Finalist at readingwriters.com

I made it to the finals of the Dialogue-Only Story contest over at Reading Writers. "Up High" is about two men on the edge of a building, with two very different agendas up there. Whether or not I'll get the Grand Prize is still up in the air.

Bathroom Monologue: Cave Man Logan

“Following impressive sales for Old Man Logan, Mark Millar and Joe Quesada announced today that Millar will return to Wolverine in 2010 with a new year-long story. Following the last remnants of civilization being destroyed, the elderly Logan lives a solitary life of fighting Savage Land dinosaurs and mutant bears for food. He will reside in a cave under the rubble of the former X-Mansion, painting panels in memorial to all the friends and enemies he has lost on the walls. The story will return Wolverine to his animalistic roots as he wears nothing but an animal hide and appears to have lost the ability to speak. Cave Man Logan is scheduled to begin in February 2010.”

Bathroom Monologue: Balls

The ball was actually invented by September, the Goddess of Disease. It was an act of mercy, not athletics, as no gym teacher divinity could have designed it. It was round, like the planet, and while entertainment was intrinsic, its primary goal was to transmit bacteria from person to person. From floor to person. From wet rugby field to person. And so on.

Consider all the germs it would collect by merely dribbling it on the floor of the Wal Mart in which you purchased it, upon which thousands of other people had previously walked, fell, spit, sneezed and occasionally bled. And what is filthier than the human hand, which scratches the buttocks, cups the sneeze and generally touches more alien materials than any other part of the non-sexual anatomy? The only thing filthier would be the ball, which passes from human to human, hand to hand, wet rugby field to person.

Yet kind September’s gift didn’t cause plagues. Athletes became the paragons of fitness because they were exposed to more exercise and more germs than anyone else. Their immune systems buffed up. Sports were a side effect of her ball. So yes, contrary to the intuition of every kid to ever suffer asthma – disease invented sports, no matter what Apollo has tried to claim since.

Bathroom Monologue: Thinking of the Phone in the Bathroom

Here's a prank call nobody makes. You look up a number in the phone book, then call.

"Hello?" she answers.

In your deepest voice, ask, "Is this Valerie Nab?"

"Yes?" she answers in a half-question.

"That's good." Then, taking your mouth away from the receiver, say loud enough that she'll still hear, "Location confirmed."

Then hang up.

Nobody makes that prank. No clue why.

Bathroom Monologue: En Medea Res

En Medea Res, the literary device where Euripides goes right to the fun part of a witch going ape shit on her husband and kids. No sissy romance, heroic month-long voyages or unhygienic labor - we're going right to flaming chariots and a "That bitch!" moment worthy of Dallas, only a few thousand years before there was a Texas.

Bathroom Monologue: Unwatchable Edition

Hot on the heels of the Watchmen Director’s Cut Bluray (TM), author Alan Moore will be releasing his own cut of the blockbuster film. The Definitive Author’s Cut Watchmen Bluray (R) is promised to feature exclusive commentary and tells the entire film as Moore intended. The Bluray case will be empty.

Cover art by David Gibbons.

Bathroom Monologue: Grocer Chat

[GARY sits on one end of the booth in a pink tuxedo. GRUFF STOVER sits on the other side of the booth in red and green flannel. ARYANA between them, back to the window, wearing a chain mail pant suit. GRUFF pushes a bowl of fruit towards GARY. A chair is pulled up to the front of the booth, but no one sits there. His is an absence that weighs upon us all.]

Gary: No.

Gruff: You have to eat healthy.

Gary: The experience of teeth biting into a banana is like that of sinking your boots into thick mud.

Gruff: You’ve been impossible since you took up poetry.

Aryana: Try an apple.

Gary: Don’t kid me. Snow White went down to an apple. Apples kill.

Gruff: It’s like you’re morally opposed to fruit.

Gary: My colon is. It’s not my fault media has conditioned me to not to eat things that fall dead off of trees. Between fairy tale poisons and razor blades hidden in rinds, fruit isn’t trustworthy.

Aryana: He has a point. There’s no haunted candy.

Gruff: Maybe America would lose weight if there were more stories about evil. Butterfingers.

Gary: I doubt that would do it.

Aryana: Also, Gary’s British.

Gruff: Venomous Mars Bars, then.

