Vampire Camp

Originally published in Quill & Quire, October, 2011


In the fall of 1972, the Holy Grail for my friends and me was a Saturday afternoon bike ride to the Kilborn Shoppers confectionary in our Ottawa neighbourhood of Alta Vista. On the spiral magazine rack by the window were the horror comic books and paperback horror novels, some of which I still own, lovingly tucked away in boxes the way other people might save sports ribbons or Wolf Cub badges. We’d pay our 20 cents, bicycle home, and barricade ourselves in our rooms and thrill to the perpetual Halloween that awaited us between those garish covers, especially the vampire comics like The Tomb of Dracula or Vampire Tales. 

In my late forties, I’ve been amazed and delighted by the number of writers  working in and out of the horror genre that share these particular cultural touchpoints. Last year I interviewed Benjamin Percy, a brilliant literary writer regarded by many critics as a young prince of American letters. Percy is a good 10 years younger than me, but still – like feral children speaking a private language – it took no time at all to discover that he was a classic horror nerd, with many of the same points of reference. The horror genre is the ultimate democracy.

            
As a writer, though, making the leap to horror (in my case from literary non-fiction and essays) hasn’t been without some amusing bumps along the way.

            
Try telling your friends or literary colleagues that you’re writing a vampire novel and watch their reactions – from the gleeful (“Ooooh, I love Twilight!”) to the snobbish (“Really? Why on earth?) to the mercantile (“Vampires are so hot right now! Is it going to be a series?”).

            
Then try explaining that you’re not writing about “sexy” vampires, that what you’re working on isn’t a “vampire romance,” but a good old-fashioned undead horror show set in a small northern Ontario mining town, with vampires that have the requisite old-school preoccupations – an aversion to crucifixes, a taste for shape-shifting. The kind that don’t “glitter” in the sunlight, but might explode into fire and stinking ash and smoke. The kind that sleep in coffins and caves, not penthouse apartments. The kind that don’t attend high school and hang with beautiful, sensitive, lonely outcasts, but who might happily eat one of them for dinner, and not in a nice way, either. And no, it can’t be a series, because the body count is too high.

            
Bless them, they usually don’t get it, but that’s okay. That’s the price of writing a vampire novel in the age of Stephenie Meyer, Inc.

            
My vampires are the Hammer Films vampires: Christopher Lee as Count Dracula, towering in the shadows at the top of the long stone staircase in Horror of Dracula, or Robert Tayman as Count Mitterhouse in Vampire Circus, terrorizing the Serbian village of Stattel. Or even Robert Quarry as Count Yorga, Vampire, sashaying through the corridors of his Los Angeles mansion in his waist-length cape like an undead Liberace in the company of his garishly made-up brides.

            
They’re the shockingly articulate, aristocratic vampires of Marvel Comics’ The Tomb of Dracula and Vampire Tales. They’re the Victorian vampires of Bram Stoker’s eponymous Dracula, the novel I read when I was 11 and never mistook for a “dark romance.” They’re Mr. Barlow, and the American vampires of Salem’s Lot.

            
I was a comic book kid back before they were called “graphic novels,” back when they were still considered something that would rot your brain, but even my ex-schoolteacher mother was impressed with the writing. 

            
So yeah, I’m old. 

            
But that’s okay, because writing my vampire novel, Enter, Night, was a bit like travelling back in time to a pre-Botox era, one where properly undead things slept during the day and rose up from their graves at night and sucked the life from your veins and didn’t try to become your bf4EvR 

            
Over the course of the writing, I listened to the music of the era, re-read the comics and the novels (some execrable) with the eyes of a professional writer, some holding up remarkably well) and re-watched a raft of 1970s horror films on DVD. I trolled eBay for vintage fragrances that might evoke scent memory, and vintage magazines that my parents might have had lying around the house in 1972. And I pored over boxes of pictures and school yearbooks. 

As a student at the rugged St. John’s Cathedral Boy’s School in Selkirk, Manitoba, I’d paddled approximately 2,200 miles through the wildernesses of northern Ontario and western Canada. The pure gothic beauty of Canadian badlands had imprinted itself on my teenage mind. That gorgeous isolation came surging back in the creation of the fictional mining town of Parr’s Landing and the people in it. By setting the novel in Canada —by finding our very own Transylvania in the forests and cliffs around Lake Superior and shading it with what could be considered gothic and grotesque in our history as Canadians. I brought the vampires of my 1970s childhood home.  

            
Best of all, I got to revisit the place where it will always be a cold October Saturday afternoon in 1972, and I’m flying through a cloud of windborne autumn leaves on the wings of a Schwinn banana bike and my own imagination. Not a bad place to have begun the journey of my own writer’s life so many years ago, as it turns out.  

            
All gold, no “glitter.” No offense, Edward. You’re scary too.