, contaminated, and consumed also underlie the acts of true vampiric feeding that she repeatedly rejects. As a heroine in the 1990s, Anita Blake must reject the vampiric bite in order to retain her independence, agency, and feminist subjectivity. This dynamic is elegantly explained in Marina Warner’s reading of monstrous consumption in Monsters of Our Own Making, when she argues that in stories about monsters who feed on humans, “The cluster of meanings around the idea of consumption (devouring, swallowing, wolfing down, bloodsucking, to name but a few) communicates struggles about separate identity . . . and personal autonomy.”68 For

68 Marina Warner, Monsters of Our Own Making: The Peculiar Pleasures of Fear (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 15. Monsters of Our Own Making was first published as Marina Warner, No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999).

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Warner, “The act of eating represents . . . biological ownership through incorporation,” and “the commingling of bodies in the cannibal act threatens to wipe out the smaller . . . characters.”69 Furthermore, as she explains, there is a distinction between the necessary biological act of eating for nourishment and the act of consuming, which means to swallow, use up, exhaust, and destroy. To consume something means to make it disappear. To be consumed by a monster is to lose one’s identity and autonomy. Warner thus suggests that “the question is not only ‘Who eats and who gets eaten?’ but ‘Who consumes and who is consumed?’”70 By consuming blood, vampires threaten on a profound level the identity of those upon whom they feed. As shown when Robert attempts to hypnotise the crowd at Guilty Pleasures, in the Anita Blake series this “commingling of bodies” is not merely physical (vampiric teeth in a human neck, vampiric hunger mingling with sexual pleasure) but emotional and spiritual. Through their heroines, UFPR texts like this series confront the problem of what it means to maintain an autonomous female identity. The feeding vampire is a monster that can steal one’s will, one’s agency, transforming the identity of those who experience its bite into something inhuman, something Other than what they were before. For the heroine of UFPR, who has only recently broken free of the role of the victim and claimed the role of the female hero, these are dire threats. To consent to the vampire’s bite would mean giving up this newfound agency and identity and would return heroines like Anita Blake to the role of the victim. As Ananya Mukherjea argues, a yearning for the vampire lover “has to do with the contradictory and conflicted relationship that many women have to feminism and femininity and a perceived conflict between feeling protected and having the approval of visible femininity, on the one hand, and being self-determining and active, on the other.”71 As the Anita Blake series shows, UFPR brings the struggle to maintain an autonomous identity into conflict with the heroine’s yearning to pursue her own desires and appetites. For many heroines in urban fantasy, including Blake, a monstrous appetite is for both food and sex. The Anita Blake series uses monstrous eating to interrogate the fear that female sexual desire is monstrous in a patriarchal culture. As Warner argues, “monstrous eaters raise questions about the very nature of desire and our ways of

69 Warner, Monsters of Our Own Making, 56, 77. 70 Ibid., 15. 71 Ananya Mukherjea, “My Vampire Boyfriend: Postfeminism, ‘Perfect’ Masculinity, and the Contemporary Appeal of the Paranormal Romance,” Studies in Popular Culture 33, no. 2 (2011): 3.

130 expressing it: do our appetites make us monstrous?”72 In her analysis of women in horror films, Barbara Creed uses the term the “monstrous-feminine” to emphasise “the importance of gender in the construction of [female] monstrosity.”73 Creed argues that the monstrous-feminine “is defined in terms of her sexuality,” which is to say, “the difference of female sexuality as a difference which is grounded in monstrousness.”74 Furthermore, she suggests that in horror, “those images which define woman as monstrous in relation to her reproductive functions work to reinforce the phallocentric notion that female sexuality is abject.”75 Creed here follows the psychoanalytic theory of Julia Kristeva, who in Powers of Horror defines the abject as that which is “radically excluded,” that which “disturbs identity, system, order” and “does not respect borders, positions, rules.”76 As that which is abject is rejected, the borders between self and Other are reconfirmed. Female sexuality must be framed as abject, and thus is rejected, in the struggle to maintain patriarchal power. In Guilty Pleasures, as Anita Blake struggles with her competing fear of and desire for the vampiric bite, she struggles with her own (apparently monstrous) transgressive sexual desires as a woman in a patriarchal world. She fears that her female sexuality is abject, and so is the vampire who desires to bite her, the vampire she herself desires. Kristeva writes that the corpse is “the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life.”77 In this sense, the undead vampire is an abject figure. When speaking of her vampire love interest, Jean-Claude, Anita insists, “He’s dead. . . . A walking corpse. It doesn’t matter how pretty he is, or how compelling, he’s still dead. I don’t date corpses. A girl’s got to have some standards.” 78 But the vampiric corpse, which ought to be rejected, is nonetheless “pretty” and “compelling”—that is, sexually attractive—to her. Perpetuated by a living corpse and drawing human blood, the vampiric bite is also abject, transgressing the physical limits of the self and the monstrous Other as vampiric teeth penetrate the human body. If Blake were to succumb to the allure of this bite, these limits would collapse, destabilising her identity as a human subject in a world filled with monsters. And as blood “leaks” from the body, it too crosses the physical

72 Warner, Monsters of Our Own Making, 135. 73 Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, 3. 74 Ibid, 3, 2. 75 Ibid., 151. 76 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 2, 4. 77 Ibid., 4. 78 Laurell K. Hamilton, Circus of the Damned (1995; repr., New York: Jove, 2002), 292. Further references to this novel will be given parenthetically, citing the page number.

131 limits that divide the inside from the outside.79 In Kristeva’s words, blood becomes “a fascinating semantic crossroads, the propitious place for abjection, where death and femininity, murder and procreation, cessation of life and vitality all come together.”80 However, although loss of blood may lead to death, female blood, associated with the blood of the menstrual cycle, also signifies the possibility that life can be created. By spilling blood, the act of vampiric feeding, itself potentially an act of procreation, thus signifies death but also female sexuality. Eroticism is a crucial aspect of the vampire’s bite in the Anita Blake series. In conflating the vampiric bite and blood-drinking with sexual desire, Hamilton builds upon earlier vampire literature that exploits the connection between appetitive and sexual hungers.81 For example, in “Kiss Me with Those Red Lips,” Christopher Craft analyses the sexual suggestiveness of the vampiric bite in Dracula, arguing precisely that the vampire’s bite explores an “interfusion of sexual desire and the fear that the moment of erotic fulfilment may occasion the erasure of the conventional and integral self.”82 Reading Dracula in its historical context, Craft argues that Dracula’s bite refracts “a characteristic, if hyperbolic, instance of Victorian anxiety over the potential fluidity of gender roles.”83 In Hamilton’s Anita Blake series, the vampire’s bite threatens this same loss of self, evoking an anxiety about what it means to live as an independent woman in the postfeminist era. If Blake succumbs to her sexual desire for the vampire bite, she risks being consumed and thereby losing the autonomy she has achieved through her work as a female vampire slayer within a still-patriarchal society. The sexual potential implicit in the act of being “consumed” thus conflicts with the heroine’s need to remain a protagonist and refuse the role of the victim. For this reason, despite the growing prevalence of the humanised vampire in the 1990s, the vampire’s bite remains threatening to urban-fantasy heroines such as Anita Blake and Buffy Summers during that decade. The prospect of becoming hunted, of becoming prey—and worse, the prospect of desiring to become prey—are antithetical to a slayer’s

79 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 102. 80 Ibid., 96. Emphasis in original. 81 Drawing on the psychoanalytic work of Adam Phillips, Warner suggests that kissing and feeding are “oral gratifications” that may be “interchangeable at a psychic level.” She notes that there is a “potent erotic field reverberating around the word ‘consuming’ and its associated metaphors . . . and has become the particular terrain of the vampire fiction of Anne Rice and other return visits to the Dracula legend.” See Warner, Monsters of Our Own Making, 74, 140. See also Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life (London: Faber and Faber, 1993). 82 Craft, “Kiss Me with Those Red Lips,” 107. 83 Ibid., 112.

132 identity. The vampiric bite awakens the heroine to her own desire to be consumed (eaten, incorporated) and to consume, which at first seem contrary to her imperative to do moral good—to protect good humans, slay evil vampires, and thereby police the boundaries between the good human self and the evil monstrous Other.

Refusing the Vampire Bite: From Vampire Slayer to Human Servant Blake’s determination to avoid being consumed is most strongly challenged by her sexual attraction to the vampire Jean-Claude. Jean-Claude is the manager of the Guilty Pleasures strip club, a role that suggests his complicity in eroticising the vampire’s body and bite. His vampiric powers stem from his seductiveness. Like Robert, Jean-Claude can project emotion using his voice and his powers of vampiric hypnosis. When he tries to use these powers on Anita, she remarks that “his voice held things that the words didn’t even hint at. Promises whispered in darkened rooms, under cool sheets. He sucked me under, rolled my mind” (20). Jean-Claude’s hypnotic power is clearly sexual, here implanting in Anita’s mind an image of a sexual encounter in a bed. Just as Phillip manoeuvres Anita into kissing him in order to maintain her cover, Jean-Claude manoeuvres her into kissing him so that the two are able to hide from police (39–40). Jean-Claude wants to seduce Anita, and she is susceptible to his seduction. In her first account of Jean-Claude, Blake tells the reader that he “looked like a vampire was supposed to look” (11), which the text implies is a rakish aristocratic seducer, a Gothic villain from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century: “Soft curling hair tangled with the high white lace of an antique shirt. Lace spilled over pale- longer fingered hands. The shirt hung open, giving a glimpse of lean bare chest” (12). The antique clothing suggests that Jean-Claude is an aristocratic vampire, as they were first imagined centuries earlier, by, for example, John Polidori in The Vampyre (1819). In that novella, the vampire Lord Ruthven feeds upon and murders his bride on their wedding night, an act that turns the sexual consummation of their marriage into the groom’s bloody consumption of his bride. By drawing a link with this literary and historical background, Hamilton frames Jean-Claude as a seductive monster with an ulterior motive in seducing her heroine. As a vampire, Jean-Claude wants to seduce Blake in order to feed upon her. Ostensibly to save Blake from fatal injury, he forges a metaphysical bond with her by using his vampiric powers to “mark” Blake as his “human servant.” He explains the forging of the human-servant bond by telling Blake, “I shared my life-force with you”

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(45). Jean-Claude thus shares his vampiric essence with Blake, inextricably linking their identities. According to him, to become a human servant is to be given “a great gift” (45), one that extends his vampiric powers to her, thereby giving her greater stamina, greater strength, near immortality, and immunity to certain vampire powers (45)—in other words, by making her physically less human and more vampiric. As a human servant, Blake supposedly retains her agency as an individual. Another vampire explains that the role of “human servant” is different from that of the -like (or Phillip- like) character in vampire literature, a character who blindly follows vampiric commands to satisfy his own uncontrollable physical and spiritual addiction. As Jean-Claude’s human servant, Blake is not “one of those pathetic half-creatures that have a few bites and do our bidding” (45); instead, she “will serve him [Jean-Claude] out of willingness, nothing more” (46). But Blake soon discovers that far from making her immune to vampire powers, the human-servant bond actually makes her more vulnerable to psychic attacks. For example, now that she is a human servant, Blake’s free will is no longer required for Jean-Claude to feed through her, even if he does not feed on her blood. The vampire Master of the City,84 Nikolaos, reveals to Blake that Jean-Claude is already using the human-servant bond in this way: “‘Have you been eating more than usual?’ she asked. . . . ‘He is siphoning energy from you, Anita. He is feeding through your body. He should be growing weak by now, but you will keep him strong’” (211). Nikolaos makes it clear that part of being a human servant means feeding her vampire master, whether or not Anita gives consent. Blake is also susceptible to psychic attacks from Jean-Claude when she sleeps (see 86–87, 174–75, 224–25), which suggests that her unconscious is deeply troubled by her desire for, and rejection of, Jean-Claude’s bite. This suggestion is developed through dreams that foreground Blake’s deepest fear—namely, fear that the act of vampiric feeding is an act of incorporation, whereby her identity will be lost. One of Blake’s nightmares draws heavily on imagery from Bram Stoker’s Dracula in order to make this point. Nevertheless, as a postfeminist popular text, Guilty Pleasures makes subtle but significant changes to Stoker’s description of an exchange of blood between the heroine and the vampire. In Hamilton’s dream sequence, Jean-Claude forces Anita Blake to drink from a bloody wound on his chest (224–25). This scene recalls the passage in which Stoker’s Dracula forces the heroine, Mina Harker, to drink from his breast. Stoker writes that Dracula

84 Hamilton’s term for the local head-honcho vampire in a vampire community.

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held Mrs Harker’s hands, keeping them away with her arms at full tension; his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man’s bare breast. . . . The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink.”85 Like Dracula, Jean-Claude holds Anita at the wrist and the head, forcing her to drink from him: Jean-Claude transferred both my wrists to one hand, and I could not stop him. . . . His fingers tightened at the base of my skull and began to push. . . . He pressed my face closer to the wound on his chest.” (225) The similarities between these passages are obvious. Both female characters are attacked while sleeping: Mina, who is half-awake, is physically attacked; for Anita Blake, the attack occurs in a dream. In Anita’s dream, she wears “a long, white dress that had lace,” an image that evokes a Victorian-style nightgown like that worn by Mina Harker. For both characters, the white gown suggests the spiritual and sexual purity threatened by the vampire. Both heroines are overcome by force, but in Guilty Pleasures, Jean-Claude strives to make Anita complicit in the act of feeding by forcing her to undress him: “He cupped his hands over mine, holding them tight; then he ripped his shirt open using my hands” (224). The ritual words spoken by the two vampires suggest that the supernatural bond forged between the heroine and the vampire is a marriage and consummation (a suggestion reinforced by the aforementioned white gown worn by both heroines). By sharing his blood with Mina, Dracula establishes a profound connection between them. As he tells Mina: “And you, their best beloved one, are now to me, flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood; kin of my kin; my bountiful wine-press for a while; and shall be later on my companion and my helper. . . . You have aided in thwarting me; now you shall come to my call. When my brain says ‘Come!’ to you, you shall cross land or sea to do my bidding.” (252) As Jean-Claude forces Anita to drink from him, he establishes a similar connection by reciting similar words: “‘Blood of my blood, flesh of my flesh, two minds with but one

85 Stoker, Dracula, 247. Further references to this novel will be given parenthetically, citing the page number.

135 body, two souls wedded as one’” (225). Both vampires paraphrase passages from the Bible that are commonly used in marriage ceremonies. Dracula’s description of Mina as his “companion” and “helper” recalls Genesis 2:18, in which God declares he will make Eve as a “helper” for Adam. The phrases “blood of my blood” and “flesh of my flesh,” are taken from Genesis 2:24, which describes the marriage ceremony that binds Adam and Eve. In addition to Jean-Claude’s use of the word “wedded,” his claim that they are now “two minds but with one body” once again echoes Genesis 2:24 (“a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh”). By sharing his blood with Anita, even though only in a dream, Jean-Claude forges a physical and spiritual bond that, for Anita, involves a kind of double incorporation: not only does the vampire take blood and her identity into himself, but by feeding Anita his own blood, he forces her to take part of his body into hers, to incorporate his body and its essence into herself. Forever. Anita tells the reader, “For one bright, shining moment, I saw it, felt it. Eternity with Jean-Claude. His touch . . .86 forever. His lips. His blood” (225). Notwithstanding these similarities, the words spoken by Jean-Claude are different from those spoken by Dracula. For a start, they are more overtly romantic. Anita is not merely made “kin of my kin,” as Mina is. Instead she becomes part of the vampire’s very self: “two minds with but one body, two souls wedded as one,” more explicitly signifying the mingling of their two souls (225). And unlike Dracula, Jean- Claude does not render his victim merely an object for consumption, a “bountiful wine- press.” Nor does he emphasise her servitude to his will, as Dracula does when he tells Mina she must do his bidding. Further, Mina is punished by Dracula in order to injure his male rivals: she is “their best beloved one,” and as such Dracula treats her here as an object or property that can be used against them. In contrast, Jean-Claude claims that he wants Anita as his human servant for their mutual benefit. Hamilton transforms Dracula’s heroine, foregrounding the differences in the degree of agency possible for a late nineteenth-century Gothic heroine and a late twentieth-century heroine in UFPR. In Dracula, the heroes of the narrative are able to exploit the psychic connection between Mina and Dracula to track the vampire’s movements and eventually defeat him. Again, although Mina’s soul is at stake, her function at this point in the text is primarily to facilitate the heroic actions of the men who defeat the vampire for her. Her own agency as a heroine is limited. She helplessly

86 Ellipsis in original.

136 submits to Dracula, and she is described by the men who discover her as a kitten whose nose has been forced into a saucer of milk (247). But Anita rejects outright Jean- Claude’s offer to incorporate her identity into his own, to marry their souls. She actively resists: “I hit at him,” she narrates. “I dropped to a sitting position, forcing him to strangle me or lower me to the ground. . . . I kicked out with everything I had” (225). As a twenty-first-century action heroine, Anita has the power to fight back against the vampire. In rejecting Jean-Claude’s offer of vampiric marriage, Anita Blake recalls the stance of second wave feminism, which dismissed the institution of marriage as a patriarchal institution designed to control women. For example, in The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan argued that by conforming to the role of wife, mother, and housewife, women “forfeited their own existence,” succumbing so completely to the gendered role demanded of them that they lost their subjectivity and their agency.87 Similarly, Kate Millet argued in Sexual Politics that “patriarchal marriage and the family with its ranks and divisions of labour” work toward “the interiorisation of patriarchal ideology.” This ideology relegates women to an “inferior” “economic position” and stigmatises female sexuality, while simultaneously reducing women to sexual objects. 88 In The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer also rejected marriage, as a “middle-class myth” of the patriarchal institution.89 Like these second wave feminists, Anita Blake refuses to be bound by a marriage that limits her to the role of wife, “helper,” and “servant.” When Jean-Claude attempts to make Anita his human servant, he dramatically challenges her identity as a feminist vampire-slaying heroine. A servant, by definition, is one who serves, who is inferior, who has less power than the “master.” The label “human servant” yokes Blake’s “human” identity the word it qualifies, “servant.” She is now expected to be subservient to Jean-Claude, and in the vampire community, she is thought to be his property. In The Laughing Corpse, Jean-Claude tells her, “You are mine, Anita. Willing or not, you are mine” (179). When she is made a human servant, Blake’s identity is as a vampire slayer is undermined: If she is a servant to a vampire master, how can she remain “the Executioner,” a legal vampire slayer whom the vampires fear? As a human servant, Blake is instead positioned as a female human who is objectified and victimized by

87 Betty Friedan, The Feminist Mystique (1963; repr., New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013), 375. 88 Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (1969; repr., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 54. 89 Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1970), 198–218.

137 vampires. Her fear that she will lose her identity in succumbing to a vampire’s seductive bite is thus realised. It’s no wonder that Blake insists, “‘I don’t want to be anyone’s servant’” (Guilty Pleasures, 211).

The Supernatural Sexual Politics of Meat Friedan’s argument that the housewife is denied the position of a fully human subject is explicitly humanist. She argues that those limited by role of the housewife “have lost the unique mark of the human being”: the “unique human capacity . . . to live not at the mercy of the world, but as a builder and designer of that world—that is the distinction between human and animal behaviour, or between the human being and the machine.”90 In drawing these Cartesian oppositions between the human and the animal, and the human and the machine, Friedan assumes that if women are to be full human subjects, they must define themselves against these forms of Otherness. In rejecting vampiric feeding, Blake is similarly refusing to be treated as an animal and as food.91 Carol J. Adams’s The Sexual Politics of Meat provides a useful feminist framework to consider both Anita’s fear of being consumed as food by male monsters and the relationship between femaleness and monstrosity. Adams seeks to “situate the production of meat’s meaning within a political-cultural context.”92 She argues that the contemporary cultural understanding of meat-eating “recurs within a fixed gender system; the coherence it achieves as a meaningful item of food arises from patriarchal attitudes, including the idea that the end justifies the means, that the objectification of other beings is a necessary part of life, and that violence can and should be masked.”93 As such, patriarchal gender conventions promote meat-eating as “a symbol and celebration of male dominance” over both species and gender: “gender inequality is built into the species inequality that meat eating proclaims.”94 Adams’s work is notable for its account of the way that representations of meat in media, advertising, and contemporary culture render certain referents “absent.” Drawing on linguistics and semiotic theory, Adams argues that if we can understand

90 Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 376. 91 As Adams and Donovan summarise, “Historically, the ideological justification for women’s alleged inferiority has been by appropriating them to animals.” See Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan, “Introduction,” in Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations, eds. Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 1. 92 Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (New York: Continuum, 2010), 26. 93 Ibid., 27. 94 Ibid., 58.

138 how referents are made absent, we can read how cultural practices make invisible the processes by which we oppress, exclude, and render invisible the Other. She argues that “animals are made absent through language that renames dead bodies before consumers participate in eating them,” and that this occurs in three ways.95 First, because the entities that we eat “are literally absent because they are dead.” Second, “when we eat animals we change the way we talk about them. . . . The word meat has an absent referent, the dead animals.”96 The third way animals are made absent is “metaphorical”: animals become absent referents when they “become metaphors for describing people’s experiences,” such as, for example, “when rape victims or battered women say, ‘I felt like a piece of meat.’”97 According to Adams, “sexual violence and meat-eating, which appear to be discrete forms of violence, find a point of intersection in the absent referent. Cultural images of sexual violence, and actual sexual violence, often rely on our knowledge of how animals are butchered and eaten.”98 This metaphor can also function in the opposite direction: “in images of animal slaughter, erotic overtones suggest that women are the absent referent.” Adams argues that “the structure of the absent referent in patriarchal culture strengthens individual oppressions by always recalling other oppressed groups.” 99 Meat-eating and sexual violence are thus “intertwined oppressions” that promote continued patriarchal dominance over both women and animals.100 When paired with Warner’s questions about “who consumes and who is consumed,” Adams’s feminist vegetarian theory illuminates the anxiety framing Anita Blake’s aversion to vampiric feeding. As I have noted, Anita rejects the vampiric bite because she fears that if she allows herself to be consumed, she will lose her independence as a heroine. But we can now add to this claim, following Adams, that the “erotic overtones” of vampiric feeding mask the process of objectification, consumption, and incorporation that occurs when a male vampire consumes a human female as though she were an animal, or worse, as though she were merely meat and blood.101

95 Ibid., 66. 96 Ibid., 66–67. 97 Ibid., 67. 98 Ibid., 68. 99 Ibid., 69. 100 Ibid., 71. 101 Adams also links the violence done to objectified animal Others in a patriarchal, meat-eating culture with the violence done to objected racial Others (e.g. 52–55, 70). As discussed in chapter

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Adams’s politicised account of the absent referent also complicates how we read Hamilton’s vampire strippers. I have already suggested that as a vampire victim, Phillip’s bite-scarred body evokes the absent bodies of the vampires who have marked him. And through their own human acts of biting, Phillip and Monica again evoke vampiric biting. Though human, these characters express the subversive hungers of the vampire. In doing so, they imply that it is not necessarily the vampire itself that Anita fears but the primal appetitive and sexual hungers that the vampire feels. Of course, Phillip and the vampire strippers also function as referents for the absent, objectified female body. Although stripping in its current form developed from the female burlesque of the late nineteenth century, the male strippers made famous by brands like Chippendales became popular only in the 1980s and 1990s. Hamilton’s stripping vampires, appearing in the early 1990s, echo this (then) new phenomenon. Like the human strippers at Chippendales, Hamilton’s vampire strippers performatively reinforce their role as male sexual aggressors, glorifying the muscular male body in order to profit from an audience of female consumers. However, Hamilton’s vampires are nonetheless positioned (like female bodies) as Othered bodies to be objectified by the dominant human society. There has been much critical debate over whether striptease can potentially be a transgressive, performative experience for women or whether it is an objectifying and exploitative practice.102 Controversial radical feminist Sheila Jeffreys argues that female striptease “is most prevalent, historically, in societies in which women were very much second class citizens,” suggesting that female strippers have historically had little control over how their actions are perceived ideologically or profited from economically.103 The vampires in Hamilton’s series are indeed judged as “second-class citizens.” For example, though vampires are citizens in Hamilton’s fictional United States, in The Laughing Corpse it is made clear that they do not have the rights of full citizenship, for example, the right to vote: “There was even a movement to give the vamps the vote. Taxation without representation and all that” (11). Furthermore, vampire businesses in

2, George R. R. Martin’s Fevre Dream also uses the act of vampiric feeding to foreground this connection. 102 For a radical feminist history of the strip club, see Sheila Jeffreys, chapter 4, “The Strip Club Boom,” in The Industrial Vagina: The Political Economy of Global Sex Trade (London: Routledge, 2009). For a more sex-positive and postfeminist account of striptease in the 1990s, see Katherine Liepe-Levinson, Strip Show: Performances of Gender and Desire (New York: Routledge, 2002). For a sex-positive analysis of neoburlesque striptease and performativity, see Sherril Dodds, Dancing on the Canon: Embodiments of Value in Popular Dance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 105–35. 103 Jeffreys, The Industrial Vagina, 86.

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Hamilton’s fictional version of St. Louis are segregated from human businesses. Guilty Pleasures lies in an area euphemistically titled “the District” or “Blood Square,” a red light district on the St. Louis waterfront designated as the city’s vampire business district (Guilty Pleasures, 10). This segregation refracts St. Louis’s fraught history of racial segregation and the ongoing struggles with racial discrimination in the United States more broadly. The systemic inequality that leads to segregation is highlighted in Burnt Offerings (1998), the seventh Anita Blake novel, where a vampire bar outside the vampire district is the scene of an altercation.104 In this passage, a human girl attempts to frame a vampire for biting her without consent. As a consulting vampire expert, Anita unhappily informs the police that “there’s some hardcore opposition to a vampire business outside the vampire district. There’s a petition and some sort of city meeting scheduled. Ms. Pierce will make a great witness to the dangers of vampires being outside the district” (174). Burnt Offerings suggests that humans who reject the idea that vampires have the right to live among them as full citizens actively and violently advocate for segregation. Despite the fact that her vampires’ supernatural and biological powers threaten to dominate the humans they encounter, Hamilton positions her vampires socially as a racialised, sexualised, and feminised minority of second-class citizens. By establishing her vampires as second-class citizens, Hamilton suggests those of them who become strippers are forced to make use of their supernatural talents—their ability to hypnotise and seduce others, their supernatural eroticism and good looks, and the erotic associations of the vampiric bite—in order to survive economically. In doing so, she places her vampires in a position similar to that of women forced to sell their bodies as commodities.105 Hamilton strengthens this association by repeatedly giving physical descriptions that feminise her vampires. For example, in Guilty Pleasures Jean- Claude is repeatedly described as “beautiful,” an adjective associated with women, rather

104 Laurell K. Hamilton, Burnt Offerings (1998; repr., New York: Jove, 2002). Further references to this novel will be given parenthetically, citing the page number. 105 This reading is further supported by later novels in the series. For example, in Incubus Dreams (2004), Hamilton draws several parallels between the gender-based prejudice experienced by women, who are sexually objectified, and the prejudice experienced by the vampires and shapeshifters in her world, who are dehumanised. In that novel, a serial killer targets strippers as his victims, a plot premise that itself suggests how those who are treated as sexual objects may be considered disposable commodities. Blake arrives at a strip-club crime scene to investigate, only to be mistaken for a stripper and thus experience sexual harassment (386). She later visits another strip club accompanied by the wereleopard Micah, and this time the police question him, presuming that he is a male stripper because of his feminised, lycanthropic body (665–67). In both scenes, the male authority figures of the police are derisive and antagonistic toward those they view as Other.

141 than “handsome,” an adjective associated with men (36, 45, 46).106 Combined with this oppressed social position, feminising descriptions of vampires like Jean-Claude strongly suggest that Hamilton’s vampires, while threatening to consume her heroine, may also act as a referent for the absent female body. By focusing on the sexual appeal of a vampire whose body is literally put on display for a female audience, Hamilton distracts from and yet evokes contemporary issues centred on female sexuality and the objectification of the sexualised female body. What is the effect of feminising the vampire and of reading the vampire as referent for absent women? Hamilton again establishes monstrous Otherness, monstrous difference, as an experience shared by her heroine and her supernaturally monstrous characters. If, as Williams suggests, the heroine in the horror text looks at the monster and recognises her own socially constructed Otherness as a woman, when Anita sees vampire victims and vampires performing together on stage in a strip club, she is offered the opportunity to connect the vampiric experience as a second-class, monstrously Othered and yet sexualised citizen to her own experience as a second-class, sexualised, female Other in patriarchal society. Though Hamilton’s sexualised vampire strippers pose a seductive threat to Anita, they also act as a means of exploring her own sexual desires. Their physical appeal as idealised male bodies, literally on display for her enjoyment, foregrounds Anita’s awareness of her own sexual desire for the supernatural male body. At the same time, the physical role played by the vampire stripper provokes an awareness of the dangers and stigmas of overt female sexuality in a culture that objectifies and commoditises the female body and female desire. Hamilton’s series thus uses the apparently humorous novelty of a vampire strip club to explore in a complex way the social stigmas associated with female desire. Through her vampire strippers, Hamilton tests the limits of gendered, monstrous identification by intertwining the sexual objectification and consumption of the female body with the act of vampiric feeding.