Bathroom Monologue: Split Swords

“Wrong! It is my other personality that has post-traumatic stress disorder. I compensate for him by handling even the most mind-breaking situations with a debonair ease that brings women to their knees. Where he could barely operate a pocket calculator, I have unmatched skill with a basket-hilted rapier! Antagonists of my other self, en garde!”

Bathroom Monologue: Previously On #003

Previously on Previously On...

A girl went to a diner because she was hungry, not because gravity had disappeared.

Apollo showed up at that diner, wanting to take Gravity's job. He may not be alone...


And then...

A shut-in with a pathological fear of the Hanes underwear people expanded his house to provide safety from anything they dropped on him.

Somewhere in middle America there is a psychic who spends more of her time than she’d like helping people who don’t believe her.

And a long time ago someone built an iron army. They were not just a cute prose poem.


And now...

“That went well,” Lawrence said to himself, watching the reporter leave. Most were out of commission today, but she had real gumption, using a fire extinguisher to fly cross town in the absence of gravity. If her small talk was even half true, this would be a much more carbon-friendly method of travel. He watched until her white exhaust foam trailed out of sight, then turned back into his hall. He braced his hands on the low ceiling and began to waddle towards the living room.

He’d built the ceilings low so the bastards at Hanes couldn’t hide out of his peripheral vision when they eventually attacked. Though the reporter had played dumb, Lawrence thought she saw the truth. She’d wanted a story about a zero-gravity-proof house, but he’d dropped enough hints that when this aired, it would blow the lid off the intentional Hanes conspiracy.

He shimmied along the halls that connected his house to the sidewalk, another Hanes-related addition. So were the pillows and mattresses along the walls. Oh, they’d all looked crazy until today. But now who was crazy? Reporters were riding fire extinguishers.

As he shimmied around one corner, his cell rang. Instinctively he pulled it from his pocket, lost his balance and floated face-first into the ceiling. It did not feel as uncomfortable as you’d think.

After a moment of swimming impotently, he let himself drift and answered the phone.

“Hello?”

“Hello. This is the Melrose Psychic Hotline.”

“What?” He jerked, and accidentally rotated until his butt was level with the ceiling cushions. “You people can’t call me. That’s not fair.”

“I am calling you.”

Like a true shut-in with nothing else to do, he pounced.

“You can’t do that! It’s a 900 number. I’m not going to pay you, and you can’t call me expecting me to pay. You can get all this stuff online free. Is that why you’re calling people? Reverse the charges and bilk them with your scam?”

“You’re not being charged, fool. I’m calling to warn you that a catastrophe is about to break out.”

“You’re a day late. Has the gravity not gone out there?”

“It’s gone out everywhere. That’s not the catastrophe I’m trying to warn you about.”

“Then what is?”

“Remain calm. Know that whatever happens, the spirit of your house always loved you.”

“I don’t believe in this stuff, lady.”

“You watch too much TV. You are wearing green socks. You have a pathological fear that the Hanes underwear company is out to kill you.”

Lawrence paused. He stared at the receiver. Was she one of them?

“I am not one of them,” she said so loud that he heard her with the phone away from his ear. He put it back to his ear and listened on.

“There is no them, Lawrence. So listen to me. Remain calm and follow the redheaded man as soon as it’s over.”

“As soon as what’s over?”

“Clairvoyance isn’t Google. I only see parts. If you don’t follow the redheaded man, you’ll be crushed by the giant—”

Lawrence didn’t hear whatever the giant crushing thing was going to be because a giant iron foot came smashing through the ceiling.

For a micromoment he thought it was thunder.

Then he thought it was Hanes, having dropped not just a ton of their tagless underwear, but an entire jumbo jet on him.

And just as the cushy ceiling came down on him, he thought this might have something to do with what the psychic was saying.

The impact tossed him down the hall leading to the garage, feeling like the ball on a foosball table. Any part of the padded construction that caved sent him flying away before it could hurt, though he thought he felt a bruise forming when he struck the door to the garage.

From there he looked up through the gaping hole that had once been his gloriously low and gravity-friendly ceilings, and saw a giant, rusty foot. It was flat, with a few claw-like prongs on the end, like toes on a toy monster. Except this toy was several stories tall. The feet led to a leg, which led to an iron skeletal body, atop which glared a giant iron Jack O’Lantern. Its eyes blazed like cartoon furnaces. It looked right at him, then looked away. He’d never been so happy as when a giant robot showed no interest in him. Thank God, these things clearly weren’t working for Hanes.

