The future of vampire books
From Book Riot: FORETELLING THE FUTURE OF VAMPIRE BOOKS
Always entertaining to try to predict what might happen next in a subgenre, so sure! I’m interested to see what Book Riot thinks is up next for vampire stories.
We’ve done the Creature of the Night vampire and the Detective vampire and Sexy vampire — in many, many iterations — and the peculiar subset of the Sexy Glittery vampire who is perfectly fine in sunlight. So sure, now what?
… this desire to see our norms flipped can come from a need to see alternative perspectives of that which we have been told is concrete and unchanging, such as societal roles or historical events. Vampires have a habit of reflecting the times we live in, not only disrupting them but personifying them, and as we begin to be more aware of how our media and education systems construct false realities for us based on historical revisionism and misinformation, I anticipate the ‘norms’ of vampirism being dissected and rewritten as well, with the vampire emerging as a victim of centuries-long smear campaigns. I can see the vampire portrayed as a Cassandra-like figure, violently shoved aside despite their evident humanity, unfairly framed as a monster for revealing the truth about the world we live in.
Hmm! The vampire as … how could we sum this up … okay: the vampire as wise but unfairly marginalized race? Is that where the above paragraph is aiming?
Yes, yes, reading the rest of the article, I think that is a fair summation of this prediction. That actually seems like a fairly plausible direction for vampire stories to take.
The author of the post refers to Octavia Butler’s Fledgling as an example of this kind of vampire story. I was just thinking about that book for a different reason. I really do not remember much about it — I only read it once, and it seemed to me very much like the first book of a series. I was very sorry Butler would never have a chance to go on with it, and so I never re-read it.
But since I’ve now thought of it twice in the past couple of hours, maybe I should bring it upstairs and plan to re-read it.
I will add that I haven’t personally recovered from a surfeit of vampires five or ten years ago, so I don’t read many vampire stories anymore. The only ones I always pick up are Barbara Hambly’s ongoing Ysidro series. The first book, Those Who Hunt the Night, may be my favorite vampire story of all time.
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