Twilight (for those that don’t know) follows Bella on her trek to becoming a vampire. You don’t know this in the first book. From what I hear, she messes with werewolves in the second book and has this odd love triangle going on between a vampire and a werewolf until other stuff happens. And yes, I have an idea of what that “other stuff” is and don’t want to dwell on it.

Moving forward…

Some years ago I discovered the author L.J. Smith. As I recall, the first book of hers I read was about a teenage witch coven and I really enjoyed it. The books were sold in the Y/A section of the bookstore (I was working in at the time… and in bookstores I visit on occasion). Pretty quickly, I’d either purchased or borrowed all of Smith’s books and enjoyed them and then time passed, she stopped publishing, and in the end I pretty much lost track of her.

At the same time, I also saw a series of movies over a series of years that rotated around vampires. The first in the series was, Interview with the Vampire based off of the book with the same title by Anne Rice. At its core, the audience is treated to a vampire telling the world about his experiences about being a vampire. The bulk of the movie is set in the past, before cars, and encompasses the early experiences of being a vampire with the outcome that you get a montage and voice-over dialogue that moves the story forward in time to the present. In the end, I didn’t find this movie or (almost) any other movie about vampires to be at all interesting. In fact, this coupled with some other experiences led me to shy away from almost everything to do with the subject.

Then I read Christopher Moore‘s book, Bloodsucking Fiends. This book followed, rather strictly, the humorous tale of a young girl waking up a vampire and how she copes with the changes that have taken place in her life. As a result, the audience is entertained by the a girl learning to be undead and being ten pounds heavier (forever) than she wants to be.

Ah, to be a girl who worries about ten extra pounds….

Actually, I have no idea what that is like and as as a result will move forward.

Then I was introduced to the writing of Kim Harrison. Her books are all told first person from Rachel Morgan‘s POV and encompass all sorts of fantasy creatures that include vampires. Harrison has written at least one short story from her principle vampire character’s POV. I didn’t enjouy it. But I do enjoy Rachel Morgan‘s POV and that she is a witch. I like the idea of witchcraft.

Imagine the naive notion of wish fulfillment… that is, at it’s core, what stories about magic are about. You, the individual, are given the opportunity change the world around you through some medium that, depending on what book or story or fantasy or horror element you are reading, ends up being about tapping into a mystic energy. Different people call it different things, but the outcome is still the same, changing something around you.

And yet, this post isn’t about magic or witches, it is about vampires.

The problem with writers who write about vampires is that they write from the perspective of someone who has not lived very long and yet, have lived hundreds of years. Take Twilight as an example. Edward Cullen is a vampire. As I remember, he’s been alive for somewhere around 100 years. And yet, when watching the movie or reading the book, the attitude of the character is someone who has lived for a period of less than twenty years rather than more than 80 years. As a result, there is a pretty serious disconnect between what one expects from the character(s) as a vampire and what one gets. The problem is that Edward should be more mature and by extension should have to force himself to act younger than he is… but switching into maturity and wisdom that doesn’t belong to someone of his apparent age. And yet, instead of maturity the outcome is immaturity.

It is through immaturity that the audience then finds the disconnect. There are more things about the story that cause disconnects… though I am not all that interested in outlining what Stephanie Meyer has done wrong or why I agree with Steven King about how she is actually a very bad writer. What she did right was to tap into the primal need for fear in love and as a result this spread like wildfire among women and girls and we have a modern day Jane Austen… who, also, wasn’t that great of a writer and tapped into some rather basic needs of her principle audience.

The outcome, for me, is that, “No,” I don’t enjoy the movie. I did need to watch it alone so that people wouldn’t tell me what I though about it before I gave it it’s fair shake. Along with that, I felt it was… mean spirited (???) to attack Kristen Stewart for what she says in interviews without first getting a glimpse of her acting ability (poor, actually). Kristin Stewart likes to say a lot of things. They are not thought out. And they end up being rather mean spirited and make her sound stupid. On top of which, the dialogue she is supposed to say doesn’t work coming out of her mouth. Instead of sounding more intelligent, she sounds like she is trying to sound more intelligent.

Vampires, however, become disinteresting because they are one dimensional and, in almost all cases where the author attempts to make them three dimensional, they also fail. In short, the idea that someone could, potentially, live for periods of hundreds and thousands of years would indicate that the potential for human growth and development should extend to the vampire growing as well. Instead, the vampire often becomes stagnant in whatever era they were most comfortable and as a result, you get the idea of what the individual might have been like say, during the reign of the pharoah’s.

As a result, all of the experiences and learning opportunities and etc. that took place from that time to the modern are lost because that particular individual stopped (effectively) experiencing life from that point forward.

And this is one of the serious flaws with vampire stories. On the one hand, you get the desire to live indefiniately. On the other hand, that long life requires the individual to eat blood and deal with other aspects of the curses. The outcome is that authors have very little ability to place themselves in the shoes of the undead and as a result don’t write compelling enough stories. At least, not compelling enough for me.While all of that is true, another truism is that Twilight as a book and as a movie sucks.

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