Through the wreckage of what had been a totally sweet low-ceilinged media center, Lawrence spied someone in a black cloak running from his basement. The man showed no trouble running, though when Lawrence checked himself, he found the gravity still out.

The man had long, red hair.

“I wonder…” Lawrence began. Then another giant foot came crashing through his ceiling. It convinced him to run away, or at least, to get moving.

Since he was already floating helplessly, Lawrence kicked his legs. They struck the garage door and sent him shooting forward through the air. When he reached another wall, he braced and kicked off again. If some part of his mind weren’t terrified, and another grieving that he’d lost part of his house, he would have been delighted at a sensation so similar to playing in the town pool.

“Hey! Hey!” he called.

The redheaded man continued running, not looking back. So Lawrence torpedoed further, hoping to grab the bastard’s cape. He’d at least find out why he’d been in his basement, if not why psychics found this man worth following.

The redheaded man did not looking back. Lawrence, preoccupied with the redheaded man, didn’t either. Had either looked back, they would have seen several giant, iron Jack O’Lanterns changing course to follow them.

Bathroom Monologue: 4th Grade Vengeance

Tired of losing at dodgeball, Wilkins devised a plan. Nobody particularly liked him. Fine. They liked candy. He used butterscotches and butterfingers to bribe the six biggest boys in the class. One candy on the playground, one after gym. Whoever was picked for the opposite team was to play poorly and take dives. Those on his side were on nuts duty. No human shields. Wilkins knew how to shy away from getting hit. No. The giants were tasked with pegging as many fourth graders as possible in the gonads. They thought it was so funny when they caught him in the groin and he cried so that he went to the nurse’s. Fine. He’d secure the strongest arms sugar could buy to send them to the E.R. Even if his team lost, even if he got tagged yet again, the class laughing at his foes as they clutched their groins would be worth it. Vengeance, bright and beautiful.

Bathroom Monologue: When the Machines Win

They watched automated steamrollers level buildings. People tried to flee in the last non auto-pilot cars, but fleets of S.U.V.’s driven by Smart Systems drove in their way. With no human driver to fear, they rammed into the sides of the human escapees’ cabs.

Some humans bailed from the convoy, running through the alleys on foot. A troop of bipedal robots popped from the auto-piloted cars, hitting the ground with blades that man had invented for the crippled. They ran faster on those blades than Olympians in Nikes.

It was going to be a bad day for the last survivors of Los Angeles.

Medusa and the wolfman watched it from atop the ‘Y’ of the Hollywood sign. Medusa and all her serpentine hair laughed, adjusting her sunglasses. They were reflective.

“Told you if left to their own devices those devices would kill them.”

“You did,” muttered the wolfman.

Medusa held out her palm. When the did nothing, she snapped her fingers.

“Come on.”

He growled, then fished a twenty out of his tattered shorts and deposited it in her palm. Human currency was technically worthless, but not all bets were off.

As she smoothed out the bill, he asked, “So what next?”

“Well, technology is eradicating them. It’s time for magic to save the world.”

The Smart System cars finally blocked in the human convoy. Brave people smashed the front cars into the barricade, but it was too thick with plastic and steel. It wouldn’t budge and the machines had no mind against getting trashed. A moment later the shadow of one of the giant steamrollers fell over them all.

So many people abandoned their cars that only a child noticed one of the houses walking out of the ghettos. Cartoon chicken feet stretched from its foundations, shuttling it along until it stood in the path of the steamroller. It was so old it almost looked like a scale model dollhouse, except there were no windows or doors. The chicken feet braced as the wheel of the steamroller struck it, and though it trembled, the machine couldn’t crush it. Its gears ground so loud that the fleeing humans could only faintly hear the house’s occupant cackle. The sparks began to shoot from the chimney.

“You really want to save them?” asked the wolfman. “They’ve always been a pain in the ass.”

“If anyone gets to hold a grudge…” she said, running an index finger over the stitch scars around her neck.”

“Fine, we’ll try. But fangs and howling at the moon won’t scare a sentient mortar launcher. We’ll need to wake Merlin for this job.”

“Damn,” the gorgon’s hair cursed.

