THE LES DANIELS BLOG TOUR: When Is a Tired Trope Not Tired? You Just Need to Find the Needle in the Haystack – Guest Blog by Matt Bechtel
Starting today, Matt Bechtel of Necon E-Books is embarking on a Blog tour celebrating the work and legacy of the legendary Les Daniels. I’m very honored and humbled to host the inaugural entry here.
It’s fitting that not only this article, but our entire Les Daniels Blog Tour, begins with a story about Bob Booth; after all, Necon (and therefore Bob) is the direct connection between Les Daniels and Brian Keene.
Over the three years Bob acted as a judge for the monthly Necon E-Books Flash Fiction Contest, he adopted a personal edict — he would not vote for any zombie or vampire stories. Why? Because we received SO DAMN MANY of ‘em! Every month, no matter what; we could set the contest theme as “Puppies and Kittens,” and we would get stories of bloodsucking dogs and undead felines.
The funny thing is, of course, that even personal edicts are meant to be broken. Occasionally (and by that I mean VERY rarely), we’d receive a zombie or vampire piece that was so good that even Bob would vote for it despite it’s seemingly played-out trope. In short, if the work is great, TRULY great, it will rise above the maddening crowd and find an appreciative audience, even amongst readers who have been so turned off to its subject matter that they are literally prejudiced against it before reading a single word.
So, despite his flash fiction edict, can you take a wild guess at two authors of whom Bob Booth never grew tired? Big shock, it’s Brian Keene and Les Daniels; in fact, I can’t begin to tell you how many times Bob re-read their seminal works because he returned to them so often.
I’m going to come dangerously close to breaking the longstanding, “What Happens At Necon Stays At Necon” rule here, but when Brian Keene was roasted at Necon 31, well … let’s just say he had to endure a few zombie jokes. But truthfully (and not that I, or anyone, would have ever admitted this during his roast!), those barbs were really guilt by association. Yes, the horror genre has been plagued by a flood of hackneyed, trite, empty zombie stories over the past few decades like … well, a hoard of mindless, empty zombies. Yet that can’t touch or change just how good novels like The Rising and City of the Dead are; in Brian’s hands, even a now-lifeless trope like zombies springs to life (pun fully intended).
Which brings me back to the other novels I mentioned were always, ALWAYS recycled upon Bob Booth’s “To Be Read” list — The Don Sebastian Chronicles by Les Daniels. Truthfully, has any piece of writing other than the Bible inspired as much fiction as Bram Stoker’s Dracula? It honestly feels wrong to even call vampires “a trope;” they’re really more of a cash-cow industry, a subject immune from descending into “fad” status. This, of course, leads to a lot of really sub-par works about vampires (and “sub-par” is being incredibly kind). I’m not talking about ones that are intentionally bad for comic value, like 1972’s infamous blaxploitation film “Blacula;” I mean stuff that only saw the light of day because its main character had fangs and the market’s thirst for bloodsuckers is unquenchable. And before anyone thinks I’m on some kind of “old man horror fan rant” (i.e. “Back in my day we had good vampire fiction!”), this is not a condemnation of any recent pop-culture sensations; quite frankly, there were plenty of lousy vampire stories before any sparkly teenagers kept diaries.
Want proof? There’s a quote upon the cover of the Tor paperback edition of Yellow Fog (Book Four of The Don Sebastian Chronicles, published in 1986) from another true legend of the horror genre, Charles L. Grant — “We’re talking real vampires here!” Five simple words, one of them italicized, letting the reader know that this novel is the wheat needing separation from the chaff (from someone who would definitely know the difference).
I would never be so egotistical as to compare myself to Charles L. Grant, but I knew and respected Charlie well enough to know that the following analogy is one he would’ve made himself — Brian Keene is to zombies what Les Daniels is to vampires. And therein lies the answer to the title question of this article. When is a tired trope not tired? When it’s in the hands of a true artist. In fact, no matter how sick of zombies and/or vampires you may be, I all but guarantee that reading the works of Keene and Daniels will actually make you MORE disgusted with what I referred to earlier as “the maddening crowd” because they’ll remind you of just how GOOD these tropes can be when they’re done right. No matter how many poor, cookie-cutter renditions came before or followed, works like The Rising Series and The Don Sebastian Chronicles will always remain relevant because they are great novels first, zombie/vampire pieces second.
When critiquing writers, “lazy” is a synonym for “bad.” You wanna draft off the work of others and crank out a piece of tripe that will sell? By all means, go for it. Just know that your work will never be appreciated and re-read the way Keene and Daniels are; that’s a distinction reserved for authors with too much respect for their art, their fans, and their genre to be lazy.
***
Just a friendly reminder — The Complete Don Sebastian Chronicles are now available as e-books at www.neceonebooks.com, so please order your copies today!
***
THE LES DANIELS BLOG TOUR continues Monday, 1/27 at the New England Horror Writers website.
