Recently, I finished The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones.
It’s a phenomenal novel about a Pikuni Blackfeet named Good Stab who gets turned into a vampire and decides to start killing the hunters that are driving the buffalo population to extinction. Jones toys with the vampire myth in ways I’ve never seen before. For his vampires, “you are what you eat,” which leads to an unexpected existential crisis when Good Stab starts developing the pale skin and blue eyes of the colonizers he is eating. But perhaps even more thought-provoking, when a vampire begins feeding, they physically cannot stop until their prey is completely drained, even if this means consuming so much blood that their stomach explodes.
Yeah. Pretty gross, right?
These little twists really highlight the vampiric nature of American colonization itself in ways I’d never thought of before. At one point Good Stab asks the white narrator, “When will you have enough of our land?” The narrator is unable to answer because the answer is of course never. The colonial beast cannot stop until its consumed everything in its path. And even as it tries to destroy the cultures of the indigenous peoples it decimates, it cannot help but be transformed by them.
I’m not going to go on and on about how awesome this book is. (Just read it. Seriously, go read it NOW.) But as I turned the last page on what has to be my one hundredth vampire novel, I started wondering: why don’t I ever get sick of this?
Some people do. When I was submitting short stories to fantasy and sci fi magazines, more than once I got warnings that vampire stories would be thrown in the trash. It’s been done too many times. People are sick of it after Twilight and True Blood.
But I’m not.
My first contact with vampires was Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight. I was thirteen years old, and I distinctly remember that when I finished the last page in my mother’s car, I turned to her and said, “Mom, I don’t think I’ll ever read anything as good as this again.”
Cut me some slack. I was thirteen! Hormones were raging. A month later, I immediately realized I was wrong when I started the Percy Jackson series, but Twilight sent me down a rabbit hole of vampire obsession. I devoured Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, and then in my typical dramatic fashion, I proceeded to lay face down on the floor and pray to God that I could create something that beautiful one day. I told God that I’d give up anything if They would make me a brilliant writer.
I read Interview four more times over the course of the next decade.
I think for me, the vampire myth circles a series of existential questions that nearly every human has had, or at least every human who’s battled a bout of severe depression. Anne Rice’s Louis constantly asks “Why am I here? For what purpose? Who created the first vampire, and why?” Growing up in a Christian household where the existence of an all-knowing, all-powerful was presented to me as something as factually sound as the speed of light, I began to circle the drain of similar questions when I started noticing inconsistencies and moral flaws in the bible.
Louis’s unending quest for meaning mirrored my own. But there was also something in his—and every vampire’s—unending hunger. No matter how many times he feeds, there is still a void, still something missing after the temporary satisfaction fades. I used to think that if I got into a great MFA program, I’d finally be happy. Then I thought if I landed an agent, I’d finally be happy. Then I thought if I could just get a book traditionally published, I’d finally be . . . you see where this is going.
At each milestone, I experienced a fleeting satisfaction right before that awful feeling washed over me again. I started to wonder what was wrong with me, but over time I realized that there is no one thing that can keep a person happy for life. That unending hunger is baked into our human anatomy. It’s what helps us accomplish our goals. After all, if publishing Billions to Burn gave me the peace I wanted, I wouldn’t have a new release on the way.
All this to say, vampires are . . . human. Their problems are just our problems in neon, and I’ll never be over them because I’ll never be over us. So if you have a new cool twist on the vampire, please hit me up @taylorbanksauthor on threads. I’m always reading.
And I’m always hungry.