Sat Oct 31, 2009 — by Alexandra Honigsberg

When Vampires Suck: a review of 'How to Catch and Keep a Vampire'

Diana Laurence’s How to Catch and Keep a Vampire: A Step-By-Step Guide to Loving the Bad and the Beautiful (Sellers Publishing, 10/23/09, $14.95 trade paperback) is advertised as non-fiction and humor. It’s 160 pages, complete with FAQs, myth busting, case studies, cutesiness with perhaps a nod to Sex and the City, references to the latest vampire crazes (True Blood and Twilight), and an underlying cautionary tale (the danger of the serial-killer-turned-vamp-professor, Dr. John Grey) of female stupidity, to-turn-or-not-to-turn angst between Diana and her vamp paramour Connor, and redemption. It tries to be many things. 

I kept wanting to like it. I love vamp lit. I’m published in the sub-genre several times over and love to play in that playground. I’ve watched the suckers ever since I was a little girl and first saw Bela Lugosi as The Count and said, “Oooh! He’s cool! He wears capes and goes to the opera!” and lusted after Frank Langella and loved Rice’s The Vampire Lestat (and I’m an adult, so I despise Twilight – vampires don’t sparkle!) and can geeble with the best of them over Vampire Bill and his delicious-but-inaccurate accent! So I get the whole fascination-not-fear idea and how that can be played for amusement. We are not amused.

Laurence’s vamps tend toward the True Blood variety, but with added bonuses. Yes, they drink real blood and synthblood, but they can also eat and they have a drink called Light Shade that enables them to walk in the sun plus an elixir that makes their pale skin more normal looking. They aren’t damned, but are immortal (societal prejudice smear campaign). Flying is merely hypnosis on their victims – they don’t do it. They used to sleep in coffins out of superstition but don’t, anymore. They don’t shape shift – more myth and hypnosis. The worst parts about being a vamp seem to be that they can’t use mirrors and the alienation they have from loved ones due to prejudice and the mere fact that the vamp will live forever (barring staking) and other types of humans won’t (oh yeah, they’re human…they have souls!). Oh, and if you drink a vamp’s blood but are caught in time, you can be drained of all your now tainted blood, have it replaced with synth blood ‘til they can get your proper blood type, and prevent a turning before it’s acted upon all your blood cells and they’ve acted upon the rest of the cells in your body. But it has to be done fast.

It’s all just a bit too neat and tidy and convenient and…well…flat. It should be seductive, like its subject. It’s not. Dry. How can you make talking about vampires, one of the most fun subjects in the world (every culture has a type of vampire myth!), boring? This manages. Not quite sure how. But it does. And that sucks. Excuse the bad pun. I just couldn’t help myself.

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