The Challenge of Vampires

We receive stories featuring vampires every submission period. It’s understandable, since Weird Lit is open to work that includes supernatural creatures and cryptids. We welcome the chance to read work that is outside the realist point of view. Common mythological creatures in creative representation come with some drawbacks, though, and for me, vampires top that list. 

Vampires have saturated so deeply into pop culture and genre lit that it’s become hard to create anything fresh. Working with such an overused trope isn’t something I would recommend to most writers, unless you find a way to create something unexpected. Don’t get me wrong, I’m obsessed with analyzing the use of the vampire figure throughout history. I wrote my college dissertation on vampires and how their appearance in both Bram Stoker’s and Bret Easton Ellis’s work illustrates the fears society held at the end of both the 19th and 20th centuries in England and America. If you want to create meaningful work with vampires, think deeply about the ways vampires can stand in for thought-provoking social anxieties and discussions of cultural unease. 

Fear of the Other

This historical vampire representation is the most basic, but surprisingly, it isn’t done often, especially in the more comedic or romantic renditions of vampires in fiction. Bram Stoker described Dracula as a foreigner, racially distinct from the historically homogenous British society of the book’s setting. Using the vampire figure to communicate fear of those who exist outside of cultural or ethnic norms can be a powerful tool to explore prejudice, xenophobia, and racism.

Uncontrollable Spread and Conversion

Anxiety of the spread of disease has been a recurring topic since long before the COVID pandemic, making appearances in the form of different mythical creatures—most regularly, vampires and zombies. Vampires can also represent a symbolic spread of psychological decay or of social or political degeneration. We are living in a time that so greatly fears exposure to novel ideas and intellectual concepts (see also: book banning, censorship, disallowed words). Propaganda and heavily biased news is also a repeating theme, and vampires could be great tools to portray the spread of disinformation.

Sexuality and Repression

I’d be remiss if I didn’t touch on this element, given that our most famous historical vampire novel, Dracula, was written in a post-Victorian English setting with a lot of elements of feminine repression. Dracula visits the main female character by night and brings her to a culturally unacceptable state of being. There’s plenty to explore, and many authors have gone there. Personally, I think Anne Rice, Laurel K. Hamilton, and Stephenie Meyer have just about covered the sexy vampires thing, but I think there could be room for a more nuanced approach, one that also incorporates feminist or queer elements. 

Just because it’s been done to death doesn’t mean it can’t be done better, or in a novel way—but tread carefully, friends. Consider how your use of vampires can connect to a larger commentary. Readers have a lot of preexisting ideas when it comes to these creatures, and good editors are just very well-read readers with publishing goals. Know that if you write vampires, you will have to work really hard to move beyond the shortcomings and the shorthand of so many other writers’ vampire interpretations.  But as I like to say every reading period: prove me wrong, please. I welcome the challenge, and so should you.