Different Blood

About the Book

Different blood flows in their veins--but our blood quenches their thirst.  

From Bram Stoker´s 1897 creation of Count Dracula, portrayed as a foreign invader bent on the conquest of England, the literary vampire has symbolized the Other, whether his or her otherness arises from racial, ethnic, sexual, or species difference.  Even before the bloodsucking Martians of H. G. Wells´ War of the Worlds, however, popular fiction contained a few vampires who were members of alien species rather than supernatural undead.  Guy de Maupassant´s "Horla" is only one of the best-known.

Vampire invaders from other planets appear in pulp fiction throughout the 20th century.  Among others, interplanetary adventurer Northwest Smith meets a shapeshifting, Medusoid seductress in C. L. Moore´s "Shambleau."  Even more intriguing, though, are humanoid and quasi-humanoid beings who live on Earth among us, often camouflaged as our own kind.  Jack Williamson´s Darker Than You Think, for example, features an inhuman race, vampiric as well as lycanthropic, that has preyed on humanity from prehistoric times.  A gentler view of the Earth-born "alien vampire" appears in Ray Bradbury´s "Homecoming," a poignant tale of the one "normal" boy in a clan of "monsters."  Such fiction can use vampirism either to valorize or to undercut racism and xenophobia. Richard Matheson makes the vampire a misfit child in "Dress of White Silk" and "Drink My Blood."  Cyril Kornbluth´s "The Mindworm," at mid-century, uses the alien in the form of a mutant born of human parents to foreground another cultural preoccupation, the fears spawned by the nuclear age.  Similar fears underlie Matheson´s I Am Legend, in which a worldwide plague wipes out all "normal" human beings and transforms the survivors into a new species.

The boom in vampire fiction that began in the 1970s engendered a variety of "alien" vampires, many of them portrayed as sympathetic characters.  The science fiction vampire is especially suited to the presentation of vampirism as morally neutral rather than inherently evil.  Suzy McKee Charnas´ The Vampire Tapestry, Whitley Strieber´s The Hunger, George R. R. Martin´s Fevre Dream, Jacqueline Lichtenberg´s Those of My Blood, Elaine Bergstrom´s Shattered Glass, and Melanie Tem´s Desmodus are only a few examples of this richly diverse subgenre.  In the ´80s and ´90s the new subgenre of vampire romance also flourished, exploring the naturally evolved vampire (as well as the more traditional undead type) in terms of the redemptive power of love.

Different Blood surveys the literary vampire as alien from the mid-1800s to the 1990s, analyzing the many uses to which science fiction and fantasy authors have put this theme.  Their works explore issues of species, race, ecological responsibility, gender, eroticism, xenophobia, parasitism, symbiosis, intimacy, and the bridging of differences.

An extensive bibliography guides the reader to numerous novels and short stories on the "vampire as alien" theme, many of them still in print.  For further recommendations from the author, visit the Realm of Vampires:

http://www.simegen.com/reviews/vampires/vamprelm.htm

Erratum: The following entry was inadvertently omitted from the bibliography under Primary Sources between "Wells, H. G." and "Wilson, Colin":

Williamson, Jack. DARKER THAN YOU THINK. UNKNOWN 4, 4 (1940). Rpt. NY: Berkley, 1969.

About the Author

Author of a werewolf novel, Shadow of the Beast (Design Image Group) and an Eppie Award-winning vampire novel, Dark Changeling, Margaret L. Carter has devoted several decades to the collection and analysis of vampire fiction. Her works include Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics (an anthology of scholarly essays) and The Vampire in Literature: A Critical Bibliography. She produces an annual vampire fiction bibliographic update and has edited a long-running fanzine, The Vampire's Crypt. Dark Star Publications will publish two of her vampire romances, Sealed in Blood and Crimson Dreams, in 2001 and 2002. Her own vampire fiction belongs to the "vampire as another species" category analyzed in Different Blood, to which she brings a fan's enthusiasm as well as years of study.