106 This recurs throughout the series, for example in The Laughing Corpse, 110, 111, and 177, and in Circus of the Damned, 240. Jean-Claude’s clothing often is also feminising, for example, the aforementioned lace shirt he wears in Guilty Pleasures (12), and the white night gown with lace trim that he wears in Circus of the Damned, which prompts Anita to ask, “How could any man wear a white lace gown and not look silly?” (197).

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Moving Toward Intersectional Solidarity with Vampires Hamilton’s complex representations of vampirism suggest the vampire’s potential as a figure for hybridity and for plural forms of Otherness. Her representation of her heroine, Anita Blake, suggests that the transition from second wave to post- and third wave feminism is an ongoing process of negotiation between kinds of feminism, not a straightforward and linear development. For example, Blake’s rejection of the human- servant bond parallels second wave feminist attitudes toward heterosexual marriage (such as those held by Betty Friedan). However, she is also challenged by a more recent, third wave feminist perspective that asks this heroine to recognise how her own marginalisation as a woman in patriarchal culture aligns her with other forms of Others: the racial Other, the queer Other, the monstrous Other. In this sense, Anita Blake also engages with the contemporary and emerging movement toward intersectionality in the feminism of the 1990s. Kimberlé Crenshaw first used the term “intersectionality” in her 1989 essay on black feminism, “in order to contrast the multidimensionality of Black women’s experience with the single-axis analysis that distorts these experiences.”107 The single theoretical axis to which Crenshaw refers places women in opposition to men or race in opposition to whiteness. Instead, Crenshaw emphasises how gender and race intersect in the marginalisation of those without privilege. As Lutz, Vivar, and Supik have more recently noted, following Crenshaw, the focus on this intersectionality between race and gender in black women’s feminism made it “possible for the first time to speak of the simultaneity and mutual co-constitution of different categories of social differentiation and to emphasise the specificity of the experiences shaped by these interactions.”108 Intersectional feminism acknowledges the structures of power that operate simultaneously to marginalise various forms of social Otherness. Hamilton’s Anita Blake at first rejects the vampiric Other and its bite. However, this chapter has suggested that the intersectional alignment between her gendered self and the monstrous vampire plays a crucial role in the way that Blake renegotiates her

107 Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989): 139. 108 Helma Lutz, Maria Teresa Herrera Vivar, and Linda Supik, eds., Framing Intersectionality: Debates on a Multi-faceted Concept in Gender Studies (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011), 2. For more on intersectionality and feminism, see Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Colour,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–99; and Leslie McCall, “The Complexity of Intersectionality,” Signs 30, no. 3 (2005): 1171– 1800.

143 feminist identity. This is suggested by Blake’s own position as an outsider. As a biracial (half-Hispanic) woman, Blake is a minority within the dominant white patriarchal culture in the United States. Through her toughness, Blake challenges the patriarchy’s conceptions of traditional femininity that discourage violent action by women, yet this often has the effect of further positioning her as abnormal for her gender. Most importantly, Blake recognises that her Otherness as a woman in patriarchal culture is similar to the Otherness of the monster within human society. And as a necromancer, Blake is also partly monstrous herself. Her new status as a human servant further confirms Blake’s own supernatural monstrosity. That Blake is able to identify with monstrous outsiders such as vampires is further suggested by her discomfort with male (vampire) strippers in Guilty Pleasures. And though these vampire strippers consume human blood, they, in turn, are consumed by the human audiences who commoditise their sexuality. Guilty Pleasures suggests that Blake rejects the vampiric bite and the sexual appeal of the vampire because her gender and sexuality as a heterosexual woman make her vulnerable to consumption. In the early 1990s, Anita Blake and her fellow UFPR heroines (such as Buffy Summers) begin their adventures convinced that they must kill monsters in order to fight evil and protect the normative values of human society. But Anita Blake holds very different attitudes toward vampiric feeding at different points in the overarching narrative of Hamilton’s series. As part of a complex fictional world developed through a series of novels over more than twenty years, Hamilton’s characters must change and develop with their historical context. Anita’s changing attitudes toward vampiric feeding in the 1990s and after the year 2000 are representative of the character trajectories of many of the heroines in UFPR fiction in these periods. Hamilton’s protagonist is thus a key figure for analysing these shifts in attitudes and their broader significance in both vampire literature and popular culture. Anita begins in the 1990s as a heroine who rejects vampires as evil because vampiric feeding threatens to rob her of her feminist agency. However, as Hamilton’s series develops over time, Anita’s own evolving identity allows her to reconsider her attitude toward monstrous feeding. As the subsequent chapters will show, though Blake initially fears being consumed by the vampire’s bite, in more recent novels in Hamilton’s series, she comes to embrace Otherness and revel in the act of feeding. Eventually, Anita Blake becomes a living vampire. And when this occurs, she progresses from an

144 antimonster narrator who identifies as human to a supernatural narrator who embraces her own Otherness and her own posthuman identity. Before we can analyse this posthuman identity in the second part of this thesis, it is helpful to develop the theoretical frame through which we consider the posthumanity of the vampire. Chapter 5 thus elaborates on what it means to read the vampire as posthuman. In doing so, it considers how, since 2000, the posthuman vampire has developed not only in urban fantasy and paranormal romance but in another emergent subgenre of vampire literature, the post-apocalyptic vampire narrative.

PART TWO

CHAPTER FIVE

The Vampire as Posthuman: A Theoretical Framework

Vampires in the Twenty-First Century: The Emergence of the Post- Apocalyptic Vampire Narrative From the late 1990s onward, the questions posed by vampire literature mark the shift from a predominantly humanised and humanist vampire to new forms of posthuman vampires. In the new millennium, in tandem with this shift, two popular variants of vampire literature have become prevalent. Since the year 2000, the urban fantasy and paranormal romance (UFPR) genre has experienced an enormous increase in popularity, becoming the prevailing mode of vampire literature and more generally. Nevertheless, a study of how the vampire has developed in this period must also acknowledge that from approximately 2005 onward, another popular new form of vampire narrative also emerged: the post-apocalyptic vampire narrative (PAVN).1 Both of these forms of vampire literature interrogate and respond to anxieties raised by the posthuman; by developments in the feminist movement and in feminist posthumanism; as well as by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the ensuing military tensions of the post-9/11 era. However, UFPR and PAVNs respond to these anxieties in dramatically different ways. Perhaps most interestingly, post-apocalyptic vampire narratives also emerge in part as a critical response to the popularity of the posthuman vampire found in urban fantasy and paranormal romance. This chapter will explore the relation between these two contrary forms of popular vampire literature. It will also outline the posthumanist theory that, I argue, provides a useful framework in an account of how both UFPR and PAVNs explore anxieties about ethical interactions between the self and the Other in a posthuman world. In making this argument, I draw in particular on the work of Donna Haraway,

1 The term “post-apocalyptic vampire literature” is used in the thesis to describe texts that explore an ongoing apocalyptic event caused by vampirism as well as texts that explore the immediate or long-term aftermath (that is, the “post-”) of an apocalyptic event or cataclysmic shift, which may result in a dystopian future for humans.

147 148 which considers posthumanist Otherness from technological and biological (species- oriented) perspectives. This chapter thus establishes a framework that I will use to analyse the vampires of UFPR in chapter 6. It also establishes the platform from which I argue, in chapter 7, that PAVNs not only refract the same cultural anxieties as UFPR but refract them through an intertextual play with UFPR that contests and rejects that genre’s form of posthuman vampire. The shift from a predominantly humanised vampire to a new kind of posthuman vampire in UFPR comes at a time in the late 1990s and early 2000s when new questions were emerging about the relationship between the human self and Other. In this era, representations of the posthuman vampire are used to explore an ongoing “qualitative shift” in what it means to be human, or posthuman, a shift that Rosi Braidotti cites as a key feature of the posthuman condition.2 Haraway explicitly links the vampire, the human, and posthuman bioethics in her essay, “Universal Donors in a Vampire Culture.”3 More broadly, scholars including Margaret L. Carter, Allucquère Roseanne Stone, Rob Latham, William Patrick Day, Stacey Abbott, and Jeffrey Weinstock have previously read the vampire as a posthuman entity.4 By foregrounding and contesting the boundaries between humans and other species, between human society and the environment, and between human beings and technology, vampires emphasise the constructedness of the human. Moreover, they destabilise our conceptions of what it means to be human by representing the human, the animal, the technological, and the supernatural as interrelated, hybridised, and mutually constitutive in the posthuman world. Vampires thus ask us to consider both the possibilities and the dangers of a posthuman future in which advanced technologies and magics may even more dramatically challenge what it means to be human. Both UFPR and PAVNs are set in fictional worlds that are in many ways dystopian. Contemporary dystopian fiction often focuses on world run by a totalitarian regime that controls politics and economics, to the detriment of ordinary citizens. While

2 Braidotti, The Posthuman, 1–2. 3 Donna J. Haraway, “Race: Universal Donors in a Vampire Culture. It’s All in the Family: Biological Kinship Categories in the Twentieth-Century United States,” in The Haraway Reader, ed. Donna J. Haraway (New York: Routledge, 2004), 251–94. 4 See Carter, “The Vampire as Alien in Contemporary Fiction” and “Vampire-Human Symbiosis in Fevre Dream and The Empire of Fear.” Carter’s theoretical approach is not explicitly posthumanist; however, her readings of the vampire in these essays take a biological and technological focus that is typical in posthumanist criticism. See also: Roseanne Allucquère Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995); Latham, Consuming Youth; Day, Vampire Legends; Abbott, Celluloid Vampires; Abbott, Undead Apocalypse; and Jeffrey Weinstock, The Vampire Film.

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PAVNs may be dystopian in this sense (the totalitarian regime in question being a vampire regime), UFPR generally is not. However, UFPR often borders on the dystopian in the rather more simple and literal sense of suggesting a “bad place.” Its speculative worlds offer alternative realities in which society has become drastically altered by the introduction of supernatural monsters. These alternative realities, in which monsters are real, are often nightmarishly violent and gory, even in paranormal romance series. Worlds in UFPR are often post-cataclysmic, which is to say that they are frequently the result of a dramatic social shift that has not destroyed human society (as in a PAVN) but that nonetheless has drastically altered it. For example, Hamilton’s Anita Blake series (1993–) is set in a world where a landmark court ruling has determined that vampires are legal citizens of the United States, which in turn has encouraged them and other monsters to emerge from the fringes of society and to seek to enter its mainstream. Similarly, Kim Harrison’s Hollows series (2004–) follows protagonist Rachel Morgan, a witch living in Cincinnati after “the Turn,” a cataclysmic event brought about by genetic engineering gone awry. Consequently, witches, vampires, and other supernatural creatures emerge from hiding to become figures of mainstream society.5 And to cite another example, Ilona Andrews’s Kate Daniels series (2007–) is set in a version of Atlanta that is “post-Shift.” In this fictional world, human society shifts every thousand years between “tech” (technology) and magic. Andrews’s heroine lives in a world dealing with “post-Shift resonance,” an ongoing oscillation between periods when technology functions and those when a magical energy prevents technology from functioning. All of these worlds offer dark and gritty alternative visions of our own contemporary world or its near future. The heroines who inhabit them must solve mysterious events, all the while engaging in violent action and studying horrifically detailed crime scenes. In these worlds, vampires and other monsters are represented as community groups that struggle to coexist alongside humans.6

5 Harrison explores the events of the Turn in depth in her series prequel, The Turn (New York: Gallery Books, 2017). 6 Examples of post-cataclysmic, dystopian, and/or everyday-supernatural worlds in film also include the films The Breed (a low-budget film directed by Michael Oblowitz, Sony Pictures, 2001) and Daybreakers (directed by Michael and Peter Spirit, Lionsgate, 2009). Arguably, the Underworld film franchise, which began in 2003 with Underworld, now also fits this model. As the title suggests, this series began by representing vampires and werewolves as part of a secret “underworld” society, as was common in the UFPR series of the 1990s. However, the fourth

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The role of the vampire is dramatically different in the PAVN, which rejects the possibility that humans and Others can peacefully coexist. As with UFPR, there have been few previous attempts to identify the significance of this new narrative trend in vampire literature.7 The following brief history of post-apocalyptic vampire narratives addresses this critical gap, as part of my attempt to outline and analyse significant new developments in vampire literature from the 1990s to the present. Though it has been partially eclipsed by the popularity of UFPR, the PAVN has nonetheless emerged since 2005 as a distinct new trend in vampire literature. Examples of the PAVN include films such as I Am Legend (2007), Daybreakers (2009), Stake Land (2010), and Priest (2011); young adult novels such as Emily McKay’s Farm trilogy (2012– 2014); Julie Kagawa’s The Immortal Rules (2012), and ’s The Coldest Girl in Cold Town (2013); novels including Justin Cronin’s Passage trilogy (2010–2016) and Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s Strain trilogy (2009–2011); the television adaptation of Hogan and del Toro’s trilogy, The Strain (2014–); and television series Van Helsing (2016– ).8 Unlike UFPR, PAVNs do not explore how humans might coexist with the monstrous Other. Instead they typically show how swift-spreading vampirism threatens to devastate, or in some cases has already devastated, the human world. In these narratives, the disintegration of the boundary between the human and the vampiric Other results in the disintegration of human society. Vampires must therefore be overcome if humanity is to be saved. Though some series follow a heroine or an ensemble of protagonists,9 the plot in those narratives aimed at an adult audience is most often led by male characters who, with a small group of survivors, fight vampires in order to save humankind. In many respects, PAVNs offer a mirror image of the narrative trajectories of UFPR: in PAVNs, the (usually male) protagonist fights to film in this franchise, Underworld: Awakening (directed by Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein, Sony Pictures, 2012) moved to an everyday-supernatural model. 7 One very recent study that also identifies this trend, and analyses it in greater depth than the scope of this thesis allows, is Abbott’s Undead Apocalypse. 8 I Am Legend, directed by Francis Lawrence, Warner Bros Pictures, 2007; Stake Land, directed by Jim Mickle, Dark Sky Films, 2010; Priest, directed by Scott Stewart, Screen Gems, 2011; Emily McKay, the Farm trilogy, 3 novels (2012–2014); Julie Kagawa, The Immortal Rules (New York: Harlequin Teen, 2012); Holly Black, The Coldest Girl in Cold Town (New York: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2013); Justin Cronin, the Passage trilogy, 3 novels, (2010–2016); Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, the Strain trilogy, 3 novels, (2009–2011); The Strain, created by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, FX Productions, 2014–2017; Van Helsing, created by Neil LaBute, Syfy, 2016–. 9 For example, female protagonists are found in McKay’s, Kagawa’s, and Black’s abovementioned YA novels and the television series Van Helsing.

151 eradicate vampires and save human society; in UFPR, the (usually female) protagonist fights to maintain the peace between vampires, humans, and other monsters, facilitating the coexistence of humans and monstrous Others within a posthuman society. Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954) is the first text to represent an apocalyptic event caused by vampirism, and is likely to have been the earliest text to frame vampirism as a purely biological (and not supernatural) infection. Matheson’s protagonist, Robert Neville, believes himself to be the last man on earth, the only survivor of a pandemic that has turned humans into vampires, which he struggles to understand scientifically. Neville believes vampirism to be the result of a bacterial infection, and he therefore attributes folkloric aspects of the infection (such the vampire’s aversions to garlic and sunlight) to mass hysteria. After three years of exterminating vampires, Neville discovers that the infected masses have begun to evolve and are forming a new vampiric society. I Am Legend concludes as Neville realises that he, as the sole uninfected human in this new society, has now become the monstrous Other. The novella has been adapted to film several times, first as The Last Man On Earth (1964), starring horror alumnus Vincent Price; next as The Omega Man (1971), featuring Charlton Heston, who had also recently starred as the last man on a post-apocalyptic earth in Planet of the Apes (1968); and most recently the film also titled I Am Legend (2007), starring Will Smith.10 Three of the innovations found in Matheson’s text have powerfully influenced later vampire literature. First, the emphasis on the biological nature of the vampire is further developed in later twentieth-century vampire literature (as we have seen in the analysis of Martin’s Fevre Dream in chapter 2) and in the vampire literature of the new millennium. Second, in the twenty-first century, the representation of a vampiric society is explored in both UFPR and PAVNs. And third, Matheson’s innovative exploration of his protagonist’s ethical uncertainty—that human acts may also be monstrous—is further explored in much UFPR. However, with the exception of Matheson’s novella, the PAVN did not gain wide popularity in the later twentieth century. Instead, its collocation of a man-eating monster and apocalyptic social collapse were adopted by the zombie narrative. Matheson’s novel directly influenced George A. Romero, the creator of the seminal

10 The Last Man on Earth, directed by Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow, 20th Century Fox, 1964; The Omega Man, directed by Boris Sagal, Warner Bros, 1971; Planet of the Apes, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, 20th Century Fox, 1968.

152 zombie film Night of the Living Dead (1968).11 As Deborah Christie notes in “A Dead New World,” “In interview after interview, Romero maintains that he was especially interested in Matheson’s representation of one civilization replacing another . . . of ‘a new society coming in and devouring the old.’” 12 Romero is often cited as the progenitor of post-apocalyptic zombie films in which a mindless, devouring hoard of the undead feed upon the living, in the process destroying human society. Like Matheson’s vampire narrative, Romero’s zombie stories reverse the social order: the monstrous Other becomes the norm and the human self becomes the minority under threat. Zombies remained popular in post-apocalyptic horror throughout the later twentieth century, but in the new millennium, the zombie narrative has experienced a marked resurgence, at the same time that interest in the post-apocalyptic vampire has emerged.13 Stacey Abbott writes of the “re-invention of the cinematic zombie” or “the cinematic rising of the zombie” in the new millennium and argues that in this era, the zombie film went from cult horror genre to “mainstream media.” 14 The current popularity of the post-apocalyptic narrative in vampire literature may in part be explained by the marketable nature of a zombie-vampire hybrid narrative at a time when zombie narratives are extremely profitable.15 I suggested in chapter 3 that the success of

11 Night of the Living Dead, directed by George A. Romero, Image Ten, 1968. 12 Deborah Christie quoting George A. Romero in “A Dead New World: Richard Matheson and the Modern Zombie,” in Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Posthuman, edited by Deborah Christie and Sarah Juliet Lauro (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 67. Christie also makes an interesting argument that the zombie is a posthuman entity because it troubles the division between the dead and the living. An analysis of the zombie as posthuman is explored throughout the edited collection in which her essay appears. 13 Notable recent examples and parodies of the zombie genre include the Resident Evil film franchise, 6 films, Screen Gems, 2002–2016; 28 Days Later, directed by Danny Boyle, Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2003; its sequel 28 Weeks Later, directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 20th Century Fox, 2007; Shaun of the Dead, directed by Edgar Wright, Working Title, 2004; a number of sequels and remakes based on the zombie films of George A. Romero (including Dawn of the Dead, directed by Zack Snyder, Strike Entertainment, 2004; Land of the Dead, directed by George A. Romero, Atmosphere Entertainment MM, 2005; Diary of the Dead, directed by George A. Romero, the Weinstein Company, 2007; Day of the Dead, directed by Steve Minor, First Look Studios, 2008); the zombie-sheep film Black Sheep, directed by Jonathan King, New Zealand Film Commission, 2006; Planet Terror, directed by Robert Roderiguez, Dimension Films, 2007; Zombie Strippers, directed by Jay Lee, Triumph Films, 2008; Dead Snow, directed by Tommy Wirkola, Euforia Film, 2009; Zombieland, directed by Ruben Fleischer, Columbia Pictures, 2009; World War Z, directed by Marc Forster, Paramount Pictures, 2013; paranormal romance Warm Bodies, directed by Jonathan Levine, Lionsgate, 2013; television series The Walking Dead, created by Frank Darabont, AMC Studios, 2010–; and urban-fantasy TV series iZombie, created by Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero-Wright, the CW, 2015–. 14 Abbott, Undead Apocalypse, 64, 68. 15 Victoria Nelson also notes the many similarities between zombies and vampires in contemporary post-apocalyptic narratives, even suggesting the hybrid term “zampire” in

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UFPR is in part owing to its marketability as a hybrid genre. Similarly, from 2005 onward, PAVNs have borrowed tropes from the zombie narrative, exploiting a cross- over popularity for zombies and vampires in twenty-first-century popular fiction and blockbuster films. The PAVN and the zombie narrative share key tropes. As Abbott has recently argued, “in the twenty-first century, the vampire and zombie are increasingly integrated and intertwined,” with a clear “relationship and increasing influence on each other.”16 Both post-apocalyptic vampires and zombies are the monstrous undead, or living dead, who feed on humans. In post-apocalyptic vampire and zombie narratives, this act of feeding spreads the supernatural condition, which spreads so quickly that it causes human society to disintegrate. This usually results in a post-apocalyptic future where humans become vulnerable prey, struggling to survive. Post-apocalyptic vampire and zombie narratives also draw on the tropes of the Frankenstein story, named after Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel in which scientist and scholar Victor Frankenstein deploys his discoveries in chemistry and alchemy to create life. As is well known, he creates “the Monster,” a not-quite-human creature made from dead body parts, who turns against him, seeking to destroy everything Victor holds dear. 17 Contemporary Frankensteinian narratives follow in Shelley’s footsteps by exploring the potentially disastrous consequences that follow from the use of advanced science and technologies (particularly biotechnologies) to meddle with human life.18 For example, in McKay’s The Farm, vampires are created when scientific experimentation goes awry. In the 2007 version of I Am Legend, vampirism is caused by a genetically engineered virus that was originally designed to cure cancer. And in Cronin’s The Passage, military experimentation on human genetics creates a vampire virus. In all of these texts, biotechnological innovation has unintended and disastrous consequences for humankind. Further, both post-apocalyptic vampire and zombie narratives refract concerns about the boundaries between humans and nonhuman animal species. Vampires in post-

Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 154. 16 Abbott, Undead Apocalypse, 4. Notably, Abbott’s study considers not only how vampires in post-apocalyptic fiction are influenced by constructions of the zombie but how these zombies also are influenced by vampires, a question outside the scope of this thesis. 17 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: A Norton Critical Edition, edited by Paul Hunter (1818; repr., New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012). 18 Nelson also notes the recurring use of the virus and “scientific mistake” as causes for monstrous mutations in these texts. Nelson, Gothicka, 152.

154 apocalyptic narratives transgress the species boundaries between the human and the animal Other with horrific consequences. In addition to biotechnical challenges to the limits of human biology, those who become vampires in post-apocalyptic narratives such as I Am Legend, Stake Land, The Passage, and The Strain degenerate into amoral, animalistic monsters that are driven by instinct. Abbott notes that not only are these vampires monsters who “cannot pass for human,” but that they also “often lose their ability to communicate, restricted to feral snarls and growls,”19 which further suggests an atavistic descent. Vampiric infection also frequently transgresses the boundary between human and animal, relying on animals to carry disease from one species to another. For example, in The Strain the vampiric infection is transmitted by a parasite carrying a virus, and in Daybreakers vampirism results from a vampire-bat plague that has infected humans. In this sense, PAVNs refract contemporary anxieties about global pandemic scares such as HIV, rabies, bird flu, swine flu, and ebola,20 all of which have been linked to the transmission of viruses from animals to the human species. Finally, in twenty-first-century zombie and post-apocalyptic vampire narratives, transgressions of the boundary between the human and the monstrous Other also evoke the specific contemporary sociocultural anxieties of the post-9/11 era. In Undead Apocalypse, Stacey Abbott identifies the September 11 attacks as “an apocalyptic moment through which so much of our twenty-first century experience has been shaped.”21 Like the zombie narrative, apocalyptic vampire narratives use the vampire to suggest that violent clashes result when the boundaries disintegrate between self and Other. In these narratives, this boundary is often figured as one between citizen and foreigner or between citizen and terrorist. The connections between the horror film, the zombie narrative, and anxieties about terrorism and war in the post-9/11 era have been discussed by many critics,22 some of whom have also begun to analyse how recent

19 Abbott, Undead Apocalypse, 180. 20 Abbott also makes this connection. See Undead Apocalypse, 6. 21 Ibid.; see also 68–69, 76, 194–96. 22 See: Höglund, The American Imperial Gothic; Mary Bloodsworth-Lugo and Carmen Lugo-Lugo, “The Monster Within: Post-9/11 Narratives of Threat and the U.S. Shifting Terrain of Terror” in Monster Culture in the 21st Century: A Reader, eds. Marina Levina and Diem-My T. Bui (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013), 243–55; Kevin J. Wetmore, Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema (London: Continuum, 2012); Aviva Briefel and Sam Miller, eds. Horror After 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of Terror (Austin: Texas University Press, 2011); Antonio Sanchez-Escalonilla, “Hollywood and the Rhetoric of Panic: The Popular Genres of Action and Fantasy in the Wake of the 9/11 Attacks,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 38, no. 1 (2010): 10–20; Douglas Kellner, Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush-Cheney Era (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); Kyle Bishop, “Dead Man Still Walking: Explaining the Zombie Renaissance,” Journal of

155 vampire literature refracts this same historical context. For example, Glennis Byron and Aspasia Stephanou identify Justin Cronin’s The Passage as “an apocalyptic vampire narrative” that “registers much more than a simple growing ‘uneasiness’ about American neo-imperialism.” They read this novel as “a sharply satiric attack” on the way that the US engages in international politics post-9/11.23 Just as George R. R. Martin’s Fevre Dream (1982) uses its humanised vampire to engage with American imperialism in Cold War politics (as argued in chapter 2), PAVNs show that contemporary vampires continue to engage with similar anxieties about US imperialism and terrorism in the new millennium.

Posthumanism as a Critical and Contextual Framework While PAVNs share a number of genre tropes, these same tropes are also explored, albeit in different ways, in contemporary UFPR. Both these strands of postmillennial vampire literature map contemporary anxieties concerning the distinctions between the living and the dead, the organic and the technological, the human and the animal, the insider and the outsider, the community and the global24—in short, between the human self and the Other. From a theoretical perspective, both PAVNs and UFPR thus explore the anxieties attendant upon the decentring of the human self in the posthuman era. In this

Popular Film and Television 37, no. 1 (2009): 16–25; Joseph Maddrey, Nightmares in Red, White, and Blue: The Evolution of the American Horror Film (Jefferson: McFarland, 2004). 23 Glennis Byron and Aspasia Stephanou, “Neo-Imperialism and the Apocalyptic Vampire Narrative: Justin Cronin’s The Passage,” in Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires: Dark Blood, eds. Tabish Khair and Johan Höglund (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 190. 24 Though further research on this point remains outside the scope of this thesis, UFPR texts also respond to the prevalent political anxieties of the post-9/11 period. For example, Bly reads how J. R. Ward’s Dark Lover (New York: Penguin, 2005), the first instalment in Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood Series, 15 novels (2005–), refracts anxieties about masculinity and female vulnerability and the fear of domestic insurgents in post-9/11 America. See Bly, “On Popular Romance, J. R. Ward, and the Limits of Genre Study.” Piatti-Farnell similarly argues that in Dark Lover, Ward refracts the fear, grief, and desire for revenge sensationalised in post-9/11 America. See Piatti-Farnell, The Vampire in Contemporary Popular Literature, 153–59. Kimberley McMahon- Coleman further considers the relationship between masculinity, violence, and vampires in post- 9/11 America in “The Sliding Scale of Evil: Television Vampires in a Post-Bush World,” in A History of Evil in Popular Culture: What Hannibal Lecture, Stephen King and Vampires Reveal About America, eds. Sharon Packer and Jody Pennington (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2014), 185–98. And Munford and Waters argue that “shows like True Blood invoke the spectacle of bleeding, plundered, violated and promiscuous bodies as a means of communicating concerns about the ‘leakiness’ of the American body politic in the wake of 9/11,” while “in accordance with the nostalgic turn of post-9/11 politics, the Gothic—through its recent resurrection of the dizzy, swooning, imperilled naïf—has retreated back into its oldest formulations of gender identities.” See Munford and Waters, Feminism and Popular Culture, 164, 167.

