A facinating read

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	• Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997 - 280 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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A facinating read

While many readers are often hesitant to read a book of essays... this book is truly a facinating read. Ancient myths of vampires often revolve around evil and death, but these essays look at the familiar image in a new light, quite relevant to our modern society. Here we explore the many faces of the vampire going far beyond Stoker's "Dracula". Through these essays we see the vampire as more than just a stalker in the night, but as a symbol of our own human insecurities of sexuality, lonliness, and death. Readers of horror will love this book as a companion piece to old favorites as their eyes will be opened to a broader view of a facinating staple of both modern and classic fiction alike.

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"Blood Read is a fresh look at an old form, offering lively, lucid insights into the contemporary explosion of vampire fiction. Nothing else like it exists. This book should set the terms for discussion about vampires for some time to come."--Brian Attebery, Idaho State University The vampire is one of the nineteenth century's most powerful surviving archetypes, owing largely to Bela Lugosi's portrayal of Dracula, the Bram Stoker creation. Yet the figure of the vampire has undergone many transformations in recent years, thanks to Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles and other works, and many young people now identify with vampires in complex ways. Blood Read explores these transformations and shows how they reflect and illuminate ongoing changes in postmodern culture. It focuses on the metaphorical roles played by vampires in contemporary fiction and film, revealing what they can tell us about sexuality and power, power and alienation, attitudes toward illness, and the definition of evil in a secular age. Scholars and writers from the United States, Canada, England, and Japan examine how today's vampire has evolved from that of the last century, consider the vampire as a metaphor for consumption within the context of social concerns, and discuss the vampire figure in terms of contemporary literary theory. In addition, three writers of vampire fiction--Suzy McKee Charnas (author of the now-classic Vampire Tapestry), Brian Stableford (writer of the lively and erudite novels Empire of Fear and Young Blood), and Jewelle Gomez (creator of the dazzling Gilda stories)--discuss their own uses of the vampire, focusing on race and gender politics, eroticism, and the nature of evil. The first book to examine a wide range of vampire narratives from the perspective of both writers and scholars, Blood Read offers a variety of styles that will keep readers thoroughly engaged, inviting them to participate in a dialogue between fiction and analysis that shows the vampire to be a cultural necessity of our age. For, contrary to legends in which Dracula has no reflection, we can see reflections of ourselves in the vampire as it stands before us cloaked not in black but in metaphor. Joan Gordon is Associate Professor of English at Nassau Community College in New York. Veronica Hollinger is Associate Professor in the Cultural Studies Program at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario.

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