Vampires for Valentines Giveaway!

Monday, February 11, 2013

Pitt as Anne Rice's Louis, 90's Hot

Awhile back, I posted my thoughts about the vampire exhaustion we seem to be facing. Are we over the vampire? Well, you can read about my thoughts on that here, Vampires are Dead-Again, but I don't think we've yet reached the end of the vampire's story. After all, vampires have been around since the ancient period. The first references we have to vampire-like creatures come from ancient Sumerian culture and that would be about 4000BCE. It was not until Byron and Polidori played with the idea of vampires as literary devices that we began to see this ancient fiend as a refined gentleman who might devour us--in a lot of ways.

Please don't suck my blood. Seriously.

From the start, vampires depicted the society they were from. When Byron wrote his "Fragment of a Novel" at Villa Diodati, he saw the vampire as a gentleman on a grand tour, snacking on virgins and leading young men into temptation. Polidori, Byron fan-boy, plagiarized the great poet's plot in his story "The Vampyre." Following Byron and Polidori, we have the vampire classic "Carmilla" which depicted a female vampire with homosexual lust for her vicitim--read Victorian era fear of female sexuality--and, of course, Stoker's "Dracula" which reinvents Vlad Tepes' history while playing with writing style: inclusion of journal entries, newspaper reports, notes, etc. to tell the tale of Dracula. Have you ever tried to read Stoker's masterpiece? I find it very cumbersome, though I love the plot buried within.

Sparkles = Lust?

Vampires represent the issues of the society for which they are written. But vampires, while dangerous, are very often lust-worthy, and they have been since the birth of the vampire in literature. Like him or not, Edward Cullen--nay, all the Cullens--are hot. Young Dracula: hot. Lord Rutheven: hot. Carmilla: hot. More often are vampires hot than not. Why? Well, the answer, of course, is painfully obvious--pun intended. It is the symbolic exchange of fluid between the fiend and the victim that is so, well, open to Freudian interpretation. Giant fangs. Penetration. Exchange of fluids. It is symbolic sex. By nature, the way the vampire feeds evokes sexual connotations. What would make being bit by a vampire even better? Having sex with him/her too. It is because of this exchange of life-giving fluids that we will often see the vampire as hot.

Granted, 30 Days of Night vampires are very unappealing, but with a film like that, the vampire represents something else. When a vampire is not sexual, it often becomes a thinking, calculating killer. Unlike a mindless eating zombie, that kind of vampire speaks to other things in our society that are dark, dangerous, and definitely--as Paris Hilton might have said--not hot. The vampires we often love represent ideals that are both physical and emotional. Immortal love with a really good looking person. Sounds good.

To celebrate our lusty vampires, I am offering a little give-away that will run from February 12th-February 19th. If you would like to be considered to win my Vampire Prize Pack, you need to do two things:

1) Sign in so we know your name, and in the comments section below this post, comment with one or the other: Sparkles! or No Sparkles!

2) Sign up to "Follow" this blog.

It's that simple! On 11:59pm of the 19th, I will randomly choose a winner of the Vampire Prize Pack which will include all of the nifty items listed below:

Bram Stoker's Dracula (Collector's Edition)

1 DVD Collector's Edition of Bram Stoker's Dracula

1 Tarot of the Vampyres Kit by Ian Daniels

1 autographed copy of "The Harvesting" by Melanie Karsak! (yes, vampires!)

Be sure to visit all the blogs participating in the hop on the linky list to the right. And special thanks to paranormal romance authors Felicity Heaton, Caris Roane and H. D. Thomson for organizing this hop!