156 era, the differences between the (white, patriarchal, dominant) humanist self and the (racialised, gendered, queer, animal, technological, monstrous) Other have become destabilised. In What is Posthumanism?, Cary Wolfe argues that posthumanism “comes both before and after humanism.” On the one hand, posthumanism “names the embodiment and embeddedness of the human being in not just its biological but also its technological world, the prosthetic coevolution of the human animal with the technicity of tools and external archival mechanisms.” On the other hand, “it comes after in the sense that posthumanism names a historical moment in which the decentring of the human by its imbrications in technical, medical, informatics, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore.”25 Wolfe suggests here that posthumanist theory builds on the recognition that Homo sapiens has always developed not only through biological evolution but through technological evolution: technological advances have made possible human social development. Posthumanist theory is posthumanist because it both follows and disrupts humanist philosophy by questioning what it means to be human. As noted in chapter 2, humanist philosophy privileges the human in opposition to the mechanical or animal. In contrast, posthumanist philosophy begins with (in Wolfe’s words) a “decentring of the human.” In the twenty-first century, rapid advances in information, communications, and medical technologies have increasingly disrupted the limits of the human body by connecting us to machines (for example, through cybernetics and prosthetics) and to one another (for example, through wireless global networks). As will be further discussed below, for Donna Haraway, the cyborg (a half-human, half-machine entity) is a key figure for conceptualizing this shift in the later twentieth century and beyond.26 In addition to decentring the human, Wolfe argues that the posthumanist shift demands the recognition that “the world is an ongoing, differentiated construction and creation of a shared environment.”27 This acknowledgement foregrounds a key concept in posthumanist theory: a shared posthuman network extends conceptions of human identity by linking humans to the wider nonhuman world in new ways. The “shared environment” of the posthuman world also recalls Wolfe’s argument, in Animal Rites,

25 Carey Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xv. 26 Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149–81. “A Cyborg Manifesto” was originally published as Donna J. Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the 1980s,” Socialist Review 15, no. 2 (1985): 65–107. 27 Ibid., xxiv.

157 that humans and human society should no longer be framed in simple opposition to animals and the nonhuman biological or ecological environment. Rosi Braidotti similarly argues that posthumanism is a form of post-anthropocentrism: “animals are no longer the signifying system that props up the humans’ self-projections and moral aspirations.”28 Like Wolfe, Neil Badmington and Rosi Braidotti align posthumanist theory with a new awareness of the limits of any account of the human that defines it in opposition to inanimate machines, nonhuman animals, and nature. Crucially, Badmington and Braidotti argue that as we revise what it means to be human in a posthuman world, we must also change our conception of what it means to be human or “Other.” Badmington, for example, argues that “posthumanism marks a careful, ongoing, overdue rethinking of the dominant humanist (or anthropocentric) account of who ‘we’ are as human beings,” and that “in the light of posthumanist theory and culture, ‘we’ are not who ‘we’ once believed ourselves to be. And neither are ‘our’ others.”29 He thus argues that because posthumanist theory destabilises what it means to be human, it invites us to rethink what it means to be Other, a category that has previously been defined in opposition to the definition of the human. Braidotti similarly proposes that “the posthuman condition introduces a qualitative shift in our thinking about what exactly is the basic unit of common reference for our species, our polity, and our relationship to other inhabitants of this planet.” This shift, she continues, “raises serious questions as to the very structures of our shared identity” as the “discourses and representations of the nonhuman, the inhuman, the anti-human, the inhumane and the posthuman proliferate and overlap in our globalised, technologically mediated societies.”30 Like Badmington, Braidotti also suggests here that the “human” has been defined through its antithesis to the many forms of Otherness. To reconceive what it means to be human in the posthuman world therefore involves questioning “structures of shared identity” and, by implication, considering the possibility that posthuman identity may be relational and multiplicitous. From the late 1990s to the present time, dramatic innovations in biotechnologies have been a catalyst for the emergence of the posthuman. For example, the Human Genome Project, completed in 2003, mapped the human gene sequence, offering new insights into the evolutionary history of humans and our relation to nonhuman animals.

28 Braidotti, The Posthuman, 70. 29 Badmington, “Posthumanism,” 374. 30 Braidotti, The Posthuman, 1–2.

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For Donna Haraway, the link between genetic sequencing and biologist constructions of race is a source of concern that biotechnologies might offer new, potentially harmful ways of categorising and defining race, thereby threatening to erase lived histories in favour of biologies.31 Such advances might, she suggests, threaten a resurgence of racist discourse in a United States still fraught with racial tensions. But she also argues that projects such as the Human Genome Diversity Project raise important “questions about agency” that “permeate practices of representation,” such as “Who, or what, is the human that is to be exhaustively represented?”32 In tandem with this question, Haraway asks how patenting genetic techniques and materials will affect medical experimentation and healing.33 For example, like the Human Genome Project, the cloning of Dolly the Sheep in 1996 raised popular awareness of the extent to which it is now possible to intervene in biological reproduction. Similarly, the potential for genetically screened and/or modified human babies raises new ethical questions about the danger of eugenics and the ethics of interfering drastically with “natural” human reproduction.34 Just as problematically, the OncoMouse, a genetically modified mouse used for cancer research (and much analysed by Haraway) offers an example of gene transfer between humans and animals—a possibility that further destabilises the distinction between the human and the animal in posthuman medical technologies. In addition to these scientific innovations, since the 1960s, when the environmentalist movement began, the connection between the human world and the nonhuman world has also been a matter of scientific and popular concern. In the 1990s, the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty first signed in 1997, represented an international commitment to reduce greenhouse gases and fight human-driven climate change. More recently, the Paris Agreement of 2016 constitutes a similar commitment to fighting climate change by reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Abbott links climate change and the possibility of environmental disaster to the prominence of the apocalyptic narrative in the new millennium. 35 And in the twenty-first century, environmental awareness has been reframed as a need for “sustainability,” a movement

31 Haraway, “Race: Universal Donors in a Vampire Culture,” 282–83. Some of these links between race, biology, and evolutionary history were identified in chapter 2 of this thesis. 32 Ibid., 266. 33 Ibid., 270–71. 34 Abbott also identifies a connection between these biotechnological advances and representations of the cyborgian vampire in Celluloid Vampires, 200. 35 Abbott, Undead Apocalypse, 6.

159 that combines global social and economic development with environmental protection. This awareness also entails an ongoing interest in “green” technologies and renewable energy production (including biofuels, solar power, and wind power). As a movement for environmental awareness, sustainability emphasises the crucial interconnections between humans and the world we inhabit, highlighting the importance of biodiversity and ecological balance in the face of pollution and exploitation. These examples suggest only some of the ways that new, advanced technologies and an ongoing environmental crisis increasingly challenge what it means to be human. Moreover, they suggest how the relationships between the human, the technological, and the animal are challenged in new ways as we enter the twenty-first century.

Cyborgs, Companion Species, and Significant Otherness: Reading the Vampire through the Posthuman Theory of Donna Haraway Reading the vampire through a posthuman framework offers a continuation and an update of Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto.” In this seminal essay, Haraway uses the figure of the cyborg to develop a highly politicised, Marxist, feminist, and posthumanist critique of gender and economics in the late twentieth century. The “Manifesto” was originally published in 1985 and then revised for publication in Simians, Cyborgs and Women in 1991. Haraway’s account of the cyborg has been further developed in The Companion Species Manifesto in 2003 and When Species Meet in 2008. For Haraway, the cyborg begins as a figure for human-machine hybridity, but in her later work, and in that of other feminist critics, it has become a figure for any posthuman hybrid body. The cyborg, Haraway argues, is “a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality”—that is, a fictional construct for exploring the very real territory of what it means to be human in the posthuman world. Haraway’s choice of the verb “mapping” here is significant: to map a territory is not only to describe it but to actively explore it. The cyborg thus offers a means of staging and exploring “our social and bodily reality.” It is a key figure, Haraway argues, because “by the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics.” 36 The hybrid and posthuman mixing of the human with the Other

36 Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 150.

160 characterises the late twentieth century (and now the twenty-first), and the cyborg is a figure that opens new pathways for understanding “lived experience” in this period.37 In its late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century forms, we can read the vampire as a cyborgian figure: it is a fictionalized hybrid entity that offers a means of staging and exploring “our social and bodily reality,” one that maps how boundaries are contested and destabilised. In her “Manifesto,” Haraway argues that cyborg maps “three crucial boundary breakdowns”: the breakdown of the boundaries between the organic and the machine, between the physical and the nonphysical, and between the human and the animal.38 Similar breakdowns are explored in twenty-first-century vampire literature, where the vampire represents a rupturing of the boundaries between the human and machine, the human and the inhuman, the living and the dead, the natural and the supernatural. Vampiric feeding is monstrous and illegitimate because it contests these boundaries, which ultimately are those between the human and the Other. The vampire bite pierces the barrier between the human and the monster, while the fluids that are drawn or exchanged suggest a transgressive blurring of the distinction between the living human self and the undead monstrous Other. Moreover, vampiric feeding also represents a transgressive spiritual melding of the identities or souls of the participants.39 As new forms of posthuman vampire emerge in the twenty-first century, vampiric feeding becomes a means to map and respond to a widespread crisis in the popular understanding of what it means to be human—and the relationship of the category of the human to those of race, gender, sexuality, and species. Like the cyborg, vampires also combine the technological with the organic. As I have noted above, PAVNs use scientific and technological frameworks to create new monstrous, Frankensteinian biologies in texts like The Strain and The Passage. But UFPR also connects the vampire and other monsters to medical technologies, for example, by frequently identifying vampirism and/or lycanthropy as a kind of virus. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series identifies lycanthropy as a virus that can be prevented with a vaccine—but the vaccine can go awry, infecting its recipient with lycanthropy rather than inoculating him or her against it. And in Harrison’s series (where it is vampirism

37 Ibid. In her feminist critique, Haraway is specifically concerned with the lived (i.e., real world, embodied) experience of women. 38 Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 151–53. 39 See the analysis in chapter 4 of this thesis of the vampire bite in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and in Laurell K. Hamilton’s Guilty Pleasures (1993).

161 that is described as a virus), a genetic modification to tomato plants creates the deadly Angel virus that wipes out a large portion of the human population. The Frankensteinian narrative characteristic of PAVNs thus can also appear in UFPR. However, in UFPR, biotechnological experiments do not always have disastrous consequences. For example, in Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries (2001–2013) and television series True Blood (2008–2014), the development of a synthetic blood source called Tru Blood provides an alternative, ethical food source for vampires. As Abbott notes in Undead Apocalypse, the “reimagining” of vampire literature “though the lens of science as well as the increasing medicalisation of vampirism” in the twenty-first century is found in even overtly romantic paranormal texts.40 She notes, for example, that the film adaptations of the final novel in the Twilight Saga (2005–2008), Breaking Dawn: Part 1 (2011) and Breaking Dawn: Part 2 (2012), depict heroine Bella Swan’s transformation into a vampire as a partly clinical process. This supernatural transformation is combined with Bella’s medically difficult childbirth and with attempts to keep her breathing with the help of CPR, her body all the while lying on “an operating table surrounded by surgical trolleys and medical equipment.”41 Abbott identifies similar “transformation[s] . . . in a medicalized environment” for heroines in UFPR television series The Vampire Diaries (2009–2017).42 The technological and the organic are also combined in weapons to be used against vampires, which in the modern era have become much more complex than the crucifixes, garlic, and stakes found in vampire literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In her earlier monograph, Celluloid Vampires, Abbott argues that the vampire is often represented as a technological cyborg in films from the late 1990s onward, in part because it, like the vampire hunter, is dependent on technology.43 For example, in films such as (1998),44 Underworld (2003), and Van Helsing (2004), vampires and vampire-hunters alike rely on technologically advanced weaponry. Moreover, Abbott adds, in vampire films of this era, “many . . . characters are themselves represented as technology-human hybrids.”45 “Uses of modern technologies

40 Abbott, Undead Apocalypse, 41. 41 Ibid., 39–41. 42 Ibid., 41. 43 Abbott, Celluloid Vampires, 198. 44 Blade, directed by Stephen Norrington, New Line Cinema, 1998. See also Blade II, directed by Guillermo del Toro, New Line Cinema, 2002; and Blade: Trinity, directed by David S. Goyer, New Line Cinema, 2004. 45 Abbott, Celluloid Vampires, 200.

162 and science,” she argues, “allow the vampire to exceed the limitations of its body and embrace the modern age.”46 The Blade trilogy (1998–2004) gives an example of how the supernatural powers of the posthuman vampire are both enhanced by and combatted with technology. Blade, a mixed-race and half-human, half-vampire hybrid character, uses his supernatural powers to hunt down evil vampires, defined as such by their willingness to drink human blood. As Abbott notes, to combat those evil vampires, Blade also uses weapons like “technologically enhanced crossbows, shotguns, silver nitrate bullets, lasers, ultraviolet lamps, grenades and bombs, an anticoagulant superagent.”47 In all three Blade films, the use of ultraviolet technologies as weapons is particularly prevalent, suggesting that the supernatural and the technological have become increasingly entangled in contemporary vampire literature: as the posthuman vampire evolves, so does its relationship to technology. As Abbott also notes, “the role of blood in the vampire film has evolved” in a posthuman context. Just as the vampire may be framed biologically rather than supernaturally, in recent vampire films, the blood it drinks is no longer simply a mysterious life-giving force—it may also “signif[y] the potential of modern genetics and the mysteries of DNA.”48 Abbott links biotechnological iterations of the vampire to a number of contemporary scientific innovations such as “genetically modified foods, gene therapy, stem cell research, ‘designer’ babies, and most significantly, human cloning.”49 She goes on to analyse the role of blood and genetics in the Blade and Underworld series and argues that “while the iconography of the vampire film has been reconfigured to reflect a more technologically-oriented and -dependent society, the vampires in these films have embraced technology both internally and externally to

46 Ibid., 205; see also 200. 47 Abbott, Celluloid Vampires, 198–99. 48 Haraway also identifies the link between blood, genetics, and DNA in the vampire mythos. In “Race: Universal Donors in a Vampire Culture,” she analyses how race and kinship are constructed in the twentieth-century United States, arguing that racial discourse is influenced by the construction of “blood ties” as “proteinaceous threads extruded by the physical and historical passage of substance from one generation to the next, forming the great nested, organic collectives of the human family. In that process, where race was, sex was also” (251). She analyses the way that populations and races are constructed discursively and the impact that our understanding of the human genome has on this discourse. Haraway thus argues that “the discursive has never been lived with any greater vitality than in the always undead corpus of race and sex,” linking the metaphorical conception of blood to racialised and sexualised representations of vampiric Otherness (252). 49 Abbott, Celluloid Vampires, 200. Abbott further develops this reading of the vampire cyborg in Undead Apocalypse, 127–31.

163 become vampire cyborgs.”50 Blade himself relies on a medically manufactured serum to combat his own “evil” nature and repress his vampiric thirst for blood. This intertwining of the supernatural, technological, and biological marks this vampire as posthuman in a new way. Haraway also argues in the “Manifesto” that the cyborg signals another “crucial boundary breakdown,” the disintegration of the boundary between the human and the animal. Through the cyborg, she writes, “the boundary between human and animal is transgressed,” and “far from signalling a walling off from other living beings, cyborgs signal disturbingly and pleasurably tight coupling.”51 She thus argues that the cyborg destabilises the boundary between the human and other living beings, whether those beings are animals or living posthuman machines. 52 In the “Cyborg Manifesto,” Haraway traces the source of this boundary breakdown to advances in biology, bioengineering, genetics, and evolutionary theory, which reveal how closely we are related to other species. In her words: By the late twentieth century in United States scientific culture, the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached. . . . Language, tool use, social behaviour, mental events, nothing really convincingly settles the separation of animal and human. . . . The last two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace.53 In the body of work written after her “Cyborg Manifesto,” Haraway further analyses how the posthuman era challenges the boundaries between the human and the animal. In texts including Primate Visions,54 The Companion Species Manifesto, When Species

50 Abbott, Celluloid Vampires, 202. 51 Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 152. Haraway deliberately invokes the sexual connotations of the word “coupling” here, going so far as to suggest that the cyborg offers a new form of “bestiality.” This emphasis on interspecies sexuality is relevant to analysis of the contemporary vampire, particularly in paranormal romance. Quasi-/bestiality and interspecies coupling is a prominent feature of some paranormal erotica, for example in novels by Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series (1993–) and Marjorie Liu’s Dirk & Steele series, 11 novels (2005–2011). Chapter 6 analyses in more detail the transgressive potential of vampiric sexuality in the Anita Blake series. 52 Her argument perhaps recalls and refutes Descartes’s philosophical argument that animals are akin to living machines—that they are living automata, incapable of feeling as humans feel. This philosophical connection remains undeveloped in this essay, however. 53 Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 151–52. 54 Donna J. Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York : Routledge, 1989).

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Meet, and Staying with the Trouble,55 she argues that advances in new technology and the philosophy of animal rights destabilise these boundaries. Haraway thus makes the compelling case for a posthuman ethics that demands we recognise that our lives are closely interrelated with those of nonhuman Others, for example through animal experimentation, zoo habitats, pet ownership, and species extinction. Her focus on the rights of species also extends to the demands of the wider planetary ecology necessary for the sustainable cohabitation of multiple species. In Haraway’s posthuman world, awareness of our close relationships with other species challenges the boundaries that traditionally define humans as a species distinct from all others. As she writes in The Companion Species Manifesto, “subjects, objects, kinds, races, species, genres, and genders are the products of their relating.”56 But while challenging the way that humans and other species relate, Haraway does not believe that disrupting or revising these boundaries requires dissolving them entirely. This suggests one reason why Haraway does not explicitly identify her work as posthumanist.57 She does not seek to dissolve the boundaries between humans and other species; rather, she advocates that the refusal to recognise the very real differences between humans and nonhuman animals threatens to erase that distinction through an anthropocentric insistence that we treat animals as though they were human too. Haraway’s posthuman ethics recognises that human understanding of nonhuman animals is mediated by anthropocentric, socially constructed categories that distinguish the human self from the animal Other. This form of posthuman ethics demands that the Otherness of individual species and entities be continually and respectfully renegotiated. As Haraway argues, “To hold in regard, to respond, to look back reciprocally, to notice, to pay attention, to have courteous regard for, to esteem: all of that is tied to polite greeting, to constituting the polis, where and when species meet.”58 An interspecies posthuman ethics thus requires that humans recognise Otherness and respect the needs of Others. Haraway’s use of the term “polis” extends the concept of an ideal state or the body politic from the social to the ecological and environmental, suggesting a political community in which humans and nonhuman species can thrive together.

55 Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 56 Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto, 7. 57 See, for example, Haraway, When Species Meet, 16–17, 19. It should be noted, however, that despite Haraway’s disavowal of the posthumanist label, When Species Meet is nonetheless published as volume 3 of the University of Minnesota Press’s Posthumanities series. For more on Haraway’s classification as a posthumanist, see also Badmington, “Posthumanism,” 379–80. 58 Haraway, When Species Meet, 19.

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This notion of a posthuman polis offers a useful model for interpreting the posthuman worlds of urban fantasy and paranormal romance. Though the genre is defined in part by the term “urban,” popular UFPR texts are not necessarily focused on the city. The term “urban fantasy” seems to have emerged in the 1980s as a way of distinguishing fantasy with a contemporary, mundane setting from high-fantasy fiction set in alterative fictional worlds. Recent UFPR continues to juxtapose the mundane and contemporary with the paranormal and fantastic, but it may be set in semirural or rural locales. For example, Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries series and its television adaptation True Blood (produced by Alan Ball) are set predominantly in rural Louisiana. Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga takes place predominantly in the small, semirural Washington town of Forks. And Ilona Andrews’s Edge Series (2009– 2012) is set in a rural border zone between Louisiana and a feudal fairy kingdom.59 The term “urban” in urban fantasy thus now seems to signify a broader concept akin to that of the polis: a social and political milieu in which the human and iterations of the Other can mix, mingle, interrelate—and, ideally, can learn to respond to and respect one another. Haraway argues that through response and respect, humans can foster relationships that are no longer limited by a binary that opposes the human to the Other. Instead, relationships can be delineated with “significant otherness,” which plays on the notion of a “significant other,” a loved one with whom one has a romantic and/or sexual relationship. By Haraway’s definition, significant otherness is about “heterogeneous relationship,” a means of relating that “cobbles together non- harmonious agencies, and ways of living that are accountable both to their disparate inherited histories and to their barely possible but absolutely necessary joint futures.”60 In other words, significant otherness brings together different entities that, in the posthuman world, must forge new ways of relating if either is to flourish. As Haraway insists, “The relation is the smallest unit of analysis, and the relation is about significant otherness.”61 It follows that if significant otherness is about relation, relationship blurs the boundary between the self and Other, as both self and Other must adapt in order to interrelate.

59 Ilona Andrews, the Edge series, 4 novels (2009–2012). 60 Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto, 24, 7. 61 Ibid., 24.

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Negative and Affirmative Readings of the Posthuman Vampire In the later twentieth century, much vampire literature lays the foundations for a new kind of vampire, one who belongs to a species that is part of a posthuman world. To read the vampire as part of a posthuman polis is to read it as a nonhuman species within the shared environment of this world. As I have previously noted, in the 1980s a number of new texts began to represent the vampire as biologically (rather than supernaturally) Other from humans. These texts explain the existence of the vampire in medical, anatomical, evolutionary, and/or genetic terms. As I demonstrated in chapter 1, this representation of the vampire can be traced back to Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla and Stoker’s Dracula. For example, as I noted in chapter 2, Charnas’s Weyland in The Vampire Tapestry (1980) and Martin’s vampires in Fevre Dream (1982) have evolved as a separate species alongside humans. Similarly, in Whitley Strieber’s The Hunger (1981), the vampire Miriam is revealed to be the last of an ancient vampire species. Biologically distinct from humans, Miriam has survived into the twentieth century owing to her species’ long lifespan. And Brian Stableford’s The Empire of Fear (1988) suggests that vampirism is a disease or a genetic mutation that can be combated through science and biology. These vampire texts blur the boundary between the human and the animal because they suggest that nonhuman species may act and think and feel in ways similar to humans— or even more startlingly, in ways that humans cannot appreciate or comprehend. These vampires of the 1980s thus problematise the conventional relationship between the human and the animal Other. In this respect, the turn toward a conception of the vampire as a natural, biological species paves the way for the vampires of the UFPR genre, a genre that offers new roles to the vampire as a nonhuman Other in a global, posthuman world. In Vampire Legends in Contemporary American Culture, William Patrick Day uses a posthumanist framework to argue that vampire literature is “about the search for a model of humanity that allows us to exercise meaningful and ethical choice.”62 Seen in this light, vampire narratives provide a means of defining what it means to be human and to be ethically good. Day argues for the relevance of posthumanist theory in the analysis of vampire literature, noting that vampires “are literally posthuman: they were

62 Day, Vampire Legends, 130.

167 once human and now they are something else.”63 Moreover, he suggests that “the vampire story is a tale of our future, who we will become as we leave behind the traditions and inheritance of the past and their forms of humanity.”64 His reading is thus posthumanist because it considers the vampire not as the haunted spectre of our pasts or our psyches, but as a herald of the posthuman future to come—a harbinger of the posthuman world in which technology, globalisation, and other new challenges problematise what it means to be human. In contrast to Auerbach and other critics who emphasise the vampire’s humanisation in the later twentieth century, Day constructs a history of the animalised vampire found in texts from the 1970s to the 1990s, including the films Martin (1978), Nosferatu (1979), and The Lost Boys, the novel The Vampire Tapestry, and television series Forever Knight and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.65 Day argues that these texts use an animalistic, often snarling representation of the vampire to explore the posthuman threat of a descent into “pure need,” a state which reduces humans to “material beings without the need for ethical choice.”66 He thus interprets the animalistic representation of the posthuman vampire to signify an inferior state of being. This vampire is an unreasoning animal that is negatively compared to humans, who are defined by their capacity to reason and make ethical choices. For Day, the vampire narratives of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s are therefore “cautionary tales” of animalistic savagery that “express . . . the longing for the humanity we are losing.”67 In this analysis, to become a vampire means to lose humanity, which Day argues serves as a warning that posthumans may regress to an inferior, animalistic state: “It is to this intimate experience of our violent, predatory, animal nature that the vampire recalls us—raw pleasure without ethics, without consciousness or conscience.”68 This threat becomes full blown in some of the post-apocalyptic vampire narratives of the new millennium.

63 Ibid., 82. Of course, Day here fails to note that beginning the 1980s, vampires who are represented as alternative species (such as Martin’s Joshua, Charnas’s Weyland, and Strieber’s Miriam) were never actually human to begin with; they are members of another species entirely. Nonetheless, his comment illustrates how the vampire has always embodied a transformation of our understanding of what it means to be human. 63 Day, Vampire Legends, 6. 64 Ibid. 65 Martin, directed by George A. Romero, Libra Films International, 1978; , directed by Werner Hertzog, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, 1979. 66 Day, Vampire Legends, 83. 67 Ibid., 104. 68 Ibid., 7.

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Day’s alternative reading of vampire texts of the later twentieth century suggests that while the dominant trend in vampire literature has been toward urban fantasy and paranormal romance, with its sympathetic vampires, we must recognise that representations of the biological, animalized vampire have also paved the way for post- apocalyptic vampire narratives. Abbott also writes of this alternative history of the vampire text and argues that it develops further in the PAVN. She traces “a separate strand” of vampire literature that has “run parallel to the dominant form of the genre since its first emergence,” a strand in which vampires are monstrous and animalistic.69 Day’s definition of the posthuman vampire ultimately reifies a humanist framework built on the binary opposition of the human and the animal. By reading the posthuman vampire only as an animal Other that threatens ethical choice, Day continues to situate animal Otherness in opposition to a superior humanity. His posthuman vampire warns against degeneration and chaos in a world where the boundaries between human and animal break down. In this respect, his analysis is antithetical to those posthuman theories that advocate for the positive possibilities of interspecies relationships in a new posthuman polis. Braidotti calls this more optimistic form of posthumanism “affirmative critical posthumanism,” a term that I have adapted throughout this thesis. Rather than focusing on the dangerous degeneration of boundaries, affirmative posthumanism argues that the breakdown of these boundaries offers “new starting points that bring into play untapped possibilities for bonding, community building and empowerment.”70 In the following chapters, I analyse the affirmatively posthumanist forms of the vampire found in UFPR; but I also address some of the ways in which the PAVN contests and rejects UFPR’s affirmative posthumanism and instead uses the vampire to explore a conservative, pessimistic posthuman future. In chapter 6, I examine the development of intimate relationships of feeding, and of sexual and psychic connection, between vampires, humans, and other supernatural species. In UFPR, relationships between vampires and humans explore the beneficial possibilities of posthuman symbiosis. Instead of reifying the human/animal binary, UFPR frequently suggests that breaking down this binary might offer new means of interconnection and political resistance in a posthuman world. This process is seen in the Anita Blake novels from 1997 onward, as Hamilton’s protagonist becomes an

69 Abbott, Undead Apocalypse, 181; see 180–86. 70 Braidotti, The Posthuman, 54.

169 increasingly monstrous figure, gaining power by aligning herself with the posthuman vampire and the monstrous posthuman community. These novels provide representative examples of how, in UFPR, posthuman communities can resist the traditional limits of Otherness to forge positive new connections across ontological boundaries. In this way, UFPR uses the posthuman vampire to forge new networks between humans and posthuman Others, networks dependent on relationality, hybridity, affection, and affinity. In contrast, the posthuman vampires of PAVNs conform to Day’s definition of the animalised posthuman vampire, suggesting that posthuman transformation results in the degeneration of the human. We can therefore say that although both PAVNs and UFPR respond to the same anxieties about the posthuman condition, they do so in dramatically different ways. In chapter 7, the conclusion to this thesis, I consider how the vampire-human interactions in Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s Strain trilogy refute the assumption that ethical choice and mutuality will be hallmarks of the posthuman world. Instead, the Strain trilogy enacts a post-9/11 ethos that conservatively reacts against terroristic threats by rejecting and attempting to exterminate that which is Other. At the same time, it suggests that post-apocalyptic vampire narratives emerge as a conservative backlash against the affirmatively posthumanist and postfeminist fiction of UFPR, a backlash that reinscribes human mores onto vampires.

