Peter Hodges

Click the picture to see how you would do.

This isn’t necessarily a complaint.

Mostly all I want to do is vegetate with a book or a video game to take my mind off of how much my throat hurts and how loopy I feel.

I do, in fact, have the flu. I am one of the first confirmed cases of it for this season in my area. Go me!

I probably won’t post a whole lot until Monday.

The Vampire Suicides
Part One
By Peter Hodges 

I have intentionally laden several layers of cliché into the text. See if you can pick them out.

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Seriously.

Why is this genre so popular on the market? Why is vampirism such a key fixture in the dark fantasy/horror/science fiction genre? We see a genetic vampire in Peter Watts’ Blindsight. There are three different types of vampires in Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files. Stephanie Myers is making big news with her teen girl focused vampire novels. During this rise of fiction, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was on television for seven seasons. Laurell K. Hamilton has been writing book after book featuring Vampires. Her work (among others) has penetrated almost every facet of the geek mainstream, even making an appearance in the popular web comic Penny Arcade. What gives?

Even I’m not immune to it. I recently finished Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, which is an excellent, suspenseful thriller about three generations of historians and their quest to uncover the truth of (you guessed it) the Dracula legend. Despite myself, I found myself drawn into the moody atmosphere of the book. It was written in a very literary fashion (reminiscent of British Literature at the turn of the twentieth century) and packaged in such a way that I didn’t mind that it was a(nother) story about Vampires. (Yes, yes, “OMG! You read lit fic!” Get over it, already.)

What makes us so fascinated with the act of sucking blood? Why do we want to believe both the best and the worst of the walking undead?

Personally, I think that the whole idea of vampirism lends the dark side in all of us to desire two things–immortality and sin without consequence. (I use the term “sin” loosely here, not necessarily in a religious sense,  but in the sense that the possession of living, breathing humans through the act of vampirism can be classified as the basest sort of evil. I’m sure many of you can give me fictional examples of “good” vampires who must “convert” their victims to “save” them, but the end result is the same.) Who wouldn’t want to live forever? Who wouldn’t want to indulge in the sort of rampant sensuality that seems to be the vampiric inheritance? For some, even the admission price of eternal undeath isn’t enough of a barrier.

And that’s where we’ve been headed in the fictional world. 

Unless I somehow can re-imagine the whole concept (not likely), this is territory that I am unlikely to tread. No one wants to pay me stupid amounts of money (if you do, email me) to write such a story, and I can’t imagine crawling around in the head of the undead (haha) long enough to make a coherent novel.

This one comes from a young lad who claims to be in Kenya. Since this is the first time I’ve ever gotten a request to put up a pic for a caption contest, I’ll indulge him.

You guys know what to do. (Poor horse.)

In reference to my previous post:

…that fantasy I had involving Jessica Alba and the Cookie Monster outfit. (Don’t ask.)

And didn’t I say: “Don’t ask?”

Just watch this amazingly funny and well-done TF2 movie: