Kill or Be Killed

I did an informal survey of books about vampires at Barnes & Noble today. Just walking around I noticed the vampire books displays, as I have for the past year or so, strewn about. They aren't even adjacent to the Twilight displays anymore because they no longer need to be. They are everywhere. And as Neil Gaiman has noted, this vampire genre thing is starting to get played out. Which means delicious low-rent covers and stories are all over!!! So I took pictures of the many covers I found. The covers, as well as the stories within them, are a clear indication that women seem to drive the genre. Just take a look at this stuff, it's hilarious!

You have your teen vampire/paranormal novels, filled with angsty goodness. Many of them are what you would expect:



All very passive imagery here, even for the books where the protagonist is a female vampire! There were some exceptions, but very few. A lot of these novels are obviously capitalizing on the success of the Twilight series and its central character, klutzy, co-dependent Bella Swan. Some of these novels have stronger heroines, and the Chosen book is actually a very female-centered novel about a girl and her best friend. But books like Untamed (by the same author!) are pretty much about trying/wishing/spending all day thinking about being popular and having a boyfriend.

Here's a few exceptions: # 1 your defiant teenage guy, flaunting his vampireness. Note the requisite bangs that are on every guy these days. I swear I wore that haircut in the mid-90s.



They are both about 8th grader Vladmir Tod, who goes to, no joke-Bathory High School. Lots of addressing his blood lust and how difficult it is for him not to feed on those around him. That doesn't seem to be a big problem for the girl protagonists, though. Maybe the whole "my boyfriend wants to kill me/love me" scenario that is so popular with Twilighters is not as successful in reverse. Hmmm.....

I thought this one was clever. Often I want to tell the vampire characters in novels to just suck it up and be a vampire already. Or kill yourself. Whatever, just move on!


Black is for Beginners has a graphic novel quality to its cover, with the girl in front of the boy, no less:

I think this title, plus the chesty tattooed shirtless guy made me laugh, but I'm comedically about 13 years old.
Bones!

Don't blame the kids (or publishers perceptions of teen aesthetics) for the silly covers. Roll on over to the mystery and sci-fi fantasy displays for some fun ones like California Demon. Plays on words, bloody puns...it's too much.

Oh, and there were tons of covers that feature women with bare midriffs, tight clothing, and phallic instruments of vampire destruction:


Lots of tribal tattoos, I've noticed. Both on the vamps and the slayers (and especially the slayers who love vamps).

The whole "I love you but I also want to eat you for dinner" story is fascinating to me, of course. But far more sinister to me is the "I spend my life hunting your kind down and you should all be destroyed but I can't help wanting to have lots of sex with you" story. It strikes too close to the idea of racism and how racism works in this culture to be a pleasurable sexy story for me. The idea that you ascribe certain uncivilized and monstrous traits to a group of people and therefore cannot admit that you harbor any inkling of such traits, but of course you do, so then in order to deal with it you project your self-loathing onto the group by eliminating/dominating them. Tons of the books on the shelves are about the same thing. And the best-selling stories in the genre are as well (Anita Blake, Buffy, etc.). Anyway, moving on...

This one was an interesting take on the genre:

He's a vampire! And an Agent! He's Vampire Agent! And he doesn't have to wear a crop top to fight! (If you sing it, it makes a damn fine theme song)

So that was fun, right. Wait, it gets better. Where could it get any better, you might ask? I mean, what section would offer more? You guessed it, the romance novel section, which doesn't even mess around. They are all about dudes who want to have sex with you and have you for dinner, and about how someone wanting to kill you is the sexiest thing you've ever heard.

Case in point:



Apparently the "Lord of Sin" likes frilly cuffs on his shirts and cocktail rings. Who knew?


I know, these are about werewolves, but it's the same deal. Werewolf and werewolf slayer fall in love. Will they have puppies and live happily ever after? Only if he learns to stop himself before slashing her to pieces every month! And if she can ever get over having sex with a person she considers to be a dirty animal! Oh those two!


Dude, is Heather Graham the actress writing romance novels? Because that sounds amazing!



This one is about an immortal, but not a vampire (its complicated and demony), but the bare midriff mantra remains.


I actually like this cover, even though it has a girl with dead-face on it, because of the script and the black-white-red color scheme. I looked at the synopsis of the story and apparently it's about a guy named Allen Cabbot, recruited by his professor to get involved in a big adventure. He then "finds himself tangling with Battle Jesuits, a Society of Witches and a vampire, and he learns that Evergreen's real goal may be the philosopher's stone. The feisty ghost of 16th-century alchemist Edward Kelley serves as narrator, complaining about the picture on his Wikipedia entry while explaining the history behind Allen's adventure." Sounds tongue in cheek. May be worth it?

An now, the piece de resistance:


Yes, you read it right, Tall, Dark & Fangsome. The story is actually the reverse of the tale I mentioned way up in the teen fiction section. A lady vampire who has been cursed with being extra murderous or something and has to stop herself before she kills the guys she falls in love with.

My favorite little contribution to this list was something that I totally thought was a vampire novel, just from the red text, but it turns out has nothing to do with vampires, which is good, because that name is so awful, it would have to be a hack writer. That being said, wtf is up with that name? Eric Van Lustbader? For reals, Eric?



Sigh, it could be worse, of course. I mean, I could be reading about chicks who are into dragons.


Fighting dragons in drapey club wear. Not smart.