CHAPTER SIX

Eating Well: Vampiric Feeding as Affirmative Posthuman Interconnection in the Later Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Novels

Anita Blake Becomes Affirmatively Posthuman Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series is a useful text for charting key shifts in the representations of the vampire that have become popular in UFPR since the early 1990s. While developing and popularising significant new genre conventions, such as the female vampire slayer and the everyday-supernatural world, the series shows clearly how a new and affirmative posthuman ethics develops in vampire literature in the early twenty-first century. As I discussed in chapter 4, from approximately 1993 to 1996, Hamilton’s heroine rejected the act of vampiric feeding, judging it to be an evil, predatory act. In this regard, the first five Anita Blake novels largely follow the conventions of contemporary vampire literature as they appeared in the 1980s and early 1990s. As I outlined in the preceding chapters, during this period, “good” vampires were those who abstained from drinking blood, while “evil” vampires followed their urge to feed on humans. However, the ethics of vampiric feeding becomes increasingly complex in postmillennial vampire fiction, television, and film. In the new millennium, as the boundaries that distinguish the vampiric self from the human Other become even less certain, vampires in UFPR no longer need to abstain from human blood to be considered ethically “good.” This chapter will analyse a new form of posthuman vampirism that takes shape in UFPR by considering the changing representation of vampiric feeding in Hamilton’s Anita Blake series. In the posthuman worlds of recent UFPR texts like Hamilton’s, monsters and humans together strive toward an interconnected, mutually beneficial, and symbiotic coexistence. In this sense, in postmillennial UFPR the vampire story often

170 171 becomes, as Donna Haraway writes in her Companion Species Manifesto, “a story of co- habitation, co-evolution, and embodied cross-species sociality.”1 In Hamilton’s long-running series, this change in the representation of vampiric feeding appears slightly ahead of the UFPR genre that grows in popularity after the year 2000. Already in her sixth novel, The Killing Dance, published in 1997, there is a marked shift in the relationship between the heroine and the vampire as a monstrous Other. In this novel, the ethics of vampiric feeding are the explicit focus of its mystery plot line. Further, Anita Blake consummates her relationship with the vampire Jean-Claude: the two have sexual intercourse, and Blake accepts her role as Jean-Claude’s human servant and allows him to drink her blood.2 In this chapter, through a close analysis of Hamilton’s The Killing Dance, Narcissus in Chains (2001), The Harlequin (2007), and Hit List (2012),3 I will map how her series further breaks away from the representation of the (abstinent) humanised vampire and instead explores a new posthuman ethics for its vampires and its heroine. The supernatural ties that bind Anita Blake to her monstrous lovers in The Killing Dance, the development of a new supernatural hunger known as the ardeur in Narcissus in Chains, and Blake’s acceptance of a new, polyamorous lifestyle, as shown in The Harlequin and Hit List, all expand her capacity to understand and embrace Otherness and thereby forge new posthuman networks. Over the course of the series, Blake’s intimate sexual relationships with monstrous Others also suggest new possibilities for empathy and interconnection in the broader supernatural, posthuman communities of UFPR. In the Anita Blake novels published after 1997, Hamilton’s protagonist comes to believe that the act of vampiric feeding is not simply a predatory act of consumption but a biological necessity that can be mutually beneficial for both vampire and human. In other words, vampiric feeding may be a symbiotic process that benefits and satisfies both participants. Hamilton thus explores the idea that it may be possible for humans, vampires, lycanthropes, and, indeed, any other kind of monster to live together ethically in a way that nonetheless satisfies their various biological, emotional, and sexual needs. Consequently, Hamilton’s heroine no longer strives primarily to protect humans from

1 Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto, 4. 2 Laurell K. Hamilton, The Killing Dance (1997; repr. New York: Jove, 2002). Further references to this novel will be given parenthetically, citing the page number. 3 Laurell K. Hamilton, Narcissus in Chains (2001; repr. New York: Jove, 2002); Laurell K. Hamilton, The Harlequin (New York: Berkley, 2007); Laurell K. Hamilton, Hit List (2011; repr. New York: Jove, 2012). Further references to these novels will be given parenthetically, citing the page number.

172 evil monsters. Instead, she comes to identify as one of the monsters herself and strives for a posthuman ethics that allows her to love and respect humans and monsters alike. In Hamilton’s fictional posthuman world, the boundaries between human and monster, and between self and Other, become increasingly irrelevant as humans and monsters together move toward an affirmative and symbiotic posthumanity.

Posthuman Vampires as Socially Other: Feminist Posthumanism and Monstrous Communities As the posthuman shift breaks down the boundaries that divide the self from the Other, it also challenges the social boundaries that separate the mainstream from the marginalized. UFPR uses its speculative worlds and its supernatural, posthuman monsters to explore the implications of these boundary breakdowns. Monstrous Otherness in the fictional, posthuman, and supernatural worlds of UFPR thus offers a means of interrogating sociohistorical anxieties about Otherness in contemporary culture. Elaine L. Graham demonstrates this idea forcefully in Representations of the Post/Human, where she critiques the representation of posthuman monsters in science fiction texts from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) to Star Trek (1966–present). 4 Graham outlines in detail how her posthumanist critique builds on the work of Michel Foucault to frame monstrosity as a discourse that manifests in the narratives of popular culture. Following Foucault, she calls for archaeological and genealogical investigations of how monstrosity is sociohistorically constructed. The former involves “an excavation of the concealed and forgotten terms on which axiomatic categories are constructed” and the latter an attempt “to trace the dynamics of power/knowledge which give such regimes their rationale.”5 Graham thus argues for an investigation into monstrosity as a category of Otherness that historically is constructed through its opposition to the self. Monsters demonstrate that the boundaries between the self and the Other are social fabrications that can be transgressed. “Hybrids and monsters,” Graham argues, “are the vehicles through which it is possible to understand the fabricated character of all things, by virtue of the boundaries they cross and the limits they unsettle.”6 Following this line of argument, posthuman monstrosity challenges not only technological and biological boundaries but the boundaries that marginalise social Others: “That which is

4 The Star Trek franchise, created by Gene Roddenberry (1966–). 5 Graham, Representations of the Post/Human, 44. 6 Ibid., 37.

173 different becomes pathologised as monstrous and thus inhuman, disposable and dangerous. . . . So women, racial and sexual minorities, political radicals or those with physical or mental impairments are designated inhuman by virtue of their non-identity to the white, male reasoning able-bodied subject.”7 An analysis of how the vampire breaks down boundaries in the posthuman world therefore must draw attention to how the construction of the monstrous, the animal, and the machine coalesce in representations of social Otherness. Posthuman Otherness also challenges the boundaries that marginalise the nonwhite, the female, the nonheteronormative, the disabled, the poor, and so on. A critical approach to posthuman Otherness thus can be a means of engaging with, critiquing, and “processing” the relationships between bodies, identities, and ideologies, as noted by Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston.8 Moreover, Graham argues, by drawing attention to the oppression of human Others who are marginalised, posthuman monsters also act as sites for resisting this marginalisation. As posthuman monsters disrupt the boundaries between self and Other, they disrupt what it means to be Other, challenging the association of Otherness with inferiority, inhumanity, and/or evil. In the posthuman era, when the boundaries between the human, the technological, and the animal blur, monsters contest their position as social outcasts. As Graham remarks, “the impossibility of isolating ‘human nature’ from its refracted others suggests a model of post/humanity as inextricably bound up in relationality, affinity and contingency.”9 Posthuman monsters thus demand new ethical approaches to community, approaches that emphasise this same relationality, affinity, and contingency. By emphasising that Otherness is historically constructed in opposition to the self, and by challenging this opposition, posthuman communities suggest new possibilities for the acceptance and celebration of forms of Otherness. Posthuman communities may encourage new affinities, solidarities, and points of resistance, thereby forging new connections between the marginalised and the mainstream. Conceptions of community, and of the role of minorities in relationship to the mainstream community, have changed dramatically in recent decades, influenced by globalisation, ongoing civil rights struggles, postcolonialism, post-9/11 anxieties about terrorism, and the development of new global and technological networks. Monsters offer a way to explore who is a full member of the posthuman community and who

7 Ibid., 53. 8 Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, “Introduction: Posthuman Bodies,” in Posthuman Bodies, edited by Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), 4. 9 Ibid., 223.

174 continues to be excluded. As I noted in chapter 3, David Held has argued that “reason[ing] from the point of view of others” is a significant necessity in the “overlapping communities of fate” created by modern globalisation.10 These overlapping communities are geographic and social, but they are also cultural, technological, and ecological. Following Held, if the global, posthuman world demands that humans must attempt to understand the Other in order to thrive, it also demands the transgression or breakdown of the boundary that distinguishes the normative self from the marginalised Other. Following this transgression or breakdown, posthumanism demands that we recognise and respect the subjectivity and the rights of Others to participate and thrive in the posthuman community. In Multitude, Michael Hardt and Antoni Negri argue that in postmodern society, traditional conceptions of community have changed, as a result of the decline of community organisations centred on heteronormative, patriarchal values; with changing forms of labour; and with changing conceptions of patriotism and national identity in the aftermath of 9/11. They further suggest that for those who lament the loss of traditional communities, new modes of community in the twenty-first century “are incomprehensible and threatening,” even “monstrous.”11 The posthuman community, which in fiction is populated by monsters such as the vampire, is monstrous because it undermines traditional categories of social Otherness. In contrast, Hardt and Negri embrace this monstrosity, advocating for the potential of the monstrous multitude as a model of political resistance. However, they also acknowledge that multitude can be a “horrifying” concept because it threatens to bring with it “insecurity and chaos,” “the unformed and the unordered.”12 In other words, because of its unordered and perhaps chaotic nature, as a political body the multitude can resist political and social control. However, its lack of organisation, of order and structure, is monstrous and horrifying because it suggests the total dissolution of social boundaries. Hardt and Negri mention the vampire as “one figure that expresses the monstrous, excessive, and unruly character of the flesh of the multitude.” Their brief discussion of this monster explores how its relation to the community has changed in the current era. The vampire, they argue, exemplifies the multitude because it “functions in the social imagination as one figure of the monstrosity of a society in which

10 Held, “Regulating Globalisation?” 425–26. 11 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 191–92. 12 Ibid., 192.

175 traditional social bodies . . . are breaking down.” Hardt and Negri cite Bram Stoker’s Dracula as an example of how the vampire in earlier literature threatened traditional social structures (for example, “heteronormative coupling”).13 However, they argue, our contemporary vampires turn out to be different. The vampires are still social outsiders, but their monstrosity helps others to recognize that we are all monsters—high school outcasts, sexual deviants, survivors of pathologized families, and so forth. And more important, the monsters begin to form new, alternative networks of affection and social organization.14 Hardt and Negri specifically identify Hamilton’s Anita Blake series as an example of this kind of contemporary vampire text. 15 They thereby identify a key shift in the representation of the vampire from the 1980s onward: the shift from a humanised to a new form of posthuman vampire. Instead of merely threatening the social order, these vampires re-order: by contesting and destabilising the boundaries between the self and the Other, they open the possibility of new, inclusive posthuman communities.

Hamilton’s New Rules for Vampirism: How Do Vampires Eat Ethically? Through the fictional “rules” that govern the existence of her vampires, Hamilton defines how her humans and vampires can relate to one another. As I discussed in chapters 2 and 3, the humanised vampires of the 1980s and 1990s are primarily considered to be good because they abstain from drinking human blood. Instead, they feed from animals or from sources like medical blood bags.16 But Hamilton’s vampires are explicitly denied the ethical choices available to the aforementioned humanised vampires. They cannot feed on animals or medically donated blood. Instead, they must feed on the blood of the living, and they must feed often. This is made clear in Hamilton’s sixth novel, The Killing Dance, when a master vampire named Sabin visits Saint Louis to ask Anita Blake and the vampire Master of the City, Jean-Claude, for their help. 17 Sabin asks Blake (in her dual roles as a

13 Ibid, 193. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 388n112. 16 Examples of these vampires are seen in George R. R. Martin’s Fevre Dream (1982), Lee Killough’s Blood Hunt (1987) and Bloodlinks (1988), and P. N. Elrod’s Vampire Files (1990–) as well as television series Forever Knight (1992–1996), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), and Angel (1999–2004). 17 In Hamilton’s series, a “master” vampire is one who has reached a certain level of power above a normal vampire. Such vampires generally have additional powers beyond the usual

176 necromancer and as Jean-Claude’s human servant) to use her powers of to “heal” Sabin’s undead body from a disease. This disease is caused by Sabin’s choice to stop drinking human blood: “love happened to me. My love grew a conscience. She said it was wrong to feed upon people. We were people once, after all. For love of her, I tried to drink cold blood. I tried animal blood. But it was not enough to sustain me” (4). The result, as Blake quips, is that “Sabin caught some kind of disease from trying to go cold turkey” (3). In this context, the phrase “cold turkey” links humans, animals, and vampires together, suggesting that practices of eating pose an ethical problem for interspecies relationships. And Sabin has almost literally tried to go “cold turkey,” trying to beat the habit of drinking fresh human blood by drinking cold animal blood instead. But this expression, of course, suggests that his desire to drink blood is that of an addict, of someone who needs to quit some form of self-destructive behaviour. Guilty Pleasures (1993) describes the human Phillip, who willingly feeds vampires, as a “vampire junkie” (19); The Killing Dance here suggests that the “addiction” to feeding is shared by the vampire. Blake responds, “She talked you into going vegetarian. Great” (4). In doing so, she makes explicit the connection between the vampire’s ethical choice to abstain from eating humans and the human ethical choice to abstain from eating animals. But when a vampire goes “vegetarian,” this phrase is also always used ironically: vampires who are “vegetarians” refuse to consume humans, but they almost always attempt to consume animals instead—which is, of course, the opposite of vegetarianism.18 The disease caused by Sabin’s ethically motivated change in diet causes him to develop a pestilential, disease-like condition: “His skin had rotted away on half his face. It was like late-stage leprosy, but worse. The flesh was puss-filled [sic], gangrenous, and should have stunk to high heaven . . . One crystalline blue eye rolled in its rotting socket as if in danger of spilling out” (4–5). Sabin explains that the rotting is “progressive, virulently so” (6) and complains that his penis “is so grotesque that no one will touch [him]” (150). As an immortal vampire, Sabin cannot die, but he will continue to rot. In Anita’s summary of the situation, he thus faces “eternal life, eternal pain, eternal

supernatural strength, speed, healing, immortality, and powers of hypnotism. For example, they may have as an “animal to call,” an animal and/or wereanimal species that responds to their power. A master vampire may become the Master of the City, like Jean-Claude, in which case they rule over the other vampires in that city. Like a supernatural renewable energy source, a Master of the City gains power from his vampire followers, but the extraordinary force of his own supernatural abilities also gives his vampire followers power. 18 For more on this trope, see also Jean Kazez, “Dying to Eat: The Vegetarians Ethics of Twilight,” in Twilight and Philosophy: Vampires, Vegetarians and the Pursuit of Immortality, eds. Rebecca Housel and J. Jeremy Wisnewski (Hoboken: John Wily and Sons, 2009), 25–38.

177 ugliness” (12): “Maybe Sabin could go on living even after he’d been reduced to so much liquid. Now that was a hideous thought” (288). Sabin’s lover, for whom he has renounced human blood, explains to Anita: “‘he won’t die. He’ll just go insane. He’ll still have all the powers. . . . but he’ll be mad” (359). Sabin’s example shows that in the Anita Blake series, to refuse to feed on humans is to court catastrophe. The vampires in this world are “not just people with fangs,” as Anita tells the reader in The Laughing Corpse (78). Unlike Whedon’s Angel or Meyer’s Edward Cullen, Hamilton’s vampires cannot simply choose not to feed on humans. Hamilton therefore introduces a much more complex ethical problem: how to be a “good” vampire in a world where the vampire must feed on human blood, and how to be a “good” human in a world where the vampiric Others in human society may prey easily, violently, and cruelly on humans. Her vampires must negotiate some kind of feeding relationship with humans. In short, the Anita Blake series poses the problem of how to coexist symbiotically, empathetically, and respectfully with radically different Others.

From Slayer to Human Servant and Sexual Partner: The Shift from Consumption to Communion in Vampiric Feeding In The Killing Dance, Hamilton begins a more complex exploration of what it means for her heroine to participate willingly in monstrous feeding. Blake’s understanding of what it means to feed on another (and to be fed on) shifts significantly when she finally consummates her sexual relationship with Jean-Claude. As I discussed in chapter 4, Blake initially fears vampiric feeding as the threat of being consumed and incorporated (body, soul, identity, and agency) into another being. But in The Killing Dance, she begins to understand vampiric hunger as a desire for a state of possible mutuality between two disparate entities, the human and the vampire. Jean-Claude does not desire to fully consume Anita; rather, he hungers for interconnection, consummation, and, above all, communion. Communion is an act of sharing, “the action or fact of sharing or holding something in common with others; mutual participation; the condition of things so held, mutuality, community, union.”19 “Communion” is furthermore a convenient word for reconsidering the act of monstrous consumption because it connotes the Christian sacrament of holy communion and the of transubstantiation. The Christian church suggests that in taking the sacrament of the Eucharist, through

19 OED Online, s.v. “communion.”

178 transubstantiation, wafers and wine become the body and blood of Christ. In this sense, consumption through communion signifies “close spiritual union.”20 Sharing blood as a form of spiritual connection has been associated with the vampire at least since Stoker’s Dracula, in which Renfield repeatedly utters the pseudoscriptural words, “The blood is the life!”21 For the vampire, the blood is indeed the life; it is the sustenance that supports life in the undead. But while Stoker’s text suggests that Dracula’s blood brings with it an unholy corruption, in the later Anita Blake novels, Hamilton frames vampiric feeding as a positive act that results in a spiritual union beneficial for both vampire and human. In the novels preceding The Killing Dance, Blake dates and then becomes engaged to the would-be leader of the local werewolf pack, Richard Zeeman. In this work, when Zeeman kills and eats an enemy in front of her, it proves the catalyst for Blake to accept Jean-Claude as her lover rather than Zeeman (334–45). The Killing Dance contrasts Zeeman’s monstrous, wholesale cannibalism with the vampiric desire to drink blood. When Zeeman devours and incorporates his werewolf rival into himself (a true act of physical and spiritual incorporation, described in Burnt Offerings, pages 283–84), Blake finally realises that Jean-Claude’s vampiric hunger is different from this wolfish consumption. Jean-Claude does not want to devour her in an act of total incorporation; his vampiric hunger is more complex and less threatening. Anita flees from Richard to Jean-Claude, who promptly puts her in the bath, washing away the physical and emotional effects of Richard’s change. It is here that the two finally consummate their mutual sexual desire. In this passage, Anita allows Jean-Claude to feed on her blood during sexual intercourse: “His mouth fed at mine, and there was a small, sharp pain. Sweet copper blood filled my mouth, filled his mouth, and he plunged inside of me, hard and fast” (341). Vampiric feeding and kissing become synonymous here: there is no distinction made between the two acts, both described by the word “fed.” As Jean-Claude combines his kiss with his vampiric bite, Anita, too, tastes her own blood, suggesting that Jean-Claude does not simply drink her blood as a predator but that the two share in this act. If kissing is feeding, then by kissing Jean-Claude, Anita is also feeding upon him. Moreover, the penetrative act of blood-drinking, where teeth pierce the skin, is in this passage simultaneous with sexual penetration. Hamilton thus literalises the vampiric

20 Ibid. 21 Stoker, Dracula, 130, 206–7.

179 bite as an act representative of sexual penetration: vampirism no longer merely represents sexual penetration but explicitly becomes a part of this act.22 In the bathtub with Jean-Claude, Anita realises that the fulfilment of the combined hungers of bloodlust and sexual lust is more complex than the consumption she fears. In Guilty Pleasures, Anita rejects Jean-Claude and his vampiric bite because she fears that a relationship with a vampire is a form of servitude; the human-servant bond he offers threatens her autonomy as a heroine. In that earlier novel, Anita fears that her own sexual appetite, like the vampire’s lust for blood, may be used as a means to strip her of her agency. As Kate Millet wrote in her second wave feminist text, Sexual Politics, “while patriarchy tends to convert woman to a sexual object, she has not been encouraged to enjoy the sexuality which is agreed to be her fate. Instead, she is made to suffer for and be ashamed of her sexuality.”23 In the early Anita Blake novels, Blake fears that her sexual appetite is a monstrous one: it seems to be a means of Othering and objectifying her as a woman, an appetite that patriarchal culture has taught her to view as shameful. In The Killing Dance, neither vampiric bloodlust nor sexual lust result in Anita’s consumption and incorporation into the male vampire. Instead, both acts can be mutually fulfilling, mutually beneficial: I felt his need, and it wasn’t just sex, but for the first time, I understood it wasn’t just the blood, either. It was all of me. He wanted to warm himself in my body, like holding hands to a flame, gathering my warmth, my life, to him. I felt his stillness, a depth of quiet that nothing living could touch, like a still pool of water hidden away in the dark. In one crystalline moment, I realized that, for me, this was part of the attraction: I wanted to plunge my hands into his stillness, into that quiet place of death. I wanted to embrace it, confront it, conquer it. I wanted to fill him up with a burning wash of life. (338) This vampiric feeding is not predatory or exploitative. Anita here realises that Jean- Claude’s Otherness is constitutive of and complementary to, rather than oppositional to,

22 In “Kiss Me With Those Red Lips,” Craft argues that the vampiric mouth and vampiric biting in Dracula suggest the act of sexual penetration. He writes that “a swooning desire for an overwhelming penetration and an intense aversion to the demonic potency empowered to gratify that desire compose the fundamental motivating action and emotion in Dracula.” The “Vampire Mouth,” he continues, is “the primary site of erotic experience in Dracula” (109). Craft goes on to read how the vampire’s mouth and its threat of penetration foreground ambivalence and ambiguity in gendered and sexual identity in Dracula. 23 Millet, Sexual Politics, 119.

180 her own human identity. In the acts of love-making and blood-taking, both human and vampire have something significant to offer one another. Jean-Claude may want “all of” Anita, but not to eat, to incorporate, to obliterate; rather, he wants the “warmth” of her humanity to complement his inhuman state of cold . And Anita finds that in allowing Jean-Claude to feed from her, she in turn holds a power over him, the power to flood him with “a burning wash of life.” Moreover, his “stillness” and his “depth of quiet” satisfy a fatal desire within her—the necromancer’s desire for death. Through the sexual act, neither of these characters merely sate bloodlust or sexual lust; instead, they discover that they complement one another, thereby mutually satisfying a deep spiritual need. As Jean-Claude and Anita consummate their relationship, they connect spiritually, mentally, and emotionally. During sex, Anita lets down her metaphysical guard, the “mental shields” that protect her from Jean-Claude’s vampiric gaze and hypnotic abilities.24 She thus allows him to use his vampiric powers on her for the first time, letting him inside her head and heart at the same time as he penetrates her body: “Let me in, ma petite. Let me love you.” I felt it like a drape being pulled away. I felt his eyes, and they were suddenly drowning deep, an endless midnight blue ocean that somehow managed to burn. I was aware of my body. I could feel Jean-Claude inside my body. I could feel him like a brush of silk inside my mind. (343) Jean-Claude here uses his vampiric powers to transgress the limits of the mind and the body, thereby breaching the boundaries that divide the self from the Other. As discussed in chapter 2, this is the breach of her defences that, in Guilty Pleasures, Anita had feared. But in The Killing Dance, she willingly allows Jean-Claude to use his powers for vampiric interconnection in order to heighten their shared sexual experience. Reading this same scene, Ndalianis suggests in The Horror Sensorium that “the act of vampire sex and blood feeding in horror-paranormal romance embraces . . . the dissolution of self. In fact, it celebrates and revels in it.”25 But in consummating her relationship with Jean-Claude, Anita does not quite lose herself; her sense of self is not dissolved, not consumed, not wholly subsumed into that of the vampire who feeds upon her. And Blake does not find, as Andrea Dworkin writes in Intercourse, that “being owned

24 Anita’s ability to mentally “shield” herself against psychic attack is mentioned numerous times throughout the series. In The Killing Dance, for instance, see page 285, when Anita psychically allows Richard and Jean-Claude to enter her mind. For an explicit explanation of these shields, see Narcissus in Chains, pages 16–17 and 37–38. 25 Ndalianis, Horror Sensorium, 94.

181 and being fucked are or have been virtually synonymous experiences in the lives of women.” 26 Instead, vampiric feeding here is an act of significant and positive communion, whereby the human and Other experience a posthuman interconnection that is physical, emotional, and spiritual. In letting Jean-Claude feed upon her as the two of them make love for the first time, Anita Blake finds a radical version of the ideal relationship sought in third wave feminism. This is, as bell hooks writes in her foreword to the third wave feminist collection Young Wives Tales, “a vision of mutuality in partnership that affirms and enhances our capacity to know love.”27 This relationship is, moreover, a posthuman relationship of significant otherness. As Haraway writes in When Species Meet, significant otherness entails “the ongoing making of the partners through the making itself.”28 It is the contingent and ongoing process of negotiating relationships between the self and the Other. Anita Blake does not lose her identity when she consummates her relationship with Jean-Claude. Rather, both Anita Blake and Jean-Claude forge a partnership that positively redefines their identities in relation to each other. Because of this reconfiguration, Anita is able to retain her feminist agency as a heroine. “Can I still be the scourge of the vampire kind while I’m sleeping with the head bloodsucker?” she asks, at the end of The Killing Dance. Her answer is, “You bet” (387). This scene in The Killing Dance is actually the second passage in which the act of bathing seems directly related to Anita’s sexual desire for Jean-Claude. In the first, found in Bloody Bones (1996), Anita becomes intimate with Jean-Claude, kissing him after he emerges from a bath.29 By twice associating Jean-Claude’s sexual appeal with bathing, Hamilton suggests that Jean-Claude is not spiritually tainted, as Anita has previously believed him to be. Conversely, by turning these scenes into moments when Anita pursues her sexual desires, Hamilton suggests that her heroine’s sexuality is neither “dirty” nor evil. By associating sex and vampiric feeding with the act of bathing, Hamilton suggests that both vampirism and sexuality can be physically and spiritually beneficial for the heroine.30

26 Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse (New York: Free Press, 1987), 66. 27 bell hooks, “Foreword: Finding Freedom and Knowing Love,” in Young Wives Tales: New Adventures in Love and Partnership, eds. Jill Corral and Lisa Miya-Jervis (Seattle: Seal Press, 2001), xv. 28 Haraway, When Species Meet, 165. 29 Laurell K. Hamilton, Bloody Bones (1996; repr. New York: Jove, 2006), 276–85. 30 Indeed, throughout the series this becomes a trope, as some of Anita’s most significant acts of intercourse occur in the bath or the shower. For example, in Narcissus in Chains, Anita becomes metaphysically linked to her lover, Micah, when they have sex in the shower. And in Affliction

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In The Killing Dance, for the first time in the Anita Blake series, to feed a vampire is an act of consummation and communion. When Anita consummates her relationship with Jean-Claude, it marks one of the key turning points in the overarching, multivolume narrative of the series: Anita’s decision to accept the role of human servant to and lover of a vampire. It follows from this choice that Blake must begin to accept her identity as multiplicitous, monstrous, and posthuman. At this point in the series, Anita Blake is a law enforcement officer, a necromancer, a vampire hunter and slayer, and a human servant to a vampire. She has also become the (ex-)fiancée of a werewolf (the aforementioned Richard Zeeman) and the lover of a vampire. She must negotiate these various identities and embrace her own multiplicity as a source of power. Blake’s multiple identities offer a means of connecting significantly with the monsters in new ways. In The Killing Dance she acts voluntarily as Jean-Claude’s human servant, working him to find a cure for the rotting “vegetarian” vampire, Sabin. Additionally, Blake gains a second supernatural title through Richard. As Richard’s (ex)fiancée, she stands as “lupa” to his “Ulfric”—that is, as werewolf queen to his werewolf king (52–54, 106–8). She thus becomes bound to Jean-Claude as his human servant and lover and bound to Richard as a leader and protectress of his werewolf pack. The narrative trope of a heroine caught in a love triangle between a vampire and werewolf (or between members of two different supernatural species) has become a common trope in UFPR today. However, this trope was still new and innovative in the early- and mid-1990s, and Hamilton can be credited with popularising the genre formula for a monstrous love triangle.

From Human Servant to Symbiotic Succubus Complicating Anita’s connections to the vampire and werewolf communities, in The Killing Dance Anita, Jean-Claude, and Richard form a supernatural “triumvirate” using “spells that can use the link between vampire and their animal, between necromancer and vampire” (244). Forging a triumvirate creates an irrevocable supernatural, cross- species connection between these characters. But unlike the term “human servant,” the word “triumvirate” suggests a supernatural power shared among equals. Their triumvirate connects Anita, Jean-Claude, and Richard together for their mutual benefit, boosting their supernatural abilities individually and collectively.

(New York: Berkeley Publishing Group, 2013), Jean-Claude proposes marriage to Anita in similar circumstances.

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This interconnection is intimate. The three share their memories, emotions, and spiritual essences: “Bits and pieces of memory, sensations, thoughts, like three separate jigsaw puzzles shaken and tossed into the air” (381). Hamilton’s analogy here implies that as puzzle pieces, these individual characters—vampire, werewolf, and human servant/necromancer—are now parts that together comprise a greater whole. Through this new supernatural connection, their life forces are connected: if one dies, all are at risk of dying (379–82). As a supernatural triumvirate, Anita, Jean-Claude, and Richard are no longer a human, vampire, and werewolf; they forge a posthuman unit that goes beyond the limits of species and beyond the dichotomies of human and monster (or human and Other). As a triumvirate, Anita, Jean-Claude, and Richard are enmeshed in a web that connects them magically, spiritually, emotionally, and physically. In this sense, the complex relationship between them begins to resemble Haraway’s conception of companion species. These characters find themselves “in a knot of species coshaping one another in layers of reciprocating complexity.”31 The triumvirate represents a mode of “webbed existences, multiple beings in relationship,” a relationship in which “living well, flourishing, and being ‘polite’ (polite/ethical/in right relation) mean staying inside shared semiotic materiality.”32 Anita, Jean-Claude, and Richard must embrace their roles in the triumvirate in order to protect themselves. In Hamilton’s tenth novel, Narcissus in Chains, Anita explains the weakness they feel when they ignore the metaphysical web that now binds them: An is like your personal protection, your personal energy. When it’s healthy it keeps you safe like skin, but you get a hole in it, and infection can get inside. My aura had two holes in it, one for each of the men. I suspected that their auras had holes in them, too. Which put us all at risk. . . . The holes were there, and the only way to fill them was with Jean-Claude and Richard. (16–17) These characters can no longer fully function unless they support and protect each other—which is to say, unless they recognise the needs and desires of one another and accept them as necessities for healthy coexistence. Mutual cooperation is imperative for strength, for good health, for flourishing.