“You still have a beef with him?”

“No, but I’ll owe him thirty.”

Bathroom Monologue: Consternation

Every student who aspires to genius runs into this. What’s worse than reinventing the wheel? Inventing this round thing that is great for rolling, putting all your time and soul into it, and showing it to a professor only for him to take you out on the street and point underneath all the cars. Except what Renoir painted and Balzac wrote isn’t rotating under every motor vehicle. It’s initially the responsibility of the professor to inform, but eventually it becomes the terror of the aspiring genius that not merely the wheel, but the suspension, the steel frame, crumple zones, dashboard display and passenger cup holders have already been written.

Bathroom Monologue: The Accidental Advent of Day (haiku)

the Moon laughs and runs
the Sun frets and chases her
trips, falls and breaks day

Bathroom Monologue: Hung Lo’s Chinese Takeout

Back before it was a four-novel story, the premise was Hung Lo’s Chinese Takeout. Lo would work there, as a very lazy waiter who took frequent breaks to go assassinate demons. You see, the restaurant was a front for his demon-hunting business. Get it? “Takeout?” “Chinese?” Oh, double puntendre. The Maitre d’ would be Emma, his girlfriend who was capable of moving through shadows. She’d essentially field all the calls, show people to their tables, and hop through the shadow world to advise him on an easier way to kill the werewolf that was chewing on his tibia. Their chef would be the borderline neurotic Puck. Every so often a demon would make its way back to the restaurant, wreck the place and leave him a babbling mess. It’s still beyond me how this turned into a four-novel story with no restaurant.

Fears of a Pluto Fan, OR, “oh, may we pray, the author was not defacting as he IM'd” –Randall Nichols in an IM

“Science can't make Pluto not a planet. They've had Pluto as a planet for centuries. You can't do scientific backsies. That's nuts. What if other things they've been telling us forever turn out to be untrue? What if that polio vaccine isn't a permanent fix? What if not all cholesterol is bad for us? What if the universe is expanding? What if... what if none of the stuff they currently tell me to believe is real? Not only does this destroy my worldview, but all those labs the government subsidized were just wasting my tax money! I could have bought porn with that money!"

Bathroom Monologue: Hers

Hers were small rebellions. She signed the petition, but did not wear the pins or flaunt the rules by putting on forbidden clothing. When Dolden Prep finally rescinded the dress code it seemed half the girls showed up in thigh-bearing skirts and every boy had a band shirt to sport. Not she. She wore the same navy blouse and skirt every day, and once again refused to wear their pins. All she did was undo one stitch at the bottom left of the skirt. She let it alone until another stitch came out by nature of wear and laundry. Then another. Week by week, and soon day by day, she let the tear climb up her leg in a naughtier way than any boy’s hand could. She did not mend for an appearance of style. She let the idiot revolutionaries gossip about her ragged wardrobe. She listened happily to the gossip, too, when the rip climbed higher than any liberated girl allowed her miniskirt to go. The teachers could do nothing, and her fellow students in their Grateful Dead shirts and Prada shoes gawked at her indecency. She let it climb her until she heard the rumor one morning that she had a boyfriend who liked seeing her this way. It made her smile as she finally took one of their now ironically sheik protest pins, and used it to clasp the tear in her skirt.

Bathroom Monologue: Comprehension: The Equipment of the Human Mind Vs. The Problems of the World

The human mind is a worktable, about four feet in length. Some superior intelligences are about six feet long. One time I was cornered by a culture critic at a benefit dinner who might have been six and a half feet. Regardless, all human minds are three feet in width.

On the table are a hammer, a chisel, a saw or two (depending on the versatility of your studies), sandpaper, screws, nails and sundry items. You can build things with these. You can fix things with these. Most people will also use these to break things in half and bang on them.

Altogether, this 4x3 table with various utilities is your mind. When ready, you drop the problems of the world on it.

When this happens they rip the roof off of your garage and drop a sperm whale on your table. It is not a miniature sperm whale, nor a baby sperm whale. It is a full adult female, hurtling down on your table-mind. The sperm whale here represents all the problems of the world, but they are complex and so it is difficult to anatomize what organ represents what problem. It would be silly to assign poverty to the liver or overpopulation to the reproductive organs. However I believe we are all silly and tired enough to agree that taxes are the blowhole. It is such a large thing that you cannot see if the problems of the world were dropped upon you by a skyhook or a crane. Your 4x3 (or if you’re lucky, 6x3) worktable is crushed beneath the whale.

