I’m signing this Friday evening at the University Bookstore on University Ave in Seattle, with Richelle Mead. (Kickoff time is 7pm.) So this might be a tad rushed.

I’m thinking about vampires, and why they have survived–as folklore, as horror stories, as urban fantasy, as paranormal romance. It’s pretty simple–they’re shapeshifters.

I use the term “polymorphic” both with vampires and with fairy tales. The trappings and details of such stories twist and change, mirroring the fears and obsessions of their age. They survive by being mirrors we can project our fears and fantasies on. Cinderella can be about stepfamily dysfunction just as well as it can be about pop culture and the price of perceived beauty. Beauty and the Beast can comment on marriage inequality when women are seen as property, or can be the popular Victorian idea that love and culture can civilize a “savage” man (we saw a lot of that in romance during the 80s.)

As for vampirism, it’s like the Silly Putty of cultural icons. From the dangerous untrammeled sexuality and contamination of Victorian-Age Dracula to the memento mori and communal anxiety about death shaping the vampire legends in medieval* China, Eastern Europe, and Western Europe, the vampire has always been a shapeshifter. Today, the vampire is sexy, from Anne Rice’s androgynous polyamourous creatures to Christine Feehan’s super-monogamous alpha-males tamed by…well, let’s call it love. There’s my own take on the vampiric myth, which has weird aspects of I-don’t-know-what, but has the same uber-monogamy as Feehan’s with the spice of an interesting idea Tanith Lee once took to its logical limit in Sabella. (Written before I read either, let me register now.)

Right now vampires are the ultimate antiheroes or morally-ambiguous heroes, which says a lot about our cultural perceptions of outsiders. The recent explosion in not-exactly-safe but still good-guy vampires really took off with Buffy’s Angel and Spike, but the trend had been bubbling below the surface of the more traditional “Hi, I’m the rotting walking dead and I’m going to suck out your vital fluids. Yuck, right?” There’s also the image of the vampire as the ultimate noir hero–a basically good guy trapped in a basically evil world, playing against the stacked deck and trying to retain his own soul.

I said this was going to be rushed, and I meant it. I could go on for ages about how each generation or artistic movement creates a “vampire” of its own, mirroring its ideas about life, death, blood, immortality, youth, beauty–you get the idea. The vampire mythos survives because it changes its shape to mirror our desires when we look at it, which is why it’s such an interesting lode to mine. Such an elastic, shapechanging myth just begs to be stretched, stood on its head, stomped, subverted, and switched-around.**

Stories, myths, and cultural icons survive because they can mean different things at different times, because they are not really unchanging edifices of archetype (a la Joseph Campbell) but because they are Narcissus’s mirror–we look into them to see ourselves. Consequently, our vampires tell us as much about ourselves as Stoker’s Dracula tells us about Victorian sexual mores and fears, especially about the Victorian fear of female sexuality unchained by “motherhood” and submission. (Bloofer Lady, anyone?)

So, my dear fellow writer–what does a vampire mean to you? Look at your vampire stories and see what the mirror reflects. What aspects of the vampire appeal to you, and which don’t?

* I use the term “medieval” with all appropriate caution, to denote a time frame rather than an implied ethnocentric judgment.

** I particularly recommend Richard Laymon’s Bite, BTW.