31 Haraway, When Species Meet, 42. 32 Ibid., 72.

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By merging her aura with those of her monstrous lovers (alternatively framed, in the series’ terminology, as merging the supernatural “marks” of the triumvirate bond), Anita once again risks her autonomy and identity. In this merging, the boundaries between the self and the Other dissolve. Again, the supernatural connection is also a sexual one: the boundaries that held our auras in place gave way. Think of it as if you were making love and suddenly your skin slid away, spilling you against your partner, into your partner, giving you an intimacy that was never imagined, never planned, never wanted. (48) By merging their auras as members of the triumvirate, the three characters become so deeply interconnected that they even share thoughts: It sounded more like something Jean-Claude would think, but with Richard also pressed against my body I wasn’t really sure who was thinking it. I only knew it hadn’t been me. Even before the marks had merged I’d had moments like this. Moments when their thoughts invaded mine, overrode mine. (56) In this novel, Anita explicitly confirms that (as argued in chapter 4) her earlier fear of vampiric feeding had been the fear of losing her autonomy and identity: “It had been this mingling, this loss of self, that had terrified me, sent me running for anything that would keep me whole—keep me myself” (56). But in Narcissus in Chains, Anita chooses to embrace the possibilities of what she no longer sees as consumption but as cooperation, communion, and interconnection. Uniting Anita, Jean-Claude, and Richard in a supernatural triumvirate leads to the next significant turning point in the narrative of the Anita Blake series: the emergence of a supernatural power called the ardeur. Jean-Claude creatively translates ardeur as “the fire, the burning hunger” (175). Like the medieval succubus or incubus, whoever carries the supernatural hunger of the ardeur must psychically and physically “feed” on another being’s sexual energy, and even their very life-force, during sexual acts. The ardeur can actually engender lust and arousal in both its carrier and his or her prey: it causes uncontrollable feelings of desire that must be sated through sex. The ardeur takes the sexual, psychic, and physical energy generated at the point of orgasm and uses it to boost the psychic and physical power of the person or vampire who carries it. What’s more, the ardeur must be fed regularly through sex in order for its bearer to have enough psychic and physical energy to survive. This means that if Anita refuses to feed

185 the ardeur by having sex, she will die—and her death might cause the deaths of those who, like Richard and Jean-Claude, have become metaphysically linked to her. The magical power of the ardeur thus dictates that Anita must have intercourse frequently in order to “feed.” In imbuing Anita with the ardeur, Hamilton thus controversially shifted her series’ tone and content from mystery and urban fantasy toward paranormal romance and erotica.33 As a hunger that drives Anita herself to feed on others, the ardeur is the ultimate threat to the boundaries that divide the human from the vampire. When she shares her aura with the vampire Jean-Claude and werewolf Richard, Anita receives this power from Jean-Claude, who also possesses it. In this sense—to use Haraway’s terminology— as the companion-species bond is further strengthened, it drastically coshapes those bound by it. Anita’s new need for sex is described an appetite, as a need to feed, and this appetite is distinctly vampiric. Jean-Claude explains to Anita that she is “like a vampire newly risen. Even those of us who will be masters cannot fight our hunger the first night, or the first few nights. It is overwhelming” (175). As with the young vampire who has little self-control, Anita’s need to feed from sex is rapacious.34 The ardeur also further breaks down the metaphoric boundary between vampiric feeding and sexual gratification. Jean-Claude reveals that he too possesses the power to feed from sex: “I crave you more than you will ever crave the man in your arms. I have wanted to take your body in the way that only I could take it. To feed from your sex, not from a vein. But I knew that would frighten you more than blood” (157). Both sex and blood are things that one “craves” like food; lust and bloodlust are both appetites that one must “feed.” Through the ardeur, Anita becomes a living vampire who needs to feed

33 Hamilton’s fans and antifans generally did not react well to this dramatic change in genre in her novels, nor the resultant personality changes in Anita Blake as a character. Online reviews for each of her subsequent novels reveal the discontent felt by her readership. Hamilton herself eventually addressed her critics and fans in her blog post “Dear Negative Reader.” She also referred to these fans as “trolls” and “haters” in a later blog post, complaining that negative reviews of her latest novella were posted online before it was published. Despite the fact that Hamilton transitioned her series into paranormal erotica more than fifteen years ago, the controversy over this genre shift continues in reviews of her newer books, fan and reviewer blog posts, fan forums and discussion boards, and online Q and A sessions with Hamilton herself. See Laurell K. Hamilton, “Don’t Feed the Trolls,” Laurell K Hamilton (blog), September 6, 2013, accessed April 22, 2015, http://www.laurellkhamilton.org/2013/09/dont-feed-the-trolls/. 34 It should also be acknowledged that the ardeur as a plot point creates some highly problematic issues with the representation of consent in Hamilton’s series. It remains unclear, for example, how those characters whom the heroine magically compels to have sex with her can actually give consent to participate in sex or feeding.

186 on others in order to survive. She is a vampire who does not drink blood. When Anita becomes a succubus, she thus loses her (already tenuous) claim to a “human” identity. By giving Anita a sexualised hunger of her own, Hamilton uses the ardeur to challenge her heroine’s fear of being consumed by vampiric desires. Instead, through the ardeur, vampiric feeding becomes a sexual act that creates positive bonds of acceptance, affinity, and understanding between the vampire and his (or her) lover. This representation of the vampiric bite has become common in paranormal romance fiction. As Helen Bailie argues in “Blood Ties: The Vampire Lover in the Popular Romance,” the vampiric bite can play a new, central role in forging a physical and emotional bond between vampire and lover: “In the paranormal romance, there is nothing symbolic about the taking of blood but rather it becomes a necessary element of the sexual relationship.”35 As in the Anita Blake series, in paranormal romance more generally, vampiric feeding is overtly sexually pleasurable, and it often occurs at the same time as real, physical sexual intimacy between the heroine and vampire. As Bailie states, in this way “the taking of blood or the blood exchange between the protagonists become the very elements that enhance, consolidate, and secure the couple’s romantic relationship.” 36 Vampiric feeding can strengthen romantic relationships between heroines and vampires in much the same way that sexual intercourse consolidates the tie between heroine and hero in conventional romance narratives. Perhaps most important, as Bailie argues, the vampiric bite in paranormal romance is thus “an affirmation of . . . acceptance of the vampire lover and his environment.”37 By accepting the vampire’s bite, the heroine of paranormal romance shows her acceptance of her lover’s Otherness. Further, the heroine’s acceptance of her vampire lover is also a form of self- acceptance and an acceptance of the intersectional Otherness she shares with the vampire. As discussed in chapter 4, when the heroine of the horror text recognises the monster’s Otherness, she may see at the same time a reflection of her own Otherness as a woman in patriarchal culture. In the example of Anita Blake, this Otherness as a woman intersects with the Otherness of her own supernatural powers. Anita begins as a necromancer who considers herself human, but she becomes less human and more monstrous as she becomes a human servant, then a member of a supernatural triumvirate, and then a succubus who must feed on sex to survive. Blake must learn to feed reciprocally with her supernatural lovers, and she thereby comes to better

35 Bailie, “Blood Ties,” 145. 36 Ibid., 141. 37 Ibid., 145.

187 understand monstrous desires (both appetitive and sexual). In accepting the power of the ardeur and the connections it forges between her and her lovers, Anita Blake must also accept her own posthumanity as a nonhuman participant in the significant Otherness and “webbed existence” that defines relationships between companion species.38 As acts of blood-drinking and blood-exchange are reframed as positive and fulfilling sexual acts, the vampiric bite also becomes a means of exploring female sexual desire. In paranormal romance, as Bailie argues, “the sexual act is described as sensual, unrestrained, adventurous, not bound by society’s mores, and the couple’s mutual desire frees the heroine from any inhibitions she may have.”39 A sexual relationship with a vampire is not bound by “society’s mores” precisely because it involves embracing and accepting the Other through a cross-species, interracial, and/or nonheteronormative posthuman relationship. And in transgressively embracing the Otherness of the vampire, the heroine becomes empowered to challenge the social limits imposed on her own identity and her sexuality. As Hamilton’s heroine undergoes a dramatic shift in her attitude toward her sexuality, in learning to embrace mutual consumption and communion, she must also renegotiate her feminist identity. As Blake explores her sexuality in the novels from The Killing Dance onward, she faces some of the questions posed by contemporary feminist movements about the relationship between female sexuality and feminist autonomy. In this respect, Hamilton’s series refracts an ongoing contemporary debate about what it means to be a feminist. From The Killing Dance onward, Hamilton’s representation of Blake’s sexuality might be deemed sex positive: her nonheteronormative sexual desires are thenceforth framed positively as a healthy and “natural” biological, emotional, and spiritual need. Though some second wave feminists advocated for positive attitudes toward female desire and sexuality,40 sex-positive feminism is primarily associated with third wave feminism. In Not My Mother’s Daughter: Generational Conflict and Third Wave Feminism, Astrid Henry argues that third wave feminists in particular “stress the liberating potential of sexuality.”41 Carol Siegel explicitly sees the influence of third wave feminism in Anita’s “recognition that men’s sexuality is neither monolithic nor automatically productive of enmity to women,” arguing that Hamilton’s series

38 Haraway, When Species Meet, 42, 165. 39 Bailie, “Blood Ties,” 145. 40 Henry, Not My Mother’s Daughter, 91 41 Ibid., 88.

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“breathtakingly refreshes old concepts of gendered sexuality.”42 From Narcissus in Chains onward, the series even more dramatically challenges conceptions of a gendered, monogamous heteronormative female sexuality. The ardeur transforms Blake from a character who once adhered to the patriarchal ideal of a woman saving herself sexually for marriage to one who is sexually active with multiple partners. In the later Anita Blake novels, the acceptance of monstrous, nonheteronormative Otherness exemplifies a broader turn in the urban fantasy and paranormal romance genre. As UFPR becomes increasingly popular after 2001, it becomes common for paranormal romance to explore sexual relationships involving a veritable phantasmagoria of monsters: lycanthropes and shapeshifters of all varieties, demons, angels, witches, , telepaths, gargoyles, fairies, and so on. Those series more commonly classified as urban fantasy typically follow the adventures of one heroine, who pursues love and solves mysteries—for example, Hamilton’s novels but also those of Charlaine Harris, Kim Harrison, and Patricia Briggs. Series commonly classified as paranormal romance more often follow a different heroine and hero in each subsequent novel, but their adventures are usually linked. For example, the novels of Christine Feehan follow the relationships of members of a secret sect of Carpathian vampires; the novels of J. R. Ward follow the relationships of members of the “Black Dagger Brotherhood,” a band of warrior vampires; and those of Marjorie Liu follow the relationships of the members of the Dirk & Steele detective agency.43 As I discussed in chapter 4, Marina Warner exhorts us to ask “not only ‘Who eats and who gets eaten?’ but also ‘Who consumes and who is consumed?’”44 However, Hamilton’s ardeur dismantles the conception of a feeding relationship as a binary relationship between eater and eaten, consumer and consumed, predator and prey. Through the ardeur, Hamilton creates a heroine who is no longer simply fed on by the vampire; she, in turn, feeds on him. Thus, in both Anita Blake and Jean-Claude, she can represent “good” vampires who feed. As UFPR develops as a genre, abstinence from feeding is no longer a straightforward means of distinguishing between good and evil

42 Carol Siegel, “Female Heterosexual Sadism: The Final Feminist Taboo in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Anita Blake Vampire Hunter Series,” in Third Wave Feminism and Television: Jane Puts it in a Box, ed. Merri Lisa Johnson (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 83, 58. 43 Some authors also combine these approaches. For example, Kelley Armstrong’s Women of the Otherworld series has a number of different protagonists, but some of them are the focus of more than one book within the series. 44 Warner, Monsters of Our Own Making, 15.

189 vampires. Vampiric feeding ceases to be only a question of who eats whom. It is a question, as Derrida argues, of how to eat well: The moral question is thus not, nor has it ever been: should one eat or not eat, eat this and not that, the living or the nonliving, man or animal, but since one must eat in any case and since it is and tastes good to eat, and since there’s no other definition of the food (du bien), how for goodness’ sake should one eat well (bien manger)? And what does this imply? What is eating? . . . The Good can also be eaten. And it must be eaten well.45 In the posthuman world, the vampire must eat. This vampire can eat well, because it is no longer by nature an “evil” vampire. It has become a good posthuman—as has the heroine, who is now free to explore her own posthuman desires and appetites.

Webs of Love and Lust: When Supernatural Species Meet A posthumanist analysis of the construction of gender intersects with criticism in materialism, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, and the feminist animal rights movement. Early second wave criticism by feminist writers such as Simone de Beauvoir analysed and often sought to distance women from their materialist associations with nature and the animal.46 However, feminist criticism from the 1990s onward has made a case for new unities and solidarities between women and nonhuman others as similarly oppressed, appropriated, and marginalised entities.47 Posthumanist feminism links the breakdown of the boundaries that divide the self from the Other with feminist criticism of historical discourses that have sought to marginalise women as Other by denying them full human agency and subjectivity. As Braidotti and Graham argue, monstrosity is one of the historical discourses that aligns women with Otherness.48 In particular, both critics identify how “monstrous” birth defects have historically linked female gender and sexuality to monstrous Otherness. Graham argues that “the permeability of the limits of the female body . . . contribute[s] to the anxiety of a patriarchal mindset. Women’s own inescapable

45 Jacques Derrida, “‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Who Comes After the Subject?, eds. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 115. 46 de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 3, 55. 47 See, for example, Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan, eds., Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations (Duke University Press: Durham, 1995). 48 For example, see Rosi Braidotti, “Signs of Wonder and Traces of Doubt,” in Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs: Feminist Confrontations with Science, Medicine and Cyberspace, eds. Nina Lykke and Rosi Braidotti (London: Zed Books, 1996), 139.

190 bodiliness . . . puts her beyond the pale of humanity as defined in terms of the rational incorporeal subject.”49 She thus outlines how the female gender has historically been reduced to a body that functions in ways Other to that of the rational, ethical human man. Speaking from both a critical position and her own lived experience, Braidotti demonstrates how posthumanist and feminist criticism together may provide a means of critiquing the Othering of women. She writes: In the political economy of phallogocentrism and of anthropocentric humanism, . . . my sex fell on the side of ‘Otherness,’ understood as pejorative difference, or as being-worth-less-than. The becoming- posthuman speaks to my feminist self, partly because my sex, historically speaking, never quite made it into full humanity, so my allegiance to that category is at best negotiable.50 Braidotti here argues that posthumanism offers a way of making sense of her own self- conscious and subjective experience as an Othered woman who is defined as “less-than” fully human in a patriarchal society. Moreover, by suggesting that her “allegiance” with the category of humanity is negotiable, Braidotti emphasises that feminist posthumanism can offer a means of political resistance through solidarity with the posthuman Other. As a feminist, she seeks to embrace and redefine the position of the posthuman Other in a way that celebrates its potential for multiplicity and diversity.51 The posthuman heroines of UFPR engage with monstrous Otherness in new and different ways. Just as Anita Blake begins as a necromancer who can raise the dead, other heroines in UFPR often possess supernatural powers that set them apart from “normal” humans. And some, of course, are monsters in their own right, as in those series that focus on shapeshifter heroines (for example, by Patricia Briggs, Kelley Armstrong, Carrie Vaughn, and Faith Hunter). Through her supernatural powers, the UFPR heroine’s gendered Otherness intersects with her monstrous Otherness. Consequently, as Bailie argues of this heroine in “Blood Ties,” “much like the vampire who has no place in the world . . . her ability also defines her as Other, thereby relegating her to the boundaries of society.”52 The heroine’s own double monstrosity, both gendered and supernatural, allows her more easily to empathise with supernatural

49 Graham, Representations of the Post/Human, 52–53. 50 Braidotti, The Posthuman, 80–81. 51 Ibid., 48–49. 52 Bailie, “Blood Ties,” 144.

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Others such as vampires. And through this empathy, new posthuman relationships become possible. Heroines who can recognise and accept their own Otherness and the Otherness of those around them can choose to make new connections across species, race, and gender. And in the posthuman world, these connections allow the heroine and the vampire to prevail and thrive on their own terms. Hamilton’s series is particularly ground-breaking as a paranormal romance text that explores the positive potential of vampiric feeding beyond a monogamous relationship between the heroine and the vampire (or other monster). A traditional romance narrative would see Anita end happily-ever-after in monogamy with one of her suitors. But Hamilton rejects monogamy, instead expanding the number of Blake’s sexual partners as the series progresses. Blake needs more than one lover to sate the hunger of the ardeur, and in the Anita Blake novels released after 2000, the ardeur not only drives the character to physically embrace the monsters but to embrace a polyamorous lifestyle. Hamilton uses polyamory to further break down the binary relationship between predator and prey, or who consumes and who is consumed. Anita Blake cannot play a role in this kind of binary because she loves many, feeds from many, and feeds many herself. Through Blake’s ardeur, her own need to feed on others, she enters into an increasingly complex (and increasingly ridiculous) web of posthuman relationships. And in these relationships, she no longer fears the loss of her identity but instead recognises and embraces the benefits of interconnection. The magical connections forged by the ardeur bring Blake sexual satisfaction through the exploration of her transgressive desires; they also bring her new posthuman relationships of affection, friendship, and love. Blake gains supernatural power by feeding with her lovers, and they too gain in power by feeding her and feeding from her. A brief (insomuch as is possible) list of Anita Blake’s various lovers, drawn from the novels that follow Narcissus in Chains, demonstrates how Hamilton uses the ardeur to forge an extensive posthuman network for her heroine. In Narcissus in Chains, under the influence of her out-of-control ardeur powers, Anita accidentally forges permanent feeding bonds with visiting wereleopard “king” Micah and the submissive wereleopard Nathaniel. In Cerulean Sins (2003), Anita’s psychic access to Jean-Claude’s feelings for his former male lover, the vampire Asher, lead her to begin dating Asher in a ménage-a- trois relationship with Jean-Claude. Anita also adopts another vampire lover, Damian, in this novel. Through her necromantic powers, Damian becomes Anita’s “vampire servant” (a reversal of the usual human-servant bond). In Incubus Dreams (2004), Anita

192 begins a friends-with-benefits relationship with the werewolf Jason and an ongoing sexual relationship with another vampire, Requiem. In Danse Macabre (2006) she begins feeding regularly on the vampire London. From Blood Noir (2008) onward, Anita also begins to collect male weretigers as regular lovers, including characters Crispin (Blood Noir), Alex (Blood Noir), Cynric (Skin Trade, 2009), Domino (Skin Trade), and Ethan (Hit List, 2011). In Flirt (2010), Anita uses the ardeur to rob a werelion kidnapper of his free will, wielding it to inflict not only lust but true love for her. Using the ardeur as a weapon allows Anita to rescue herself from the kidnapping attempt. However, the power of the ardeur rebounds, and in making this werelion love her, Anita must love him in return. In Bullet (2010), Anita acquires her first female lover, the weretiger Black Jade.53 In addition to these fifteen semiregular lovers, throughout the series Anita Blake also remains committed to her relationship with Jean-Claude and continues a fraught on-again, off- again relationship with the werewolf Richard. Blake also has a number of casual sexual- feeding encounters and even engenders an orgy or two when she loses control of the ardeur.54 Her supernatural powers of sex and love thus connect multiple species in a complex web of relationships. The supernatural immunity of Anita’s vampiric and lycanthropic lovers ensures that this network is physically healthy, unchallenged by the communicable sexual diseases so often evoked by vampirism in precedent vampire literature. For example, in The Harlequin, Blake notes that her wereleopard lover Nathaniel cannot catch sexually transmitted diseases: “The lycanthropy killed everything that could injure the host body. It kept him healthy” (38). The undead vampires in this series are also immune to natural diseases, as is Anita as a vampire’s human servant. As noted in the introduction to this thesis, vampirism in Stoker’s Dracula (1897) has been linked to syphilis, and contemporary texts often continue to connect vampirism with HIV/AIDS as a sexually transmitted disease. 55 However, in the Anita Blake series, polyamory and sexual adventurousness generally pose no risk to Blake’s or her lovers’ (sexual) health. In connecting vampires with lycanthropes (and other supernatural monsters), Anita’s relationships with the supernatural communities of her world are not only

53 Laurell K. Hamilton, Blood Noir (New York: Berkley, 2008); Laurell K. Hamilton, Skin Trade (New York: Berkley, 2009); Laurell K. Hamilton, Hit List (New York: Berkley, 2011); Laurell K. Hamilton, Flirt (New York: Berkley, 2010); Laurell K. Hamilton, Bullet (New York: Berkley, 2010). 54 Again, in situations like this, the series offers a problematic representation of what it means to consent as a participant in supernatural sexual activity. 55 See Halberstam, Skin Shows; Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves; George E. Haggerty. “Anne Rice and the Queering of Culture”; Aldana Reyes, “Who Ordered the Hamburger with AIDS?”

193 romantic but political. As Anita becomes more intimately connected to both vampires and lycanthropes, she in turn connects these communities to one another. The triumvirate that she forms with Jean-Claude and Richard cements the interconnection between the werewolf and vampire communities. In Narcissus in Chains, when she metaphysically joins with Richard and Jean-Claude, Anita not only inherits Jean-Claude’s incubus but a form of Richard’s “beast,” his inner animal spirit. In this text, Anita also contracts a latent form of lycanthropy, becoming a carrier for the lycanthropy virus.56 Through her connection to Richard and the lycanthropy virus, Anita soon carries a menagerie of psychic wereanimal “beasts” inside her, though she cannot change form physically.57 Narcissus In Chains thus marks a turning point in Anita’s relationship to both the vampire and the lycanthrope communities. Through her psychic beasts and through her many sexual relationships, which are necessitated by and forged through the power of the ardeur, Anita forms romantic and political connections to a number of different wereanimal communities, including werewolves, wereleopards, weretigers, werelions, werehyenas, wererats, and shapeshifting swans. Anita’s lycanthropic powers also impact (and are impacted by) her sexual relationships. As noted above, in Narcissus in Chains, when Anita has sexual intercourse with the wereleopard king Micah to feed the ardeur (123–25, 152–60), this act forges a bond between the two, making her his supernatural mate. Blake thus finds herself both leopard queen to Micah and wolf queen to Richard. Moreover, in order to control the psychic beasts within her and prevent herself from shapeshifting physically, Anita must find her own “animal to call” (just as Richard is Jean-Claude’s animal to call) from each species she carries within her, which again include werewolf, wereleopard, weretiger, werelion, werehyena, and wererat. Anita generally takes new lovers to fill these roles, lovers who are able to serve as both food for the ardeur and a channel for her inner beasts. Finally, because there are multiple subspecies of weretigers, Anita acquires a metaphysical beast from each. Because of these multiple weretiger bonds, she is given the title “Mistress of Tigers” and gains the ability to channel the powers of each tiger

56 This is confirmed in a later novel, Micah (New York: Jove, 2006), and becomes a recurring plot point in subsequent Anita Blake novels. 57 However, in Dead Ice (2015), Anita is eventually able to share her power over multiple wereanimals with her wereleopard king, Micah, allowing him to change form into a weretiger. This too has political ramifications for the lycanthrope community: by this point in the series, Micah has become the leader of a multispecies coalition of lycanthropes, and his political power is strengthened both through his romantic relationship with Anita and the new supernatural powers she gives him.

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“clan” (subspecies). Anita’s lycanthropy thus also facilitates her polyamory by requiring various new sexual partners.

The Posthuman Ethics of Eating Together In fictional worlds where heroines are monsters and good vampires feed on humans, who are the bad guys, and what is evil? Quite simply, the bad guys are bad posthumans. They are vampires, humans, or other entities who refuse the connections of love, friendship, and respect, and who feed without consideration or respect for the rights of others. Bailie also notes how paranormal romances still differentiate “good” vampires from “evil” ones through vampiric feeding: The conflict between the vampire hero and others of his kind is often based on their contrasting views on the function of humans. To other vampires, humans are simply ‘blood slaves’ who should be under their control and whose sole purpose is to supply blood for their survival. For the vampire hero, humans . . . have a right to coexist independently, without fear. (143) This is the same ethical conclusion that George R. R. Martin’s Joshua reaches in Fevre Dream (1982), as analysed in chapter 2 of this thesis. In contrast to earlier vampire literature, in much UFPR it is not the act of blood- drinking that condemns a vampire as evil; instead, judgements of good and evil depend on whether this act is respectful and mutually beneficial. At the same time, for Anita Blake, and for many other heroines in UFPR, to be ethically good means accepting that Others—vampires and other monsters—have needs and rights in the posthuman world, and learning to respond accordingly. In this posthuman world, the lives of humans and monstrous Others are interconnected socially, politically, ecologically, and ethically, through mutual exchange, sharing, and respect. Through Anita Blake’s vampiric ability to feed on others, and the polyamorous relationships it encourages, Hamilton forges webs that give her the supernatural power necessary to defeat the bad guys—those who threaten the posthuman community by feeding unethically. For example, in the novels written between 2001 and 2011, Anita’s supernatural and sexual ties in the posthuman polis are essential in her eventual defeat of the series’ most powerful villain: the Mother of All Darkness (or Marmée Noir), a terrifying dark entity believed by the characters to be the first vampire ever created. In The Harlequin, Jean-Claude’s community is investigated by the Vampire Council, the governing body that rules vampires throughout the world. The council

195 sends a troupe of spies and assassins called the Harlequin to investigate Anita and Jean- Claude’s growing power base in St. Louis. However, the Harlequin was originally formed by the Mother of Darkness to police her vampires, and therefore, as the Mother of Darkness awakens, the Harlequin go rogue. It is revealed that their true motive in coming to St. Louis is to take over its supernatural community, on the orders of the Mother. At the novel’s climax, Blake and her allies square off against the Harlequin in a metaphysical battle. In this battle, it is Blake’s good intentions and her willingness to respond to the needs of others that mark her as “good” rather than “evil.” The Harlequin’s threat is not simply that they will take power but that they will destroy the bonds within Anita’s supernatural community. For example, the Harlequin attack Anita and her allies in front of a vampire congregation, and the vampire Columbine attempts to psychically possess the congregation in order to feed upon its members: “Her power cut through the vampires like a burning sword. Where it touched, they screamed and the ties that bound them to me, to Jean-Claude, seared away” (382). However, with the ardeur, Anita is able to restore these bonds. “She had showed them torture, fire, to burn and destroy them,” Anita says. “I offered a kiss. I offered gentleness. I offered love. Columbine’s power died under a wave of kindness. A wave of touch, and chaste kisses. A wave of offering help” (383). Feeling Blake’s power, a member of the vampire congregation calls her “Master” (382), suggesting that like Columbine, she might use her power to claim others as her servants or slaves. But Blake deploys her power ethically. Not only does she offer love, kindness, and help, but she acknowledges that she is also willing to share in the pain of those to whom she extends her power: “Love isn’t absence of pain,” she narrates, “it’s a hand to hold while you’re going through it” (383). Writing of “instrumental relations,” “relations of unequal use” between humans and animals, Haraway suggests that relationships between companion species mean “sharing suffering” in a way that is “material, practical, and consequential, the sort of engagement that keeps the inequality from becoming commonsensical or taken as obviously okay.”58 Blake is able to take control of the vampire crowd and to still be a good master because she is willing to engage in shared suffering, to understand the feelings of those to whom she relates and to respond accordingly. Indeed, it is a recurring trope throughout the series that Anita Blake is

58 Haraway, When Species Meet, 77.

196 willing to experience physical and emotional suffering to protect those whom she loves but also those who are simply weaker than her. Blake’s power alone is not enough to defeat Columbine and the other members of the Harlequin. Columbine’s most threatening power is that she can instill and feed on doubt in those around her: Dear God, she fed on it, and she could cause it, just like the vamps who fed off lust and fear. I was suddenly overwhelmed with the certainty that we would lose. Everyone was going to die, and there was nothing I could do about it. (386) While Anita’s power forges positive bonds of love and affection, Columbine’s are oppositional, engendering the negative emotions of doubt and fear. When Anita and her allies are nearly overwhelmed by these emotions, it is her metaphysical bonds, the ties that bind these allies together, that save them. By physically touching Micah (her wereleopard king), Nathaniel (her wereleopard to call), and Damian (her vampire servant), Anita feels the trust that her lovers place in her, and her doubts fade. When the four of them then touch Jean-Claude and Asher (Anita’s vampire lover and Jean- Claude’s second-in-command), they psychically share their certainty in Anita’s innate goodness (386–88). As with many of Anita’s supernatural powers, touch becomes a key means of acknowledging and responding to the Other. Haraway writes that touch ramifies and shapes accountability. Accountability, caring for, being affected, and entering into responsibility are not ethical abstractions. Touch . . . peppers its partners with attachment sites for world making.59 The real, physical connection of touch necessitates a response to the Other that evokes accountability for those whom this touch affects. For Anita Blake, touch is a means of caring, of being affected. By touching those for whom she feels responsible and those whom she loves (who are often one and the same), she gains physical and supernatural strength, which is in turn also shared through her touch. Hamilton’s series bears out Haraway’s argument that touch between the self and the Other can remake reality by generating a response, as it does in this scene in The Harlequin, when physical touch stops the paralysing doubts felt by Hamilton’s characters and allows them to act. Variations of this scene are enacted again and again in Hamilton’s novels: when characters lose control of their bloodlust, supernatural beast(s), physical bodies, or even

59 Ibid., 36.

197 their emotions, the physical touch of an ally sparks an emotional and metaphysical response that allows them to regain self-control. In this paranormal erotica, touch is not merely titillating—touch saves the day. As Blake and her allies face off with the Harlequin, Richard, Blake’s werewolf king and (now) ex-fiancée, is revealed as the weakness in her metaphysical web. Blake needs to use the power of the ardeur to control the crowd and defeat the Harlequin, but Richard refuses to share in this power. He suggests that Anita cannot be a good person because she has become a monster by using the power of the ardeur: If what I believe is right, if what you say you believe is right, then your cross should not burn. You have broken so many commandments. You’ve murdered, tortured, fucked, but your cross still works. I don’t understand that. (391) Richard is here unable to understand why God would protect Anita; in this series, a religious item such as a cross will, in the hands of a true believer, glow to protect its bearer from vampires. Anita responds, “You’re saying I’m evil, so God should have turned his back on me?” She goes on to say, “Maybe God isn’t the sex police, Richard . . . Is that really all you think of God? . . . Or is it that sex is easy to worry about, easy to avoid, and the whole love-your-neighbour-as-you-love-yourself thing that’s hard?” (391– 92) This response suggests that for Blake the ability to love and respect one’s neighbours—be they vampires, lycanthropes, or other species—is what defines a “good person.” Seen in this light, feeding on her neighbours is not necessarily evil. Anita needs to feed on sex; vampires need to feed on blood. The problem is thus not whether feeding on others is evil, but how one can feed on drastically different Others in an ethical manner. Writing on interspecies relationships, Haraway suggests that, in the posthuman world, “the problem is to learn to live responsibly within the multiplicitous necessity and labour of killing.” For Anita Blake, who kills vampires for a living and feeds on those around her to survive, feeding is part of the “quest” for “the capacity to respond in relentless historical, nonteleological, multispecies contingency.”60 Feeding ethically means to feed responsibly, which for Anita Blake is to feed with love, respect, and the ability to respond to the needs and desires of the Other, even if they may not align with her own.

