… from my more-than-clever friend and fellow Clarion South survivor, Brendan David Carson. On why vampires are no longer scary, but clowns are terrifying. His brain is only slightly smaller than China Mieville’s.
An excerpt is below and the rest lives here http://brendandcarsonsfiction.blogspot.com/2009/08/vampires-anticlowns-or-something.html.
Vampires – the anticlowns. Or something.
I have been having an interesting discussion with one of my best friends about the whole toothless* vampires thing.
We all know that vampires – well, I was going to say suck, but that’d be wrong. Vampires do not suck. They do not suck any more. They do not feast, or terrify, or evoke pretty much anything except peripubescent teengirl lust and whatever the word is for that deep, soul yearning after someone else’s consumer products – ipod envy, or something.
They are no longer what we fear, either in ourselves or others, other genders, other races, other people – now they are what we envy. Ridiculously rich, impossibly beautiful, adored without needing to work, able to behave like bad children but be treated like good adults (killing animals and sneaking into people’s rooms at night?) – vampires are what our inner child wants to be.