What is so special about vampires?

Last year I read 'Dracula' by Bram Stoker for the first time ever (the Wordsworth Classics edition, 1993). We'd visited the lovely town of Whitby during our holiday in England. Whitby is famous for being the landing place of Dracula in England. It is also the place where he stalks Lucy for the first time. Figuring in the tale are the town, the 199 steps to the Abbey and the cemetery on top of the cliffs, besides the ruins of the abbey. It is – besides the abbey – one of the selling points of the town. And yes, you can find shops with Dracula stuff.

The vampire according to Bram Stoker is the classic vampire: it feeds on human blood, cannot be seen in daylight and sleeps in a coffin. Although the book is sometimes quite slow in its pace, for a book first published in 1897, it is remarkably exciting. A lot happens. And of course the men in the tale risk everything to save the damsels in distress.

Compare this to the vampires in Deborah Harkness' 'A discovery of witches'. In this book the vampires eat the same diet as Norwegian grey wolves (raw meat (rarely cooked), nuts and berries), they walk in the sun (but look like sick/dead people – surprisingly...), they accumulate a lot of money (a small price for living for ages), they don't sleep in coffins (but barely sleep at all), they can be part of a family (which they created themselves by turning people into vampires), of course they have immense self restraint (or otherwise they cannot be around a woman during her periods) and they don't necessarily have to hunt a human for food (a rabbit or a deer will be fine, thank you). Thank God, Deborah didn't make them glow in the light like Edward. There is one similarity: just like Dracula, the vampire owns a gloomy castle. That's the remarkable (or annoying) thing about a vampire. Every author can give them his or her own characteristics.

Matthew Clairmont is the (lead) vampire in Deborah's tale. He is a typical alpha male: long, strong, good (albeit dead) looks, wealthy, with a bitch as a mother. Besides him we meet his vampire mother Ysebeau, and her house maid Marthe (also vampire), Matthew's brother Baldwin (who acts like a bulldozer), Matthew's son Marcus and his colleague Miriam. All with a different attitude, but sometimes touchy as hell. You can say these are the vampires on the good side. That's the (not so surprising) thing about this book. There are good vampires and bad vampires. In this case, all vampires hunt after a specific book. The good vampires (some more or less reluctant) hunt it to protect it from the witches (right, that didn't take us a long time). The bad vampires want the book for themselves. And of course, if we have good and bad vampires, there are also good and bad witches. So the good witches team up with the good vampires (the same for the other side of course) and the team is complete when the good team is joined by daemons (there are also daemons on the bad side). Yes, demons! That's one of the good parts about this book. It gives you a whole society (witches, demons, vampires) which lives alongside us normal humans, with it owns rules (don't mix!) and regulations (do not let the humans find out). Of course, our good team doesn't obey these rules for good reasons. Vampires, demons and witches are dying out. Humans are taking control. So the core of the story is about origin: where do you come from. This is endorsed with explanations on DNA and descent. It gives the book a more mature and scientific touch. Besides a scientific touch, this book has pace. A lot happens, good things and bad.

Making your hero a vampire is a way of placing him outside society, like you would do with a criminal. Outside society the rules are different. And with different rules, you can let your hero(ine) do anything a normal person would or could not do. It is a nice way of twisting the story in a different (plausible?) direction.

And yes, of course there always is something to complain about. Diana (our witch heroine) is set bound on not using magic up to an annoying point. She's a bit too quick, too fast into buying everything our good vampire has to say. But – thank God – no moaning over not being together or the way Matthew looks. As a reviewer (who was quoted on the first page of the book) said: 'Twilight for grown ups'.

One very minor irritation: the paperback I bought is quite thick (around 700 pages). I like the back side of my paperbacks clean, without any creases (another annoying habit of mine). With a book this thick, it was almost impossible to do. But I succeeded. Next time, I will look for the hardback though.

As stated earlier, I don't join the fans about Twilight (neither book nor movies). And usually, vampires aren't high on my reading list. Oh yes, I followed the whole Buffy- and Angel-series on television (but that probably had more to do with the way Angel looks). I liked 'Dracula'. But I haven't read nor seen any of the True blood-series. I will most definitely read the second book about Diane and Matthew. But for now, I have had enough of vampires (overkill?). I will return to epic fantasy, Roman history or 12^th century England.