60 Haraway, When Species Meet, 80.

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Richard’s refusal to acknowledge that goodness is contingent upon a situational response to the Other means that he cannot thrive within the web of posthuman interconnections that Anita has forged. The metaphysical bonds between Anita, Jean- Claude, and Richard are weakened by Richard’s refusal to respond to the needs of those with whom he is interconnected. Jean-Claude tells him, “[Columbine] found our weakness. The weakness that has always been there from the first.” When Richard retorts, “You mean me,” Jean-Claude corrects him: “I mean our triumvirate” (393). Because of their posthuman interconnection, Richard’s weakness is a weakness for all those with whom he is interlinked. Nonetheless, Anita and her allies are able to defeat the Harlequin by calling on the vampiric power of the ardeur and so drawing on the bonds of love between them: “Love, love to raise their faces and make them look at us. Love to help them to their feet, love and our hands to steady them, to help dry their tears” (399). For Anita Blake, to love is to look and to see (“to raise their faces and make them look at us”) and to respond with touch and connection (“our hands to steady them”). This posthuman response to Otherness is made possible only by the connections that the ardeur has forged between Anita, the vampires, and the lycanthropes. Anita’s beneficence is further reinforced by the allusions made here to two biblical passages. The first is to 1 John 4:18, which speaks of “perfect love” that “casted out fear,” just as Anita’s ability to share her feelings of love with others casts out the fear and doubt generated by Columbine. The second allusion is to Revelation 21:4, which states, “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain.” Through the ardeur and the interconnections it forges, Anita can share a righteous love that heals and unites her allies. These same interconnections are needed to defeat the Mother of Darkness herself. When Anita and her allies fight against Columbine and the Harlequin, the Mother of Darkness is drawn to the power struggle and psychically attempts to possess Anita. Again, it is only through the ardeur that Anita and Jean-Claude can hold her at bay: “Jean-Claude raised the ardeur, in a breath, in the feel of his mouth on mine. . . . I was suddenly starving. Marmee Noir screamed, ‘No!’” (414). The attempt at psychic possession is obliterated when Jean-Claude and Anita share their vampiric hunger. Vampiric hunger is thus proven to be a positive force that unites these characters and empowers them against evil.

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When Anita Blake ultimately defeats the Mother of Darkness in Hit List, this too is achieved by drawing on the posthuman network comprising her allies. In this book, Blake uses a psychic power that she has “borrowed” from another master vampire, the power to feed on life itself (305–6).61 Blake struggles in another psychic battle with the Mother: “the Darkness crashed into me, and for a moment I thought I would drown in it” (306). Jean-Claude tells her, “We cannot drown if we drink the sea” (306), which inspires her to reach out to him through their supernatural bond. When Anita connects with Jean-Claude, she realises that “he was there, and he offered me himself, his power to help me stand and remember that I was a vampire, too” (306). Blake here explicitly acknowledges that she has become a vampire herself—has become fully posthuman and monstrously Other—and that she can use her ability to feed on others as a force for good. To defeat the Mother of Darkness, Blake then psychically connects with the many weretigers to whom she has bonded, as well as reaching out to physically touch those allies who are physically present. Blake uses the psychic and physical posthuman connections forged by the ardeur to share the burden of the Mother’s power among her allies. Through love and through positive and responsive touch, Blake is able to devour her enemy: “We let her pour her scary, lonely, insane dark into us, and we drank it down with our comforting hands, our bodies” (308). The “we” here, as in Jean-Claude’s claim above that “we cannot drown if we drink the sea,” suggests that the act of vampiric feeding can be a communal act, one that can support and sustain the posthuman community. Through this communal feeding, Blake destroys the Mother of Darkness: “I ate the darkness” (309). Through the bonds of love and lust forged by feeding the ardeur, she is able to defeat her biggest threat: “It was, in the end, about love. The love of a lover, of friends, and of partners. . . . I swam in the darkness of the ocean on a raft of hands, and bodies, and giving a damn what happened to them all” (308). Through Anita Blake and her supernatural community, Hamilton’s series explores one of the possible models for ethical posthuman relationality. Through her own monstrous need to feed, Blake becomes the centre of a posthuman community in which the individual is inseparable from a complex network of interspecies relationships. Her supernatural, posthuman web affords its members the power to share their very life energy. When one member is injured, all are weakened; when one member gains power, all become more powerful. Hamilton’s novels are thus affirmatively posthuman,

61 This occurs in Obsidian Butterfly (2000).

200 depicting a world in which the destabilisation of the boundaries between the human self and the Other is radically and mutually beneficial. In Hamilton’s world, as Haraway writes of companion species, “to be in love means to be worldly, to be in connection with significant otherness and signifying others, on many scales, in layers of locals and globals, in ramifying webs. . . . Once one has been in touch, obligations and possibilities for response change.”62 Far from being vampire victims, from the late 1990s onward, the heroines of UFPR confront their fears of being consumed and are consequently able to discover the joys and powers of communion. In this genre, the ethical boundary between good and evil is no longer determined by who eats whom, who consumes whom: it is decided by vampires and heroines who eat together, and who eat well. As Haraway writes: No community works without food, without eating together. . . . In eating we are most inside the differential relationalities that make us who and what we are and that materialize what we must do if response and regard are to have any meaning personally and politically. There is no way to eat and not to kill, no way to eat and not to become with other mortal beings to whom we are accountable. . . . The practice of regard and response has no preset limits, but giving up human exceptionalism has consequences that require one to . . . cast oneself with some ways of life and not others in the never settled biopolitics of entangled species.63 For the vampires and heroines of urban fantasy and paranormal romance, feeding and eating together in the posthuman world means recognising that practices of feeding bring together the self and the Other. Self and Other are no longer defined oppositionally but through those “differential relationalities.” The self and the Other become “entangled,” or interconnected, through feeding, resulting in the need to find new, posthuman ways of interrelating ethically. For vampires, this means that drinking blood and draining life are no longer necessarily evil, predatory practices. Instead, vampiric feeding offers the potential for mutuality, sharing, response, and love.

62 Haraway, When Species Meet, 97. 63 Ibid., 294.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Conclusion: UFPR Today, the Post-Apocalyptic Vampire Narrative, and Going Forward into the Posthuman Future

The Vampire in the New Millennium The conclusion to this thesis broadens the scope of my analysis of the ways in which representations of the vampire have developed between 2000 and 2015. In doing so, it will identify in more detail some of the broader trends and conventions that have emerged in vampire literature in this period, as well as offer a brief analysis of representations of the vampire that do not fit within the limits of the popular urban fantasy and paranormal romance (UFPR) genre. First, this chapter will build on the genre study developed in chapter 3 of this thesis. By outlining in greater depth some of the conventions of the UFPR genre that have become popular since 2000, it becomes possible to offer a broader overview of the form this genre has now taken. Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series (1993–) remains a valuable touchstone in this genre overview because, as I have previously noted, as this series has unfolded, its shifts in focus and theme have echoed many of the ways in which the UFPR genre as a whole has changed. While in the years between 1990 to 2010, UFPR became firmly established as a genre in its own right, whether it will continue to be popular and how it will evolve remains unknown. Without making a firm prediction, this chapter nevertheless also considers the ways in which the relationship between UFPR and vampire literature, as well as the broader relationship between UFPR and popular culture, might continue to develop. Finally, in the last sections of this chapter, I will offer a brief textual analysis of the Strain trilogy, a key work from one of the major competing trajectories in vampire fiction, the post-apocalyptic vampire narrative (PAVN). As discussed in chapter 5, after 2000, popular vampire literature has divided into two strands, with each representing the vampire in ways very different from the other. The vampires found in UFPR and

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PAVNs suggest two quite distinct cultural responses to the posthuman: UFPR texts like the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series explore an affirmative posthumanist vision of the destabilization of the boundaries between the human and the Other; PAVNs suggest that this destabilization is disastrous for humankind. While (as discussed in chapter 5) both UFPR and PAVNs emerge in response to the possibilities of and anxieties attendant upon the posthuman condition, this chapter will argue that the vampire of PAVN also emerges in response to the popular genre tropes established in UFPR. Post- apocalyptic vampire narratives thus not only refract anxieties about the posthuman— they also reject the sympathetic, romantic, sexualized vampires popularised in urban fantasy and paranormal romance.

Genre Conventions in UFPR after 2000 The genre shifts effected by Hamilton in the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series, particularly from Narcissus in Chains (2001) onward, emerge as part of the broader developments that occur in UFPR after 2000. For example, prior to the 1990s, the vampire generally did not share the fictional world of the text with other monsters. Hamilton’s early Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter novels, and other series such as Tanya Huff’s Blood books (1991–1997), L. J. Smith’s Night World novels (1996–1998), and Whedon’s television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) and Angel (1994–2004), are innovative in their representation of the vampire as one among a number of supernatural monsters that together inhabit a fictional world. In this sense, from the 1990s onward, the UFPR genre has significantly transformed the vampire by situating it in new posthuman worlds in which vampires, werewolves, and a phantasmagoria of other monsters coexist together as a community (either secretly, in an underground supernatural world, or openly, as part of an everyday- supernatural world like that pioneered by Hamilton). As Catherine Spooner notes, “the appearance of so many vampires seeking to live amicably” with others “during the first decade of the twenty-first century remains a striking cultural phenomenon.”1 It has now become commonplace for the vampire to be represented as one species in a diverse supernatural community, and some of their kind have become key figures in a posthuman polis. This kind of supernatural community has become so popular in genre fiction, film, and television that it is easy to forget it was once an innovative

1 Catherine Spooner, Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 83–84.

203 development (one that originated within the UFPR genre) and that it represents an extraordinary shift for vampire literature.2 In particular, the everyday-supernatural fictional world, as first seen in Hamilton’s Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series, has now become a common genre trope. This world model can be found in popular series including Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files (2000–), Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries (2001–2013), Kim Harrison’s Hollows series (2004–2014), Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty Norville series (2005– 2015), Patricia Briggs’s Mercy Thompson (2006–) and Alpha and Omega series (2007–), Ilona Andrews’s Kate Daniels novels (2007–), Chloe Neill’s Chicagoland Vampires series (2009–2017), Faith Hunter’s Jane Yellowrock series (2009–), Suzanne Johnson’s Sentinels of New Orleans series (2012–),3 and Anne Bishop’s Others series (2013–).4 In all of these fiction series, supernatural monsters (such as vampires, shapeshifters, witches, wizards, fairies, demons, and angels) openly share the world with humans. Further, Hamilton’s model for an everyday-supernatural world has been popularised for a more general audience by the television series True Blood (2008–2014). Adapted by Alan Ball from Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries, True Blood is the first

2 Earlier texts in which monsters run amok together include the Universal monster films of the late 1930s and 1940s. Films like Son of Frankenstein (directed by Rowland V. Lee, Universal Pictures, 1939), Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman (directed by Roy William Neill, Universal Pictures, 1943), and House of Frankenstein (directed by Erle C. Kenton, Universal Pictures, 1944) combine characters from Universal’s earlier, successful films: Dracula, Frankenstein, Frankenstein’s monster, the Wolf Man, and so on. These films were also parodied by Abbott and Costello, beginning with Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (directed by Charles Barton, Universal, 1948). More recently, Stephen Sommers’s 2004 film Van Helsing attempted a mash-up of Universal monsters in one film. And in 2017, Universal Pictures released the first installment of what is expected to be a Universal monsters “cinematic universe,” The Mummy (directed by Alex Kurtzman, Universal Pictures, 2017). For more on this cinematic universe, see Rosie Fletcher, “The ‘Dark Universe’ Explained: The Mummy, Bride of Frankenstein, the Invisible Man and All the Universal Monsters,” Digital Spy, May 26, 2017, accessed May 29, 2017, http://www.digitalspy.com/movies/the-mummy/feature/a829209/universal-dark-universe-the- mummy-bride-of-frankenstein-the-invisible-man-trailer-release-date/, and Mia Galuppo, “Universal Takes ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ Off Release Schedule,” Hollywood Reporter, October 5, 2017, accessed October 5, 2017, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/universal- takes-bride-frankenstein-release-schedule-1046105. Alan Moore’s graphic novel League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (3 volumes, 1999–2013), which was adapted into a film of the same name (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, directed by Stephen Norrington, 20th Century Fox, 2003), brings together various monsters and literary characters in the setting of the Victorian period. Television series Penny Dreadful (created by John Logan, Showtime, 2014–2016) does the same. It should be noted, however, that all of these texts are markedly different from UFPR. They combine and recombine the same specific, well-known monsters from Gothic literature. Such texts do not suggest that broad community groups of these monsters coexist with one another and with humans, as is the case in UFPR. 3 Suzanne Johnson, Sentinels of New Orleans series, 5 novels (2012–). 4 Anne Bishop, Others series, 5 novels (2013–).

204 film or television text to represent a posthuman community, composed of humans and multiple supernatural species, in an everyday-supernatural world.5 As I noted in the genre study developed in chapter 3, True Blood shows the extent to which UFPR functions as a transmedia genre: it was adapted from an ongoing fiction series (which was reissued with tie-in paperback covers, thus connecting the books with the television series); it has generated a graphic-novel spin-off; and it was publicised using viral- and transmedia-marketing campaigns online as well as in print, poster, billboard, and other media formats. True Blood’s advertising campaign explicitly played with the “everyday” nature of the everyday-supernatural to promote its fictional world in which vampires and humans coexist. As Ndalianis argues, “in the shift to transmedia expansions that pretend that vampires are indeed part of our everyday reality,” audiences are invited to “take delight in the playful fiction that insists that, like in the series, vampires are part of our community.”6 True Blood’s transmedia campaign thus enacted precisely the kind of play between the supernatural and the mundane that made Hamilton’s and Harris’s fictional series innovative. As in Hamilton’s Anita Blake series, in UFPR as a whole, interconnection between the self and the Other in the posthuman polis often begins at the level of personal interaction. The protagonists of these series must interact with those who are Other, and therefore must learn how to respond (in Haraway’s sense of the term) to Otherness in new ways. As in the early fiction of Hamilton and Huff, and in Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, protagonists in UFPR remain predominantly female. The roles of the heroine include those of medium, mediator, defender, investigator, transgressor, and lover. The personal lives of protagonists such as Hamilton’s Anita Blake, Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse, Harrison’s Rachel Morgan, and Briggs’s Mercy Thompson are a microcosm of the broader worlds they inhabit: their personal and romantic relationships explore new, affirmative ways of understanding the relationship between the self and the Other in the posthuman world. These relationships are often forged through love and sex. Romantic and sexual discoveries like those made by Anita Blake are now common in many UFPR narratives.

5 The films The Breed (2001) and Perfect Creature (directed by Glenn Standring, 20th Century Fox, 2007) are both set in dystopian alternative realities where vampires openly coexist with humans. However, again, they do not represent vampires as one of many supernatural species that coexist together in the world of the text. The Underworld film franchise has also moved toward an everyday-supernatural world model in its two latest instalments, Underworld: Awakening (2012) and Underworld: Blood Wars (directed by Anna Foerster, Screen Gems, 2017). 6 For more on True Blood’s as a transmedia text, see Ndalianis, Horror Sensorium, 176–85.

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Hamilton’s work remains highly innovative in its representation of a polyamorous heroine. Her other ongoing paranormal erotica series, the Merry Gentry series (2000–), also has a polyamorous supernatural heroine as its protagonist: a fairy princess whose numerous sexual relationships consolidate her political power.7 In recent years, other UFPR series have also featured a vampire-like succubus as their protagonist. For example, Richelle Mead’s Georgina Kincaid series (2007–2011) has a demon-succubus as its protagonist, and television series Lost Girl (2010–2015) follows the adventures of a bisexual fairy-succubus.8 However, though the protagonists in the Georgina Kincaid series and in Lost Girl must satisfy their need to feed on sex with multiple sexual partners, they nonetheless both desire monogamy. Anita Blake and Merry Gentry do not, and Hamilton’s two series remain innovative in representing a heroine who does not ultimately seek monogamy. Polyamorous or not, the heroine in UFPR generally is represented as a sexually desirable woman who may liaise with and choose from a number of appealing, supernatural lovers. It could be argued that the romantic and sexual affairs of the heroines in this genre thus offer a means of representing and addressing female desire, albeit in a more conservative way than in the polyamorous model developed by Hamilton. Sometimes this occurs in the form of a love triangle, for example in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga (2005–2008), where human Bella Swan is attracted to both the vampire Edward Cullen and werewolf Jacob Black, or in the CW’s The Vampire Diaries (2009–2017), where Elena Gilbert, who begins as a human but becomes a vampire herself, is torn between two vampire brothers, Stefan and Damon Salvatore. In other series, the heroine experiments with a succession of romantic affairs. For example, Buffy of Buffy the Vampire Slayer explores her sexual desire in very different ways with the vampires Angel and Spike (the former encounter facilitating Buffy’s sexual awakening as a teen and the latter suggesting a lesson in developing emotionally healthy adult relationships). And in Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries, heroine Sookie Stackhouse is romantically and/or sexually involved, in rapid succession, with a vampire, a shapeshifter, another vampire, a werewolf, and a weretiger. These supernatural love affairs offer Sookie the opportunity to explore her sexual desires with multiple male partners. The distinction between these and Hamilton’s series is that Hamilton’s heroine explores these desires with multiple partners concurrently and even simultaneously.

7 Laurell K. Hamilton, Merry Gentry series, 9 novels (2000–). 8 Richelle Mead, Georgina Kincaid series, 6 novels (2007–2011); Lost Girl, created by Michelle Lovretta, Showcase (2010–2015).

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As with Anita Blake, the transgressive female sexuality of the paranormal romance heroine is linked to her new understanding and embrace of Otherness, which she finds within the monster and within herself. The UFPR heroine’s abilities are almost always something out of the ordinary and usually supernatural. As Ndalianis notes, in paranormal romance “the female protagonist takes different forms: she may be human but also have special abilities (as a private investigator, vampire hunter, necromancer or telepath) or be a paranormal creature herself.”9 Similarly, Bailie outlines how the heroine in paranormal romance is “set apart from society,” and that “the element that differentiates her from other women is that she is endowed with some form of psychic ability.”10 As Bailie argues, for the heroine this supernatural ability “defines her as Other, thereby relegating her to the boundaries of society.”11 In the new millennium, regardless of the particular species of monster, in UFPR the trajectory of the heroine’s journey normally leads her to embrace her own monstrous Otherness and further to develop her own supernatural powers. The narrative thus often involves a monstrous transformation for the heroine, which further breaks down the barriers between her and her lover. From 1997 onward, as the genre begins to enter its golden age,12 heroines in UFPR become more monstrous and more obviously posthuman. Those who were human often become something else. For example, in Huff’s fifth Blood novel, Blood Debt (1997), her human protagonist Vicki becomes a vampire.13 In popular paranormal romance series in the new millennium, this vampiric transformation becomes common. As part of her journey toward her “Happily Ever After” ending, Bella Swan in Meyer’s Twilight Saga also becomes a vampire, as do many heroines in Christine Feehan’s Carpathians series (1999–) and in J. R. Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood series (2005–). Heroines with their own supernatural abilities also become increasingly, monstrously posthuman as they are drawn further away from the human identity that they initially claimed. Anita Blake, who initially identified as a human, becomes a

9 Ndalianis, Horror Sensorium, 80. 10 Bailie, “Blood Ties,” 144. 11 Ibid. 12 I suggest this date because it marks the premiere of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series, a series that popularised the genre format that was becoming established in contemporary fiction and with the earlier Buffy film. This date also marks a key turning point in Hamilton’s series, the publication of The Killing Dance in 1997, which (as discussed in the preceding chapter) marks the first time that Anita Blake sexually consummates her relationship with one of the monsters. 13 Tanya Huff, Blood Debt (DAW: New York, 1997).

207 vampire succubus. As “the Slayer” and “the Chosen One,” Whedon’s Buffy is never fully human, possessing supernatural strength and speed that enables her to fight vampires. However, when Buffy dies in the season five finale, “The Gift,” and is then resurrected from the dead for the series’ sixth season, she is removed further still from the elements of her identity that are human.14 In seasons six and seven, Buffy struggles to accept the truth that she is a resurrected being (and therefore herself a new kind of the undead). In another example, Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse, who initially believes she is a human telepath, discovers in the series’ eighth novel, From Dead to Worse (2008), that she has telepathic powers because she is a fairy.15 This gradual increase in monstrosity and/or in supernatural power occurs even for those heroines who never believed they were human to begin with. In Kim Harrison’s Hollows series, for example, although Rachel Morgan was born a witch, she eventually learns that genetic modification has transformed her into a powerful demon. Briggs’s Mercy Thompson, in the Mercy Thompson series, is a shape-shifting coyote who must comes to terms with the knowledge that rather than being a “normal” shapeshifter, she is the daughter of a Native American coyote god. In Jeaniene Frost’s Night Huntress series (2007–2014), the heroine, Cat Crawfield, begins as a half-vampire, half-human vampire hunter before becoming a full-fledged vampire herself. And in Frost’s Night Prince series (2012–2017), set in the same fictional world, the heroine, Leila Dalton, possesses psychic powers before she falls in love with Vlad Tepesh, a.k.a. Dracula, and becomes his vampire bride. Heroines may also undergo the transformation from human to monster in events that are set before the actual first instalment of the series, as is common in several popular lycanthrope or shapeshifter series. For example, werewolves Elena Michaels, Kitty Norville, and Anna Latham are each infected with lycanthropy prior to the adventures told in the first novel in each of their respective series.16 In all of these series, the werewolf heroine struggles with the aftermath of her transformation but nonetheless learns to accept and embrace her new status as a posthuman Other.17

14 “The Gift,” Buffy the Vampire Slayer, written by Joss Whedon, directed by Joss Whedon, the WB, original air date May 22, 2001. 15 Charlaine Harrison, From Dead to Worse (Ace: New York, 2008). 16 Kelley Armstrong, Women of the Otherworld series, 13 novels (2001–2012); Carrie Vaughn, Kitty Norville series, 14 novels (2005–2015); Patricia Briggs, Alpha and Omega series, 4 novels (2007–). 17 However, in the werewolf narrative, this transformation usually does not represent a positive step toward a healthy romantic relationship but an assault or rape. For more on the relationship between female werewolves in UFPR and sexual assault, see Erin S. Young, “Flexible Heroines,

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As these shapeshifter series suggest, although the vampire remains a dominant figure in UFPR written after 2000, it does not dominate in every narrative. However, in most UFPR narratives, the vampire retains the crucial capacity for moral choice.18 In vampire literature, this capacity first appeared in earlier 1970s and 1980s novels by Anne Rice, Fred Saberhagen, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, and George R. R. Martin, among others, and was then developed in the 1990s by early UFPR authors like Huff and Hamilton, as well as in the television series Forever Knight (1992–1996) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. After 2000, popular UFPR series by Hamilton, Harris, Harrison, and Briggs all depict vampires who have the capacity to be both good and evil, and can therefore either be friends or foes to heroines. For example, Harrison’s Hollows series distinguishes between living vampires with souls and soulless undead vampires. The living vampires Ivy and Kisten become allies and lovers to the series’ witch/demon heroine, Rachel Morgan, whereas the undead vampire Piscary is a dangerous villain.19 In these UFPR series, even though vampires may not be central figures in the narrative, vampiric feeding nonetheless still has the potential to build affirmative posthuman interconnections. For example, in both Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries and in Briggs’s Mercy Thompson series, when a vampire exchanges blood with the heroine, it is able to sense when she is in danger and so can rush to her aid. Or, to take another example, in Harrison’s Hollows series, when Rachel Morgan is bitten by a vampire, she is left with a psychic “bite scar” that renders her vulnerable to vampiric attack. However, this mark also serves as a means of sexual stimulation. As such, it opens new possibilities for her personal and sexual relationships with the female vampire Ivy and male vampire Kisten, leading Rachel to question her heterosexuality as well as the virtue of monogamy.20 Good vampires thus may be useful allies, connected to the heroine through psychic, posthuman webs of relationship. Moreover, in many UFPR series, such as those of Maggie Shayne, Christine Feehan, Jeaniene Frost, and

Flexible Narratives: The Werewolf Romances of Kelley Armstrong and Carrie Vaughn,” Extrapolation 52, no. 2 (2011): 204–26. 18 Though this is not true for all vampires, and nor are all vampires sexually appealing or benevolent in all series. Some UFPR series continue to represent vampires as evil, grotesque, and without the capacity for moral choice. For example, in Ilona Andrews’s Kate Daniels series, vampires are insectoid mindless shells, undead bodies that serve as tools and weapons for magic users. 19 For example, in Harrison’s second novel, The Good, the Bad and the Undead (2005), Piscary forcibly feeds from Ivy and forces her to feed from him, committing a vampire version of rape, before confessing he has murdered a number of witches. 20 See, for example, Kim Harrison, Every Which Way But Dead (2005; repr. New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 95, 287–90, 307, 313.

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Chloe Neill, the vampiric bite continues to be represented as a sexual act. As such, it is a vital means of strengthening the bonds between the vampire and the heroine (who now may also be or become a vampire herself). This is often especially important in those series that emphasise romantic and erotic relationships (that is, series which are more typically regarded as paranormal romance than urban fantasy).

UFPR and the Vampire Today From 2008 until the present, UFPR has been remarkably popular. For example, in 2008, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga broke into mainstream popular culture with the publication of its final novel, Breaking Dawn, and the release of the film adaptation of the first book in her saga. In 2008, the four Twilight novels took the top four places on USA Today’s annual Top 100 Best-Selling Books list.21 Meyer’s novels have sold more than 120 million copies worldwide, and film adaptations of her series made more than $3 billion in the worldwide box office.22 The success of the Twilight Saga has not been an isolated event. Since 2008, UFPR as a whole has shared this popularity. The success of True Blood, which also premiered in 2008, increased sales of Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries, the novels upon which the series is based.23 It is also likely that the crossover between film and television viewers and fiction readers for these two series helped to popularise the UFPR genre as a whole. In 2008 established authors such as Armstrong, Butcher, Feehan, Hamilton, Harris, Harrison, and Ward continued to publish instalments in their ongoing popular series, while authors such as Andrews, Frost, Neill, and Hunter also experienced success as their newer series became more firmly established with fans and readers.24 By the time the CW’s popular television series The Vampire Diaries debuted in 2009, it was clear that the vampire of UFPR was in the cultural spotlight.

21 Anthony Debarros et al., “Best-Selling Books: The Annual Top 100,” USA Today, January 14, 2008, accessed April 23, 2015, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2009-01-14- top-100-titles_N.htm. 22 Dorothy Pomerantz, “Looking at Twilight by the Numbers,” Forbes, November 16, 2012, accessed April 23, 2015. http://www.forbes.com/sites/dorothypomerantz/2012/11/16/looking-at-twilight-by-the- numbers/; Amanda Bell, “Breaking Dawn – Part 2 reaches $800 million worldwide box office,” Examiner.com, January 3, 2012, accessed April 23, 2015, http://www.examiner.com/article/breaking-dawn-part-2-reaches-800-million-worldwide-box- office. 23 “True Blood a Well-Timed Hit for HBO,” Today, November 23, 2008, accessed April 23, 2015, http://www.today.com/id/27821649#.VTjFqq2qqko. 24 Armstrong, Women of the Otherworld series, 13 novels (2001–2012); Butcher, the Dresden Files, 15 novels (2000–); Feehan, Dark Carpathians series, 31 novels (1999–); Harris, Southern

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Whether the popularity of UFPR is sustainable is a valid question. In many ways, it might seem that UFPR, and the vampire in UFPR in particular, has already seen its heyday. Though vampires are prominent in this genre from 2000 onward, many authors have sought to find a new angle in UFPR by writing about other supernatural monsters (for example, Armstrong’s protagonists include witches and shapeshifters; Harrison’s series includes witches, demons, and elves; Vaughn’s heroine is a werewolf;25 Briggs’s characters include shapeshifters, werewolves, and fairies; Andrews’s series features shapeshifters and wizards; Hunter’s incorporates shapeshifters and witches). And while the multispecies, multimonster supernatural communities of these fictional worlds remain crucial to the UFPR as a genre, in many popular series, vampires may take a backseat. On numerous occasions, the media has attempted to propose a supernatural successor to the vampire, asking “Are werewolves the new vampires?” or suggesting that “zombies are the new vampires” and “angels are the new vampires.”26 This apparent search to find “the new vampires” is evidence that (as argued in chapter 3) UFPR, like all genres, is constantly evolving in dialogue with the market. Since 2012, several prominent UFPR series have come to an end. In 2012, the final film in the Twilight franchise, Breaking Dawn: Part 2 was released. The final season of True Blood aired on HBO in 2014. Among the fiction series that have concluded in recent years are Armstrong’s Women of the Otherworld series, Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries, and Harrison’s Hollows series.27 Attempts to repeat the commercial success of the Twilight Saga have failed, with box-office flops for film adaptations of two other young adult UFPR series, Mortal Instruments: City of Bones (2013) and Vampire Academy (2014).28 The Vampire Diaries completed its eighth and final season in 2017, and

Vampire Mysteries, 13 novels (2001–2013); Harrison, Hollows series, 13 novels (2004–2014); Ward, the Black Dagger Brotherhood series, 14 novels (2005–); Andrews, Kate Daniels novels, 9 novels (2007–); Frost, Night Huntress series, 7 novels (2007–2014); Neill, Chicagoland Vampires series, 13 novels (2009–2017); Hunter, Jane Yellowrock series, 10 novels (2009–). 25 Vaughn, Kitty Norville series, 14 novels (2005–2015). 26 For example: Tammy Oler, “Are Werewolves the New Vampires?” Vulture, November 19, 2008, accessed April 28, 2015, http://www.vulture.com/2008/11/are_werewolves_the_new_vampire.html; , “Zombies Are the New Vampires,” Time, April 9, 2009, accessed April 28, 2015, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1890384,00.html; Alison Flood, “Angels Are the New Vampires, Says Anne Rice,” The Guardian, October 27, 2009, accessed April 28, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/oct/26/angels-vampires-anne-rice. 27 Andrews’s Kate Daniels series is also nearing its end, with its final novel to be released in 2018. 28 Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, directed by Harald Zwart, Screen Gems, 2013, adapted from , Shadowhunter Chronicles, 11 novels (2007–); Vampire Academy, directed by

211 its spinoff series, The Originals (2013–) will air its final season in 2018.29 That these popular series are ending might suggest that, having reached its peak between 2008 and 2015, UFPR might now be in decline. It is more likely, however, that this genre and the vampire will continue to develop and change. Indeed, some of the longest-running and most prolific writers in the genre show no sign of ending their UFPR series, including Hamilton, Butcher, Feehan, and Ward. Other authors, such as Andrews and Harris, continue to write new UFPR texts. For example, Harris’s Midnight, Texas trilogy is set in the same fictional world as the Southern Vampire Mysteries and True Blood and has been adapted by NBC as a television series.30 On the CW, iZombie (2014–) continues to follow an urban-fantasy zombie heroine who eats brains and solves murders. The Underworld film franchise released a new instalment in early 2017, and a television spin-off or adaptation for that series has been rumoured.31 And despite the commercial failure of the Mortal Instruments film, a television adaptation of its source text, Cassandra Clare’s novels, is now in its second season as Shadowhunters (2016–).32 Further, despite the much-prophesied decline of the vampire, other new and interesting vampire texts continue to emerge. Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles have had remarkable longevity since the release of Interview with the Vampire in 1976. Although declaring that her series had concluded in 2003 with Blood Canticle, Rice returned in 2014 with a new instalment of the Chronicles, Prince Lestat, and in 2016 published another, Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis. 33 Rice’s Chronicles have also recently been optioned by Paramount for development as a TV series.34 Further analysis of her recent novels might consider how her sympathetic vampires have been adapted over the

Mark Waters, the Weinstein Company, 2014, adapted from fiction series of the same name by Richelle Mead. 29 The Originals, created by Julie Plec, the CW, 2013–. 30 Charlaine Harris, Midnight, Texas trilogy (3 novels, 2014–2016); Midnight, Texas, created by Charlaine Harris and Monica Owusu-Breen, NBCUniversal Television, 2017–. See also Ilona Andrews, Hidden Legacy series (3 novels, 2014–). 31 Ricksen Vanclear, “Will the Next Installment of ‘Underworld’ Follow ‘Blood Wars’ Before a Possible Reboot?” Moviepilot.com, last modified January 13, 2017, accessed January 14, 2017, https://moviepilot.com/p/will-th-next-underworld-installment-follow-blood-wars-before-a- reboot/4187246. 32 Shadowhunters, created by Ed Decter, Freeform, 2016–. 33 Anne Rice, Blood Canticle (New York: Knopf, 2003); Anne Rice, Prince Lestat (New York: Knopf, 2014); Anne Rice, Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis (New York: Knopf, 2016). 34 Joe Otterson, “‘Vampire Chronicles’ Series in Development at Paramount TV, Anonymous Content,” Variety, April 28, 2017, accessed September 1, 2017, http://variety.com/2017/tv/news/vampire-chronicles-series-paramount-tv-anonymous- content-1202402750/.

212 decades and how, in these new texts, they remain relevant in the posthuman world of the new millennium. In 2014, three critically well-received films showed that vampires may yet have something new to offer: Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement’s What We Do In the Shadows,35 and Ana Lily Amirpour’s Persian vampire- western A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. These three films all self-consciously advertise their position in the vampire genre, and they participate in the play with intertextual reference that is common in UFPR and that Ken Gelder and Jeffrey Weinstock see as crucial in the vampire film.36 For example, What We Do In The Shadows is a mockumentary that examines the everyday life of the contemporary vampire. It creates humour by highlighting and flaunting the conventions of both UFPR and vampire literature more generally. Further, it uses its documentary style to push to the extreme the interplay between the mundane and the supernatural that is crucial to the fictional worlds of UFPR: its vampires live unglamorously in a run-down flat, bickering over who has not done the dishes as mandated by a chore wheel. Most importantly, new vampire texts continue to represent vampires as companion species and cyborgian (in Haraway’s sense) posthumans in the ways that they engage with the vampire’s possible interrelationship with humans, with new technologies, and with concerns about the vampire’s place in the fragile ecology of the contemporary global world. Future research might analyse in more depth how non- UFPR texts such as the films I have just mentioned also represent the posthuman vampire. For example, Jarmusch’s vampire lovers, Adam and Eve, are highly technological global citizens; they communicate with each other on video calls between their respective homes in Detroit and Tangier, via iPhone and television screen. Adam lives in an abandoned house powered by his own quasimystical power generator, suggesting that he possesses an advanced sustainable technology. Sustainability, in fact, seems a key concern in the film, which is predominantly set in the eerie nightscapes of Detroit, a city that has long been in decline. Yet of Detroit, Eve confidently predicts, “This place will rise again. . . . There’s water here. And when the cities in the south are burning, this place will bloom.” Eve here alludes to global warming, but an anxiety with sustainability also permeates this film in a different way, through vampiric feeding, as its

35 What We Do in the Shadows, directed by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, Madmen Entertainment, 2014. 36 Gelder, New Vampire Cinema; Weinstock, Vampire Film.

213 vampires struggle to maintain a supply of potable blood.37 Only Lovers Left Alive thus demonstrates how contemporary vampire texts might respond to posthumanist concerns about what Haraway terms “the trouble of living and dying with response- ability on a damaged earth.”38 Finally, the formal, generic, and thematic hybridity of UFPR connects this genre to trends in contemporary popular culture more broadly. For example, the Twilight Saga has inspired a huge volume of fanfiction, the most significant example of which is E. L. James’s erotic Fifty Shades trilogy (2011–2012).39 This trilogy began as a fanfiction retelling of Meyer’s Twilight Saga that transformed a series termed “abstinence porn” into something explicitly sexual.40 Originally published as an e-book, with the rights for publication as a commercial novel acquired by Vintage Books in 2012, the series has been lambasted critically, yet it has been a huge commercial success. The first instalment of James’s trilogy was adapted as a commercially successful film in 2015, also titled Fifty Shades of Grey, with the second instalment released in early 2017.41 Though it does not feature any supernatural monsters, the pop-cultural and commercial success of the Fifty Shades trilogy suggests avenues of research that are highly pertinent to understanding how UFPR became a popular and commercially successful genre. They include studies of the impact of new means of self-publishing and of e-publishing on the genre fiction market; the impact of these new forms of publishing on women’s genre fiction; the role played by seriality in commercially successful women’s genre texts; and the prevalence of transmedia and cross-media

37 This concern with sustainability and global resources is also prominent in Daybreakers (2009), in which the vampire population that has taken over the world is running out of humans to feed upon. 38 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 2. 39 E. L. James, Fifty Shades trilogy, 3 novels (2011–2012). The first instalment is E. L. James, Fifty Shades of Grey (New York: Vintage, 2011). 40 See Sarah K. Day, “Pure Passion: The Twilight Saga, ‘Abstinence Porn,’ and Adolescent Women’s Fan Fiction,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 39, no. 1 (2014): 28–48. 41 Fifty Shades of Grey, directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson, Universal Pictures, 2015. Another interesting fanfiction text that rewrites the Twilight Saga as BDSM erotica is Mina Vaughn’s How to Discipline Your Vampire (New York: Pocket Star, 2013). Vaughn’s novel was originally published under the title of Sub Plans and pen name SnowWhiteHeart. Malin Isaksson and Maria Lindgren Leavenworth briefly discuss this fanfiction in “Gazing, Initiating, Desiring: Alternative Constructions of Agency and Sex in Twifics,” in Interdisciplinary Approaches to Twilight: Studies in Fiction, Media, and a Contemporary Cultural Experience, eds. Mariah Larsson and Ann Steiner (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2011), 127–42. They suggest that this novel, which (unlike Fifty Shades of Grey) places the Bella Swan character in the role of the sexual domme, establishes a “radically expanded agency” for the heroine (139). For more on the vampire in fanfiction generally, see Williamson, Lure of the Vampire; and Maria Lindgren Leavenworth and Malin Isaksson, Fanged Fan Fiction: Variations on Twilight, True Blood, and The Vampire Diaries (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2013).

214 adaptation in contemporary popular culture, as well as its impact on how popular fiction authors are producing and promoting their work.42

The Strain Trilogy and the Posthuman Vampire in the Post-9/11 Era Urban fantasy and paranormal romance has been the most popular mode of vampire literature since the 1990s. Nevertheless, its representations of the vampire are not uncontested. The post-apocalyptic vampire narrative offers a strikingly different vision of the role of the vampire (and vampiric feeding) in contesting the boundaries between self and Other in the posthuman world. As discussed in chapter 5, both UFPR and PAVNs respond to the same sociohistorical anxieties about the fragile boundaries between the human self and the monstrous Other in the posthuman era. But whereas UFPR optimistically suggests that in the posthuman future, the self and the Other can thrive together, PAVNs evince considerable scepticism regarding this idea. They suggest instead that when the boundaries between the human self and the Other begin to blur, the self degenerates into frightening, monstrous Otherness. When vampires and humans come together in post-apocalyptic narratives, horror and disaster are therefore the result. Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s Strain trilogy, comprising The Strain (2009), The Fall (2010), and The Night Eternal (2011),43 offers one example of how post- apocalyptic vampire narratives reactively turn the affirmatively posthuman vampire back into what vampires have traditionally been: a monstrous threat to all of humanity. As a typical PAVN, this trilogy consistently rejects sympathetic posthuman vampires in favour of the grotesque and inhuman vampires of earlier film, literature, and folklore. As is also typical of the PAVN, the vampire in the Strain trilogy, furthermore, serves as a means of interrogating and exploring anxieties about the unstable boundaries between the self and the Other in the post-9/11 era. As also noted in chapter 5 of this thesis, in the PAVN, those boundaries between self and Other are often figured as the borderlines between citizen and foreigner, citizen and terrorist, and, more broadly, insider and outsider. The summary of the text that follows demonstrates that, as Höglund argues, “The relationship between vampirism and political terrorism is overt in The Strain and closely tied to the descriptions of catastrophic transculturation and apocalypse that

42 For example, UFPR authors including L. J. Smith, Laurell K. Hamilton, Kelley Armstrong, and Ilona Andrews have offered readers preview chapters and free or low-priced tie-in short stories and novellas via their websites and e-book sellers. 43 Further references to these novels will be given parenthetically, citing the page number.

215 appear on its pages.” 44 Additionally, this summary illustrates that the relationship between vampirism and terrorism is linked to the relationship between vampirism and the posthuman. The Strain begins when a plane carrying “the Master,” a vampire who intends to take over the world, lands at JFK International Airport in New York. The aircraft experiences a mysterious technological blackout as it lands, and when officials board it, they find that almost all of its passengers have inexplicably perished. The Strain thus rewrites narrative elements of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), in which Dracula arrives in England on board an abandoned ship,45 in order to evoke specific sociohistorical anxieties about terrorism and Otherness in the post-9/11 United States. The deadly arrival of the master vampire via a passenger plane recalls the hijacked planes of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. As Höglund argues, “Like the late Osama Bin Laden, [the Master] perceives New York as emblematic of American modernity, and therefore the first and most obvious target when initiating his attempt at reversing American modernity.”46 The text makes this link with 9/11 explicit. As the corpses of passengers are removed from the aeroplane, the “deliberate and, at times, gruesome” (76) process recalls the removal of bodies from the ruins of the World Trade Center: “At one point, about thirty bodies in, one of the Port Authority officers suddenly stumbled away . . . moaning and gripping his hood . . . . he lashed out. . . . Panic erupted” (76). This officer is experiencing a traumatic flashback to the events of 9/11: Later, word went around that this Port Authority officer had worked those hellish first few weeks on the pile at Ground Zero . . . The spectre of 9/11 still hung over many of these Port Authority offers, and the current bewildering mass-casualty situation had brought it crashing down again. (76) The Strain thus positions the arrival of vampirism in the United States as an act of aggression from an outside force, one that causes death and destruction. The arrival of the Master also raises the possibility of a bioterrorist attack. As with Stoker’s Demeter, carrying Dracula, the plane carrying the Master arrives in New York carrying a mysterious box of earth, “a rich, black loam” (81). But historical context changes the significance of the native earth traditionally associated with vampires, and

44 Johan Höglund, “Catastrophic Transculturation in Dracula, The Strain, and The Historian,” Transnational Literature 5, no. 1 (2012): 7. 45 Stoker, Dracula, 78–84. 46 Höglund, “Catastrophic Transculturation,” 8.

216 the first responders in The Strain speculate that “whatever [biochemical] agent was used to overcome the passengers” was transported in this box. Thus, The Strain rewrites Dracula’s lore that the vampire must sleep in a coffin filled with its native earth to suggest the fear of biological terrorism. Specifically, it suggests the fear of anthrax, an anaerobic bacteria that in the weeks following September 11, 2001, was at the centre of a series of terroristic attacks perpetuated by mail and initially assumed to be attacks from the Middle East. Unsure what to do with this plane full of dead bodies, authorities contact the novel’s protagonist, Dr. Ephraim Goodweather, an epidemiologist who heads a response team with the Centers for Disease Control. As Eph and his team investigate, four survivors are removed to a hospital and the remaining corpses are distributed across New York City morgues. Unfortunately, the survivors are not really survivors: they have been infected with vampirism, and these new vampires rise and contaminate their loved ones, beginning the first wave of a mass infection of New York City. Eph realises he is dealing with a virulent disease when he teams up with Abraham Setrakian, a character partially modelled on Stoker’s . Setrakian explains the rules that govern vampirism in The Strain, demonstrating to Ephraim how the vampire’s body is transformed when it contracts a virus transmitted by parasitical worms.47 The identification of the vampire virus as a retrovirus that “hijacks” cells suggests a conservative fear of the HIV retrovirus, but it also hints at hijacking as an act of terrorism, again suggesting that the vampire’s arrival in New York is a terroristic attack like that perpetuated on September 11. Eph and Abraham fail to convince the authorities that a vampire virus is infecting New York, but they are joined in their cause by exterminator Vasiliy Fet. Vasiliy unearths the Master’s lair under the ruins of the World Trade Center—another

47 The novel thus links vampirism with the fear of abject bodily corruption as well as the fear of trans-species viral contamination from diseases like bird flu, swine flu, SARS, HIV, and ebola. In this sense, The Strain refracts a fear of the negative consequences of a posthuman transgression of boundaries between species. Braidotti connects the “proliferation of pandemics” in the early twenty-first century to posthuman “bodily politics,” implying that “renewed forms of vulnerability” serve as the flipside to the cyborgian technologies that strengthen human capabilities. See Braidotti, The Posthuman, 112. Further textual analysis of this trilogy might consider the relationship between the various pandemic scares of the early twentieth century and the fear arising from transgression of the human/animal boundary, as well as how this anxiety is refracted in the insectoid, animalistic, and subhuman representation of the vampire’s physical form in the Strain trilogy.

217 heavy-handed sign that vampirism in this series is shaped by ongoing anxieties about terrorism and external threats to the nation in post-9/11 America.48 Additionally, the vampires of the Strain trilogy suggest an unease with the imperial interests of the United States in the post-9/11 era and the way that advanced technological weaponry is used to support invasion. For example, the invading vampires of the trilogy are described as “drones” controlled by the “single will” of the Master (285). These vampire drones recall the drone technologies, or unmanned aerial combat vehicles, used in recent years by the United States in conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. But the text also seems to justify the imperial interests of the United States by suggesting that preemptive military action is necessary for the greater good. For example, Ephraim advises that to stop the spread of vampiric infection, it is necessary to mount a full-on military assault: “Come sundown . . . it’s going to be like Transylvania. What you need are strike teams. . . . Soldiers. Going house to house through that town, as if it’s Baghdad” (415). As a work of American Imperial Gothic,49 The Strain thus engages both with the fear of terroristic attack on the United States and an anxious ambivalence about the United States as an imperial state. The state is threatened by the evil enemies who desire to invade and conquer it, but it nonetheless perpetuates acts of invasion and conquest itself. In the Strain trilogy, the boundaries between the citizen and the terrorist, the domestic and the foreign, and the inside and the outside are aligned with those boundaries that are contested by the posthuman: those between the human and the animal, and the human and the technological. The vampire virus destabilises the human/animal boundary by infecting humans with a parasite and virus from another species, one that causes humans to devolve into animalistic, insectoid monsters with no subjectivity or free will.50 And when humans become vampires, they cross the boundary between the human and the technological: they become weapons that can be deployed like drones, delivering a bioterroristic disease intended to infect and so overcome the remaining human population.

48 Also noted by Höglund, “Catastrophic Transculturation,” 7. 49 See the discussion of American Imperial Gothic in chapter 2 and Höglund, American Imperial Gothic. 50 Though outside the scope of the final chapter of this thesis, further detailed analysis might be made of how this trilogy represents the disintegration of the human/animal boundary through the biology of its vampires as well as how its humans are treated as a cattle-like food source in the second and third novels.

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These representations of the vampire as a terrorist, a weapon, and an instrument of invasion engage with what Braidotti terms the “necro-politics” of posthuman war, in which bioterrorism, biotechnologies, surveillance culture, drone warfare, and weapons of mass destruction are forms of “technologically mediated violence.”51 In posthuman war, this violence becomes globalised and industrialised, leading to “the destruction of all the services that allow civil society to function.”52 This breakdown of human society can also been seen in the Strain trilogy, where the apocalyptic social disintegration begun by vampirism is facilitated by human nuclear technologies. In The Strain, Eph, Abraham and Vasiliy fail to kill the Master. They pursue him in the second and third novels in the trilogy, The Fall and The Night Eternal. In The Fall, the Master uses nuclear weaponry and power sources to create a global nuclear winter, further devastating human civil order. Again, though, the trilogy suggests an ambivalent anxiety about whether the necro- politics of war is a necessary evil: nuclear weaponry is also the only technology that can finally bring about the defeat of the Master in The Night Eternal.

Reading the PAVN as a Backlash against UFPR As I have detailed above and in chapter 5, post-apocalyptic vampire narratives undoubtedly emerge in response to anxieties about the posthuman future. However, they also emerge in direct response to the way these anxieties are negotiated by urban fantasy and paranormal romance. Thus, even texts that reject the representation of the vampire as a sympathetic, feeling subject must do so via direct engagement with this vampire. This becomes particularly clear in PAVNs like the Strain trilogy, where vampiric feeding is reactively reframed as a dangerous transgression of the boundaries between human and the monstrous Other, which can only result in the disintegration of the human. On at least four points, this violent act of consumption contrasts starkly with symbiotic and mutually fulfilling vampiric feeding, as depicted in Hamilton’s Anita Blake series and in many UFPR texts produced after 2000. First, rather than being pleasurable, as it is in UFPR, feeding in The Strain causes fear, pain, and disgust. Second, whereas feeding in UFPR is often erotic, allowing heroines to explore their sexuality and sexual desires, in The Strain it offers no possibility of sexual pleasure. Third, feeding in UFPR has the potential to engender love, empathy, and responsiveness toward the needs of the Other. But feeding in the Strain trilogy perverts love, and its vampires seek out, infect,

51 Braidotti, The Posthuman, 124; 122–30. 52 Ibid., 123.

219 and corrupt their nearest and dearest. Finally, while acts of feeding often strengthen the posthuman polis of UFPR, posthuman feeding in The Strain corrupts and destroys the human community. In The Strain vampiric feeding is a nightmarish act of aggression and violence toward human victims. When minor character Mark Luss, for example, is attacked in his home, we are told that a vampire stinger “split skin and muscle to his carotid artery, and the pain was like that of a hot skewer rammed halfway into his neck.” There is no vampiric hypnosis to mask the pain of the physical attack, no gentle or erotic undertones to the penetration, and no sense of sharing or mutual benefit. Mark’s pain dominates his senses. As a group of vampires descend on him, we are told that he experiences only “pain like a motherfucker. Corporeal, all over, his fingertips, his chest, his brain. . . . Mark hung there like a bright white star of effulgent pain” (319). This kind of feeding is not a positive or pleasurable experience even for the vampire. When drinking blood, Ansel Barbour, a “survivor” from the mysterious Flight 753, experiences only “palliative pleasure” (221)––that is, a pleasure that can only temporarily distract from the pain caused by his transformation into a vampire. The Master, the most powerful vampire in the trilogy, is voracious, even though feeding brings him little pleasure. This is made clear in The Fall, in a passage where he drains the blood of multiple bodies in one feeding, even though, as the reader is told, for him “the act of feeding [has] long ago lost its thrill” (37). In the Strain trilogy, vampires emit an ammonia-based effluence as they feed, which further distances their feeding from the pleasurable and the erotic. As Setrakian explains, these vampires “have a very compact digestive system. . . . No room for storing the food. Any undigested plasma and any other residues have to be expelled to make room for incoming nourishment. Much like a tick—excreting as it feeds” (285). They feed even when their previous meal has not been digested, which suggests that for these insectoid vampires, feeding is compulsive—it stems from desire, rather than any real appetite. And as soon as they imbibe blood, these vampires excrete its by-products; they are nothing more than pipelines for a constant stream of blood and waste—they hunger constantly, constantly desire to feed, but are never sated. This form of vampiric feeding is starkly abject. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva classifies both food and waste as abject.53 Eating is an act that necessitates defecation, and “dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which

53 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 2.

220 permits me to be.”54 For the vampires of the Strain trilogy, feeding and excretion occur simultaneously, heightening the link between these bodily processes. Like blood and sexual fluids, faeces are considered taboo substances because they are evidence of the bodily mortality that humans seek to reject. Further, food objects are external to the body, yet must be taken into and then expelled from one’s body, acts that transgress the boundaries that define the self. Kristeva writes of the process by which humans experience abject horror in relation to food and waste, but the vampires of the Strain trilogy make this process horrifyingly visible. Their compulsive hunger renders them incapable of little more than the act of feeding itself, which is also an act of defecating. These vampires are thus a nightmarish exaggeration of the potential loss of self that is caused by the transgression of the boundaries that delimit the self from the outside Other, as foregrounded in their constant intake of food and expulsion of waste. Such vampires are incapable of acting as subjective beings, let alone as sympathetic monsters. Infection by this type of vampire results in the transgression of the boundaries between life and death, inside and outside, and thus the disintegration of human subjectivity. This representation of the vampiric body is strikingly different when compared to that found in much UFPR. As a genre, UFPR frequently creates a textual space to explore bodily Otherness as positive difference, as a difference to be embraced and even celebrated in the posthuman world. For example, as I argued in chapter 4, heroines in UFPR recognise their own female Otherness in the Othered body of the monster. In this sense, as Gina Wisker writes, the contemporary vampire “is no longer abject, rejected with disgust to ensure identity . . . . The vampire dramatizes endless potential for radical alternative behaviour, for celebrating our Otherness. . . . Contemporary women vampire writers . . . dismantle patriarchy’s reductive binary thought.”55 The vampire is used in female-centred UFPR texts to rewrite the meaning of bodily Otherness in the postfeminist, posthuman world. The Strain thrusts vampiric Otherness back into the realm of (abject) bodily disgust by reframing the significance of the exchange of blood (and other bodily fluids) romanticised in UFPR. For example, when Mark Luss is violently attacked by the vampire stinger, he feels “an eruption of wetness over his chest” and realises that “the boy [vampire] had soiled himself, defecating over Mark as he fed” (319). Mark’s death is ignominious and bodily mortifying: he dies in a rush of blood and vampire shit. Having

54 Ibid., 3. 55 Gina Wisker, “Love Bites: Contemporary Women’s Vampire Fiction,” in A New Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2012), 225–26.

