#my tag

[cheraic]

what emojis do you guys think fits me

[cheraic]

jjba is interesting but its racist and sexist and badly written. so really you shouldnt watch or read it

[cheraic]

i wish i wouldnt have to think of or see stupid people

[cheraic]

even though nicky is our theme he like never fronts lol

[cheraic]

IS THAT NIGHTMARE SANS AS YOUR PFP, YOURE SO GOATED

it iss.. one of our parts is an introject of him, so i decided to change it ^^

[cheraic]

church again today. im scared my mom is gonna make me go back

[leblogestunmonstre]

A vampire novella that I think can be brought into interesting conversation with Interview with the Vampire - and which is a very worthwhile read in its own right - is The Route of Ice and Salt by José Luis Zárate (translated by David Bowles).

It is a Spanish-language Mexican novella written in 1998 (released in English in 2021) and it:

has an introduction by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and an afterword by William Martin (who still uses the name Poppy Z. Brite professionally).

retells a small segment of Dracula, namely the voyage of the Demeter from the perspective of the ship's captain.

is at times a deeply unpleasant and uncomfortable perspective to be in (this man is not a good person in many ways), much the same way that The Vampire Chronicles can be, so let that be your guide (and also serve as a content note re: sexual assault, racism, homophobia, etc).

explores monstrosity, queerness, vampirism, sexuality, and morality.

unpacks the anxieties that produced the archetype of the queer vampire in a way that feels very grounded and very human (for better and for worse).

isn't afraid to explore the ship's captain as a parallel and a foil to Dracula, but also never loses sight of the thesis that queerness is not a source of monstrosity.

uses existing vampire legends in a deft and realistic way, where the narrator has heard many different and conflicting vampire-esque tales from other sailors over his lifetime, and rather than trying to discern a "true" vampire legend, he uses these tales as a way to describe a particular experience to the reader.

For example:

I should like to open my eyes, see who stands in the doorway. There must be wind out there. I feel a cold current that must envelop my visitor. I can almost feel his icy silhouette, waiting. [...] It must be a dream, for those lips are dead. The residents of the island of Thera claim that thus arrive the vrykolakas, with slow and delicate steps, furtive, taking care that the claws of their feet never scrape the wood, never wake those whom they stalk with incandescent eyes. [...] As a caress settles lightly on one’s chest, so they crouch in the air, sinking their nails into the fresh flesh of their victim. There they remain, stealing his breath, lowering their weight gradually-yet-inexorably, till at last they let go of their perch and settle firmly in the sleeper’s dreams. It is a time for stealing the soul. When we abandon our bodies to their own devices, leaving behind the specific appetites of the flesh. The sleep produced by the vrykolakas is heavy and dense, oppressive. Whoever becomes their victim dreams of dark waters that separate him from the world, of heavy shadows that know too much, of sins for which we cannot forgive ourselves, which stare at us with black faces and incandescent eyes. The sailor of Thera said it: “The vrykolakas are suicides, apostates, the excommunicated, those who practiced dark magic, those whose corpses a cat crossed over, those who died violently, those murdered and never avenged, those conceived during the Major Holidays, those who have eaten meat of sheep killed by wolves, those who lived immorally.” They are all of us. I, as well.

It takes a while to really hit its stride and it won't be for everyone, but I think it tackles the queer vampire from an interesting angle, with a main character who - despite and because of his own fraught relationship to the concept of monstrosity - resists comparison to the figure of the vampire. This ends up feeling different and unique compared to other, more modern stories, which are often interested in exploring a sympathetic vampire figure and so bring queerness and vampirism into closer conversation. It also contrasts with Anne Rice, whose characters' queerness is entangled with ideas of vampiric desire and predation in interesting and ambivalent ways.

(One of my favorite parts of the show-version of Interview with the Vampire was the nuanced way it combined the troubling literary history of the queer vampire with the modern sympathetic vampire, to create queer vampires whose queer desire resonated with, but was also distinct from, their vampiric hunger and behaviour. I still think about Louis and his fish all the time: "I don't know how you do that. You can't like the taste." / "I try to.")

The novella's ending is fairly tidy from a thematic perspective (potentially a little too tidy, considering the main character's... everything), which could feel a bit cliche to the modern queer reader, but it was published in the '90s and was having a conversation with its own context (I should note that the author is a gay man).

It also makes use of a question that I had while reading Dracula for the first time, when its vampire lore was being pieced together by the main characters (novella spoilers under the cut):

If people who die under a vampire's predation are cursed to become vampires themselves, what does this mean for the sailors who were picked off by Dracula on the journey from Varna to Whitby?