221 achieved immortality, the vampires of The Strain become mindless, eternally blood- drinking, defecating abject bodies. Rather than being sexually appealing, their nonhuman Otherness is disgusting, thus reinstating the boundary between the human and the vampiric Other. As if this disgusting, abject image of vampiric feeding were not sufficient to distance the post-apocalyptic vampires of the Strain trilogy from the romanticised, sensual, and sexual vampires of UFPR, with the character of Gabriel Bolivar, del Toro and Hogan go even further. Bolivar is another supposed survivor from Flight 753, a rock star reminiscent of goth-culture icons such as Marilyn Manson. According to Kim Toffoletti, as a goth rock star, Manson himself is a posthuman figure, “neither male nor female, organism nor machine, human nor animal,” a figure that “evokes the terror and fascination of the alien-vampire-monster.”56 As a fictionalized goth rock star, Bolivar similarly exploits images of posthuman Otherness for fame and fortune. In his own words, his subcultural goth persona is “an act, dude. A fucking show, a spectacle. Goth greasepaint and hardcore lyrics. Google me up—my father was a Methodist preacher and the only thing I collect is pussy” (86). Before he becomes a vampire, the human Bolivar uses his posthuman goth persona to prey on women. His vulgar use of “pussy” as a metaphor for sexual intercourse and as a synecdoche for the women he sleeps with suggests strongly that Bolivar is no modern romantic Gothic hero but a misogynist. Bolivar also evokes and parodies Anne Rice’s sympathetic and romanticised vampire rock star, Lestat. In Rice’s The Vampire Lestat (1985) and Queen of the Damned (1988), Lestat is a vampire who adopts the persona of a goth rock star, while his fans assume that he is a goth rock star pretending to be a vampire. Bolivar, however, is a Lestat in reverse: he is a human who assumes a goth, vampire-like persona on stage, but eventually becomes a real vampire. The image of Lestat is further evoked by Bolivar’s treatment of his female groupies. The 2002 film adaptation of Queen of the Damned, which positions Lestat as a romantic protagonist, explicitly represents this vampire exploiting his rock star fame to feed upon his groupies, who are expecting sex but instead become

56 Kim Toffoletti, Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls: Feminism, Popular Culture and the Posthuman Body (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 83. Toffoletti suggests, however, that Manson’s posthuman body is monstrous in a way that “encourages a new vision for feminist thinking about the status of the subject” by “destabilising difference” (105). This is clearly not the case with the character of Gabriel Bolivar, who combines corruption with the monstrosity of the goth rock star. Catherine Spooner notes that the supposed corruptive potential of goth culture has been associated with “moral panic” in the US, particularly following the Columbine High School Massacre of 1999. See Catherine Spooner, “Goth Culture,” in A New Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 354–55.

222 a vampire meal.57 In a similar passage in del Toro and Hogan’s novel, while attempting to have sex with three groupies, Bolivar finds that his vampiric need to feed corrupts his sexual appetite. When he begins foreplay with the women, he cannot achieve erection: “She slid her hand across his leather pants and over his crotch, and . . . there was no gasp of astonishment . . . Nothing doing down there yet. Which was baffling, even given his illness” (187). The leather pants won by Bolivar recall those worn by Lestat in Rymer’s film, and the actions of Bolivar’s groupie recall the actions of Lestat’s, who in the film also slides her hands up his leather pants and across his crotch, where there is likewise no erection to be found. Bolivar’s leather pants in this scene also evoke, and undermine, a popular cultural image of the sexualized vampire shaped by archetypes of desirable masculinity, including the “bad boy” and the rock star as well as the subcultural “Goth sartorial idiom” often associated with vampirism.58 For example, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, vampire love interest Angel often wears a leather coat or jacket, and he appears in leather pants specifically in the episodes “Surprise” and “Innocence,” where Buffy loses her virginity to him. In these episodes, Angel loses his soul after making love to Buffy; the scenes where he appears shirtless and clad in leather pants thus suggest not only his newly cemented sexual appeal to the heroine but also his new and dangerous monstrosity.59 Spike, Buffy’s second vampire lover in the series, also consistently wears a long black leather coat. In another example, numerous sexually appealing supernatural characters in Hamilton’s Anita Blake series frequently appear in leather pants and other leather garments. Among her vampires, the heroine’s primary lover, Jean-Claude, is recurringly clad in leather boots or pants. Two such instances occur in The Killing Dance (1996), which, as discussed in the previous chapter, marks a significant turning point by introducing more explicit erotic content to the series. In The Killing Dance, Jean-Claude appears in one passage in “high, leather boots that covered nearly his entire leg” (124). And in the passage where Jean-Claude and Anita finally sexually consummate their relationship, he initially wears “jeans black and tight enough to be skin” with knee-high

57 Queen of the Damned, directed by Michael Rymer, Warner Bros, 2002. This might also be read as a metaphor for how fame works; figuratively speaking, it feeds on fans. 58 Spooner, Post-Millennial Gothic, 90. 59 “Surprise,” Buffy the Vampire Slayer, written by Marti Noxon, directed by Michael Lange, the WB, original air date January 19, 1998; “Innocence,” Buffy the Vampire Slayer, written by Joss Whedon, directed by Joss Whedon, the WB, original air date January 20, 1998.

223 leather boots (329).60 These examples suggest that leather pants and similar garments are recognized by fans as signifiers of masculine vampiric sexual appeal in this genre, a trope that the Strain dramatically rejects through Bolivar. Whereas vampiric feeding in Rice’s Chronicles (and, later, in much UFPR) is framed as an erotic, non-normative sexual act, Bolivar’s vampiric hunger corrupts the sexual act, rendering it perverse. Like Lestat, Bolivar is impotent. However, his impotence is unlike that of sympathetic vampires such as Rice’s Lestat or Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Saint-Germain. For these vampires, sexual desire is translated into vampiric, appetitive hunger, and feeding itself is a pleasurable sexual act. Rice’s vampires experience ecstasy as they drink blood, while Saint-Germain sexually pleasures the women from whom he drinks. In contrast, the desire that Bolivar feels for his groupies is confusing and abnormal: “Not a sensation of nausea, but perhaps its opposite: a need somewhere on the continuum between the longing for sex and the necessity of nourishment. But—bigger. A compulsion. A craving. An urge to violate, to ravish, to consume” (187). Vampiric feeding here is represented as the monstrous and violent act of consuming another––the very violation, ravishment, and consumption that much UFPR (and vampire fiction generally) rewrites as a pleasurable, shared experience. Bolivar draws blood from one of his groupies, causing her and the other girls to scream and struggle, whereupon he attempts to reassert masculine control or “authority” over the women: “remembering his stature as the maypole of this foursome, he asserted his authority” (188). There is no mutuality or respect for the desires of the Other; instead, Bolivar is a monstrous vampire who attempts to violate, control, and consume his female victims.61 If goth sensibility is partially defined (as Spooner argues) by “embracing beauty in decay,”62 The Strain parodies and rejects this sensibility, emphasising the physical repulsiveness of Bolivar’s bodily transformation. Having failed to perform sexually, Bolivar retreats to his bathroom to remove his stage makeup and finds that his body has become genuinely grotesque: “The makeup came off . . . and yet his flesh looked much

60 Another example is found in Circus of the Damned, page 38, where Jean-Claude is described as follows: “His tight black pants were stuffed into another pair of black boots. They came all the way up his legs, so that he was encased in leather.” See also Bloody Bones, 198. 61 Del Toro and Hogan here again engage with Bram Stoker’s Dracula. They rewrite and overturn the passage in which Jonathan Harker, trapped in Dracula’s castle, is fed upon by three female vampires. Jonathan Harker is passive, feeling himself in a pleasant, dreamlike state as the three voluptuous feed from him (41–44). Conversely, Bolivar, controls and inflicts pain upon three female lovers, becoming a vampire himself. 62 Spooner, “Goth Culture,” 351–52.

224 the same in the mirror. . . . He ripped off his shirt and examined himself: white as marble and criss-crossed with greenish veins and purplish blotches of settled blood” (188). Removing his black contact lenses from his eyes, Bolivar discovers that “the pupils were dead black. Almost as though he still had the lenses in” (189). In this passage, he has begun to transform from a sexually appealing goth rock star to a necrotic vampire body. The text thus turns back to representations of the vampire’s body as an inhuman, grotesque monstrosity. Such representations are typically influenced by the bald, white-skinned, and clawed of Nosferatu (1922).63 Vampiric transformation in The Strain is literally caused by a disease (transmitted by parasite), but through Bolivar it is also associated with sexually transmitted disease, just as vampirism has been linked with syphilis in Dracula and with HIV in texts like Anne Rice’s Chronicles and True Blood.64 Bolivar visits his physician, who mistakes Bolivar’s horrific, vampiric appearance as stage makeup (250). Unable to speak with a growing vampire stinger in his mouth, Bolivar shows the physician that his impotence has progressed from psychological to physical: “Revealed beneath his robe was his limp penis, blackened and shrivelled, ready to drop from his groin like a diseased fig from a dying tree” (252). His vampirism literally rots his genitals. Del Toro and Hogan’s vampirism is thus figured as a disease linked with sexual corruption. And this corruption is the corruption of humanity itself: Vampires in del Toro and Hogan’s trilogy have no need for human reproductive organs because they signal the end of human life, not its creation.65 The result of vampiric infection is the end of humanity. This horrific transformation offers a stark contrast to what the vampire Sabin experiences in Hamilton’s The Killing Dance. As I discussed in the previous chapter, when Sabin refuses to feed on human blood, he too begins to rot physically. As his body degenerates, Sabin is threatened with impotence and insanity (4–6, 150, 359). In Hamilton’s UFPR series, feeding on humans is thus shown to be a necessary act for a vampire to maintain its sense of humanity (in terms of its physical appearance,

63 See Undead Apocalypse, page 181, where Abbott also makes a connection between the monstrous vampires of post-apocalyptic literature and Count Orlok. Another example of this is found in Lawrence’s 2007 adaptation of I Am Legend, which draws on Nosferatu’s now-classic image of the vampire; its zombie-vampire hybrids have similar physical traits to both Orlok and Del Toro and Hogan’s vampires. 64 See Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, 175; Aldana Reyes, “Who Ordered the Hamburger with AIDS?”; and Haggerty, “Anne Rice and the Queering of Culture.” For other examples of later twentieth-century novels that associate vampirism with disease, see also Brian Aldiss’s Dracula Unbound (1991) and Dan Simmons’s Children of the Night (1992). 65 See also page 31 of The Fall, which explicitly contrasts the infection of the vampire virus with sexual reproduction.

225 intellectual capacity, and capacity for sexual desire). But in the Strain trilogy, the vampire becomes a posthuman monster whose grotesque physical form and lack of sexual capability foregrounds its loss of humanity. Unlike Hamilton’s novels, which build sexual, spiritual, and communal links that are framed as healthy, sustaining, loving webs of interconnection, the Strain trilogy destroys all possibility for affective connections between the human self and the vampiric Other in the posthuman world. Such connections lead only to the destruction of the human, as vampiric feeding transforms human love into the vampiric need to feed. As Abraham explains in The Strain, “Blood wants blood. . . . Once turned, the revenants first seek out family and friends still uninfected. They return, by night, to those with whom they share an emotional attachment. Their ‘Dear Ones.’” (294). Del Toro and Hogan thus link their post-apocalyptic vampires to earlier representations of the vampire in myth, such as those of Eastern European folklore, who return to feed on the family members and villagers they have left behind. 66 In this vampire, the transgression of the boundaries of the human and the animal is framed negatively, as a regression to primitive, animalistic, and uncivilised urges. By representing their vampires in this way, Del Toro and Hogan reframe the post-apocalyptic vampire as a monster whose Otherness must be rejected in order to protect the modern human family and community. For example, at the end of The Strain, Eph’s ex-wife, Kelly, is transformed into a vampire who seeks out her Dear One: their son, Zack (494–95). She pursues him throughout the next two novels. As The Fall describes Kelly’s desire to consume her Dear One, for the first time the narration gives a limited third person perspective of a human who has fully become a vampire. Of Kelly’s vampiric feelings, the reader is told, “She felt—with the intensity of a mother dreaming of a distressed child calling out her name—the exquisite nearness of her Dear One. . . . The force of his need for his mother redoubled her unconditional vampiric need for him” (30). Here, the text alters a common phrase, “unconditional love,” substituting the word “need” for “love.” Kelly’s desire to go to her child is like a mother’s love for her child, but it is not love: it is vampiric need, an animal compulsion, the very posthuman need described by Day in Vampire Legends in Contemporary American Culture. These vampires are “pure predators”

66 See Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial and Death: Folklore and Reality (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); and Mark Collins Jenkins, Vampire Forensics: Uncovering the Origins of an Enduring Legend (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2010).

226 who feel “pure need,” creatures whose “needs and desires define their behaviour.”67 The Strain’s vampiric feeding is thus the vampiric threat of incorporation that is so fearsome to heroines such as Anita Blake. Kelly wishes to consume her Dear One wholly: What she saw when she had laid eyes upon Zachary Goodweather again was not a boy. Was not her son, her love. She saw instead a piece of her that stubbornly remained human. She saw something that remained hers by biology, a part of her being forever. Her own blood, only still human-red, not vampire-white. . . . She saw an incomplete part of her, held back by force.” (31) Her need is entirely self-centred and self-serving, fixated on consuming her Dear One and reincorporating his blood as part of herself. In particular, Kelly represents the threat posed by the Other to the “ideal” heteronormative structure of the American family. As a devouring mother, she recalls Bram Stoker’s Lucy, the “Bloofer Lady,” who feeds on children when she becomes a vampire. Like Lucy, Kelly is, as Barbara Creed argues of the female vampire, “monstrous . . . precisely because she does threaten to undermine the formal and highly symbolic relations of men and women essential to the continuation of patriarchal society.” 68 She does not experience the affirmative, interconnected posthumanity discovered by heroines like Anita Blake. Instead, she becomes a monster incapable of love and, thus, a threat to the heroes of the novel, akin to the monstrous Mother of Darkness in Hamilton’s series. In The Strain, as in much UFPR, personal relationships between humans and vampires are representative of the relationships possible between the human and the Other in the posthuman polis. The Strain refracts these anxieties about the relationship between the self and the Other, and about the posthuman community, through the specific historical context of post-9/11 America. In doing so, it suggests that in post- 9/11 America, terrorist sleeper cells (groups of covert operatives awaiting the order to attack) might lurk in every suburb of the everyday United States. The vampires of The Strain, like clandestine, ill-structured sleeper-cell terrorists, are able to strike from within the heart of the nation. In this context, as Gelder argues, “if the vampire really lives next door, then its otherness is perhaps more unsettling than it ever was.”69

67 Day, Vampire Legends, 83. 68 Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, 61. See also Craft, “Kiss Me With Those Red Lips.” 69 Gelder, New Vampire Cinema, 41.

227

In post-9/11 America, the vampires of The Strain are precisely the vampires of “pure aggression, pure instinct,” that Gelder argues make “bad neighbours.” 70 Throughout the novel, a number of bad neighbours suggest that the Other is always lurking just next door, threatening to cross the boundaries. For example, when Ansel Barbour becomes a vampire, he locks himself in his family’s garden shed. Ansel’s wife Ann-Marie is then confronted in her yard by their bad human neighbour, Mr. Otish: their neighbour from across the street, the one who called the police. . . . The kind of neighbour who rakes his leaves into the street so that they blow into your yard. A man they never saw or heard from unless there was a problem that he suspected them or their children of having caused. (312) Confronting Ann-Marie, Otish complains about the noise coming from the shed, believing it to be the family dogs. As the conversation proceeds, it becomes apparent that Otish has physically abused one of the dogs. Ann-Marie tells Otish to go into the shed and discipline the dogs himself. She thus feeds her neighbour to her vampire husband. To take an additional example, Joan Luss, another supposed survivor of Flight 753, has also been infected with the vampire virus. Returning to her local suburban community, Joan infects her neighbours, destroying her community from within. She, too, has a problematic human neighbour: Patricia Blessige, who is full of petty, neighbourly jealousies. This is suggested by the third person narration when limited to her perspective, as in the following passage: “Oooh, the Lusses. How neighbours can get under your skin. Whenever she thought of skin-and-bones Joanie tossing off a description of her ‘European-style pure-soil wine cellar,’ Patricia shot an automatic middle finger in the general direction of the Luss house” (307). When Joan becomes a vampire, she enters Patricia’s house and feeds on her infant daughter (309), becoming another version of Stoker’s “Bloofer Lady.” The vampiric threat to Joan and Patricia’s community comes from an insider, a member of the local community, rather than an outsider, which further suggests that the transgression of these boundaries is frightening and dangerous. When Mark Blessige, Patricia’s husband arrives home, he finds his neighbourhood and his house mysteriously “abandoned” (315). In the house, Mark finds “some ten people. . . . [He] recognised a few of the people by face, fellow Bronxville residents, people he saw at Starbucks or the train club or the station. . . . Quite a random assortment for a get-together” (318). This

70 Ibid.

228 vague, familiar yet unfamiliar, almost uncanny sample of the community suggests that the everyday faces of its members may be masks to conceal their dangerous Otherness. Before Mark can react to the unsettling uncanniness of his abandoned neighbourhood and his vampire neighbours, they attack and feed upon him (318). UFPR represents the posthuman community as a web of love and responsiveness; PAVNs like The Strain instead evoke post-9/11 anxieties about the Other by representing communities that are invaded by other species as a threat to the status quo and as sites of infection. Ansel Barbour and Joan Luss attack American nuclear families, transforming them into murderous nests of vampires who turn on their neighbours. In this way, The Strain suggests that when the boundaries between self and Other disintegrate, it becomes impossible to distinguish the self from the Other, the home from the alien, the humans from the monsters. In this negative view of the posthuman world, the monsters may be lurking next door, waiting to feed. As an example of the post-apocalyptic vampire narrative, the Strain trilogy thus feeds on anxieties about the threat posed to humanism by posthumanism and to community and nation by terrorism and contagious disease. PAVNs, therefore, actively challenge both the way that UFPR presents the vampire as a posthuman Other and its affirmative vision of what constitutes “good” posthuman ethics. UFPR insists that the posthuman offers the potential to tear down boundaries that marginalise and oppress those categorised as Other in contemporary society. But PAVNs such as The Strain use the vampire to depict an Other that needs to be expelled from the human community and destroyed. It is no coincidence that the trend for post-apocalyptic vampire narratives has developed as the affirmatively posthuman (sympathetic) vampire has become prevalent in UFPR. Post-apocalyptic vampires emerged as a cross-media and transmedia trend in the same period that UFPR seems to have peaked as a genre, and the post-apocalyptic vampire narrative constitutes part of the backlash against the popularity of UFPR in recent years. This backlash is perhaps most evident in responses to Meyer’s Twilight Saga. As Crawford analyses in detail in The Twilight of the Gothic, Meyer’s Twilight Saga has been the target of particular scorn, with some vampire fans claiming “vampires and werewolves should be monsters, not romantic lovers.”71 He notes that among the

71 See Crawford, Twilight of the Gothic, 1–5; 3. See also chapter 5 in Crawford, “The Twilight Controversy,” 181–236, for his nuanced analysis of the vitriol directed toward Meyer’s Saga, aroused variously by its literary merits (or lack thereof), its portrayal of gender roles, and its position as a potentially feminist or antifeminist text.

229 detractors of the Saga, some “regarded Twilight’s depiction of vampirism, sparkles and all, as somehow inherently wrong or ridiculous.”72 Lisa Bode, in her analysis of how the Twilight Saga franchise has been negatively reviewed by film critics, argues that these critics position themselves against the Saga’s young female audience: “reviewers use the girl as a means to leverage their own cultural superiority,” including “their knowledge of vampire and horror film genres that enables them to distinguish between greater and lesser examples.” 73 She argues that the disparagement of Twilight, and of the sympathetic, romantic vampires within this narrative, is a “patrolling of the male-coded horror and action genre boundaries . . . against a perceived contamination from the ‘softened’ and the ‘gushy,’ and the specific feminine media associations of soap opera, daytime television, and Anne Rice vampire fiction.”74 The negative response to Twilight suggests broader issues relating to the acceptance and rejection of women’s genres and women’s popular culture as forms of cultural production. As Bode does, Williamson relates the rejection of the sympathetic vampire represented in the Twilight Saga to the rejection of feminine genres. She argues that, in this sense, the denigration of the Twilight Saga is a contemporary continuation of the denigration of eighteenth-century Gothic fiction: “a woman’s genre, downgraded in the cultural hierarchy . . . because of the association with femininity.”75 Spooner identifies this same belittling of women’s popular culture and supposedly “debased and diluted form[s] of the Gothic” in criticism of the Twilight Saga and True Blood.76 Both of these vampire texts frame the male vampiric body as desirable and “eminently consumable,”77 a phrase that suggests a reversal of roles between the voracious vampire and the female victim. Spooner argues that in criticism of the sexualized and romantic vampire, what both “young women in particular” and “‘grown women’ are principally being chastised for are unruly, excessive displays of desire.”78 The negative reception of Twilight is thus arguably symptomatic of a negative response to the cultural prevalence of this vampire and of women in the UFPR genre, a genre predominantly centred on female protagonists, with predominantly female writers and readers. Today, Meyer’s vampires, who are so far from scary that they sparkle in the

72 Ibid., 195. 73 Lisa Bode, “Transitional Tastes: Teen Girls and Genre in the Critical Reception of Twilight,” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 24, no. 5 (2010): 710. 74 Ibid., 711. 75 Williamson, “Let Them All In,” 79. 76 Spooner, Post-Millennial Gothic, 8–9. 77 Ibid., 86. 78 Ibid., 9.

230 sunlight, have become a pop-culture shorthand for the sympathetic, sexually appealing vampire of UFPR. Spooner identifies that “the sparkly vampire has come to be regarded as representative of a ‘de-fanged’ vampire, a vampire more likely to be regarded as a desirable romantic partner than a bloodthirsty killer.”79 Such vampires, she notes, “incite adoration from fans and loathing from their detractors.”80 Crawford argues that the success of the Twilight Saga “marked the point at which the idealistic vampire romance ceased to be the exception and became the established norm, against which it was necessary for subsequent media franchises to define themselves.”81 While Crawford discusses how other contemporary UFPR texts attempt to differentiate themselves from this new norm, PAVNs like The Strain even more strikingly contest the dominance of the romantic and sexualized vampire in vampire literature. Their monstrous vampires, as Abbott argues, “[seem] to represent a conscious attempt to make the vampire . . . scary once again.”82 PAVNs attempt to reclaim and reframe the vampire in male-coded genres. They contest the tropes of UFPR, emerging as an oppositional genre in which male heroes fight against grotesque and frightening vampires, vampires who give no pleasure, who are incapable of love, and who destroy humanity by effecting posthuman transformations. Post-apocalyptic vampires are thus the antithesis of the affirmatively posthuman vampires found in much UFPR.

Vampires in the Posthuman Future The humanised and sympathetic vampire has been a key figure in popular cultural works since the 1970s. However, since the 1990s, this vampire has developed in new ways in response to the sociohistorical concerns about the self and the Other in an era where new challenges are posed to the boundaries between the (white, patriarchal, dominant) humanist self and the (racialised, gendered, queer, animal, technological, monstrous) posthuman Other. In concert with these developments, the UFPR genre has dramatically transformed popular representations of the vampire, exploring new possibilities for ethical interactions between vampires and humans. The vampires of UFPR cross the limits of genre, media, gender, and the human in startling new ways. And today even texts that attempt to return to representations of the abject and

79 Ibid., 83. 80 Ibid., 84. 81 Crawford, Twilight of the Gothic, 269. 82 Abbott, Undead Apocalypse, 180.

231 inhuman vampire must do so via direct intertextual engagement with UFPR texts and tropes. At the same time, both UFPR and PAVNs continue to mutate, with their conventions crossing between genres and media into new forms. The Strain has now been adapted as comic book and television series. UFPR conventions have influenced the zombie genre, and have also been influenced by it, resulting in genre-bending texts such as the zombie Warm Bodies (2013) and UFPR television series iZombie. Recent PAVNs may experiment with the UFPR trope of the strong female protagonist, for example, in television series Van Helsing (2016–), where a female descendant of Dracula’s Abraham van Helsing fights vampires in a post-apocalyptic world. Parody texts such as What We Do In The Shadows play with the conventions of both humanised and abject vampires. Fan fiction and self-published erotica continue to develop the tropes and themes of UFPR, as seen in those writers who have crossed from fan fiction to published fiction, such as Cassandra Clare and E. L. James. Having first emerged in the mid-1980s, UFPR has now become firmly established as a genre of popular fiction. Like other fictional genres, such as the western or the Regency romance, UFPR may move in and out of vogue. But, having taken nearly thirty years to establish itself in popular culture, it seems likely that UFPR will have a lasting impact as a popular genre in its own right and on vampire literature more broadly. Its key conventions as identified in this thesis (including the “kickass chick” heroine; the monster as a member of a supernatural community; transgressive romance; thematic and generic hybridity; and transmedia seriality) are likely to continue to be utilised, and to further develop, in new forms. UFPR and PAVNs offer strikingly oppositional representations of the vampire. Nonetheless, a clear relationship exists between these two trends in vampire literature. UFPR and PAVNs both serve to refract and interrogate the anxieties attendant upon the relationship between the self and the Other in the posthuman era of the twenty-first century. The vampires of PAVNs also constitute a negative reaction against the postfeminist and affirmatively posthumanist vampires of UFPR. More broadly, the markedly different incarnations of the posthuman vampire in these two contemporary trends suggest an ongoing unresolved tension in our own society in reaction to the shifting boundaries of what it means to be Other—and whether those boundaries should be broken down or reinforced.

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The development of these two oppositional conceptions of the same monster may well come to seem, in retrospect, an evitable refraction of the global political tensions of the early decades of the twenty-first century and the post-9/11 era. At the present time, for those committed to an ideal of posthuman response and responsibility toward Others in the global world, the political sea change of the Trump administration, and other landmark political events like Brexit, indeed seem a regressive and insular reaction to the fear of the Other. Perhaps it should not seem so surprising that at a time when sympathetic, romantic posthuman vampires so dramatically destabilised the limits between the human and the Other, a strong and oppositional undercurrent emerged to insist that the Other remains a threat that must be eliminated. As Nina Auerbach wrote in Our Vampires, Ourselves, “every age embraces the vampire it needs.”83 Auerbach also wrote, though, that “there is no such creature as ‘The Vampire’; there are only vampires.” This is because, she adds, “since vampires are immortal, they are free to change incessantly.”84 Vampires change with their times, and they will undoubtedly continue to evolve and cross-breed, both as erotic and abject, sexy and scary, as they respond to emergent challenges in the human world. The vampires of the last thirty years have been animals, machines, diseases, significant others, lovers, stalkers, “vegetarians,” weapons, terrorists, and companion species. In their negative representations, vampires and vampiric feeding remain a vehicle for our darkest cultural fears about what it means to be human and how fragile that humanity may be. In their affirmative representations, vampires offer the possibility of transcending the limits of humanity to become something more, and vampiric feeding becomes the means by which these limits are contested. The vampire thus continues to be a monster that is defined by its need to feed. Whether that feeding is something to be feared or desired, it offers a way of representing and engaging with what it means to be a vampire, a category of Otherness that is mutually constitutive of the category of the post-/human. And despite frequent proclamations that vampires will, at any moment now, become passé, our own hunger for them still seems insatiable.

83 Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, 145. 84 Ibid., 5.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Key Primary Fiction Texts

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Aldiss, Brian. Dracula Unbound. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Andrews, Ilona. Kate Daniels novels. 9 novels. 2007–. ———. The Edge series. 4 novels. 2009–2012. ———. Hidden Legacy series. 3 novels. 2014–. Armstrong, Kelley. Women of the Otherworld series. 13 novels. 2001–2012. Ball, Alan, David Tischman, Mariah Huehner, and David Messina. True Blood Volume 1: All Together Now. San Diego: IDW Publishing, 2011. Bishop, Anne. The Others series. 5 novels. 2013–. Black, Holly. The Coldest Girl in Cold Town. New York: Little, Brown, 2013. Brennan, Sarah Rees, and Justine Larbalestier. Team Human. New York: HarperTeen, 2012. Briggs, Patricia. The Mercy Thompson series. 10 novels. 2006–. ———. Alpha and Omega series. 4 novels. 2007–. Butcher, Jim. The Dresden Files. 15 novels. 2000–. Carter, Angela. The Bloody Chamber. London: Gollancz, 1979. Cast, P. C., and Kristen Cast. The House of Night series. 12 novels. 2007–2014. Charnas, Suzy McKee. The Vampire Tapestry. London: The Women’s Press, 1992. First published 1980 by Granada Publishing. Clare, Cassandra. Shadowhunter Chronicles. 11 novels. 2007–. Clark, Aubrey. The Vampire Diaries: The Salvation Trilogy. 3 novels. 2013–2014. Collins, Nancy. Sonja Blue series. 5 novels. 1989–2002. Crichton, Michael. Congo. New York: Avon, 2003. First published 1980 by Knopf. Cronin, Justin. The Passage trilogy. 3 novels. 2010–2016. ———. The Passage. New York: Ballantine Books, 2010. Elrod, P. N. The Vampire Files. 12 novels. 1990–. Feehan, Christine. Dark Carpathians series. 31 novels. 1999–. Frost, Jeaniene. Night Huntress series. 7 novels. 2007–2014. ———. Night Prince series. 4 novels. 2012–2017. Grahame-Smith, Seth. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2010. Hambly, Barbara. Those Who Hunt the Night. New York: Del Rey, 1988. Hamilton, Laurell K. Merry Gentry series. 9 novels. 2000–.

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Author/s: McLennon, Leigh

Title: Contemporary vampire genre fiction: ethical feeding and the posthuman vampire in urban fantasy and paranormal romance

Date: 2017

Persistent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11343/208892

File Description: Contemporary Vampire Genre Fiction: Ethical Feeding and the Posthuman Vampire in Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance

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