I’ve thought it over with my roughly 3.5x3 mind, and the only flaw I see to this metaphor is that in real life you don’t get to set up your table before they drop the whale on it.

Bathroom Monologue: Unexpected Aquatic Protection

“I’m going to admit up front, not a lot of people would dig a mote around their RV. But that’s why they won’t expect it. Assassins will sneak up in the night, figuring on solid footing, and ba’am! Into the jaws of hungry baby alligators. They’ve got to be babies, since I couldn’t really dig a big mote on short notice. Plus, last time I tried digging a big one I sort of forgot to put on the break and rolled into it mid-festivities with my wife. Don’t know which was worse – paying for the new suspension on that thing, or the adult alligator getting in through the rear window. I miss my nephew…”

Bathroom Monologue: Going to the Good Battle

Going to the Good Battle
Ron broke his fast at dawn. As he cooked the eggs he wondered murky thoughts. Why had he never dedicated that nightly period when he didn’t eat to the gods? Sleep made him fast anyway, so why not hand them the honor? While the men ate, he dedicated their meal to the gods. When he marched with the rest of the troops for Ral’Hom, to fight the good battle, he dedicated the walk to the gods as well. There was no prayer or symbol. The actions drifted into the ether like any others, save that they were earmarked by a thought.

Ron had always abstained from tributes, but that morning came a question – not a revelation, but a mere question. If the gods were good and necessary as he’d heard, then were not all his good and necessary actions for them? As the troop passed through a mill town, a girl gave him a dipper of water. He thanked her, and wondered as he marched on if he had not thanked the gods in that same sentence. Were not the gods served by the millers baking honey bread and sweet beer to joy up the nights? Were they not served with every meal? Back at Braintree, up the road from his house, where the scholars studied powders and cures, was not every laboratory test and attempted equation was not a prayer? Was father, the great mathematician, more religious than he knew?

His theological epiphany lasted until that afternoon’s good battle, which was not good or godly at all. Never, even in his agnostic years, had he felt so distant from the gods as when tore into another man. He lived, though, and there would be more questions.

Bathroom Monologue: Ways to Read

The reader reads your book.

The good reader underlines things on your page.

The editor corrects things on your page.

The aspiring writer corrects things on your page, leaves suggestions in-between words, and will rewrite entire sentences in the margins.

The master writer will retype your whole manuscript to get a feel for it, changing words, sentences, paragraphs, back story, conflicts and context on the fly as he discovers how it is that he actually writes from rewriting your book.

The typesetter, dreading all these people, stays as far away from bookstores as possible.

“It was his turn” on Blink Ink

Blink Ink has accepted "It was his turn" for e-publication. It's a tweaked version of a 55-word story from last year, about a magician who vanished - and it wasn't part of his act. You can read it here: http://blink-ink.com/content/2009/07/it-was-his-turn/

Bathroom Monologue: Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody…

A bride with a bloody gown and knives for fingers stood in Chantal’s door. Her lipless mouth grinned, asking, “You said Bloody Mary in the mirror three times on October 29, 1984, right?”

Chantal ran for the window, but it was stuck shut. One serrated finger slid up her shoulder and neck, until it caressed her ear.

“The folktale that I come for anyone who mocks my name in the mirror is true. I just never said when.”

Devil Gone Missing on Thrillers, Killers & Chillers

My flash story, "Devil Gone Missing," is story of the day over at Thrillers, Killers & Chillers. It's about something that happened in a dump, because dumps are scarier than supermarkets. You can check it out here: http://thrillskillsnchills.blogspot.com/2009/07/devil-gone-missing-by-john-wiswell.html

Stories set in supermarkets are pending.

Bathroom Monologue: Two Horns, Six Sentences

The agent said they could cut off one of their horns and increase their chances at marketability. Unicorns were always in demand, but “bicorn” sounded like a farm subsidy. Most of them refused self-mutilation to masquerade as their more popular cousins, and stood by their virtue as a taller, sturdier breed with natural handholds for children who wished to ride them through dreams. All their endorsement deals fell through save one with a glue company, and when a protestor explained to them why they’d gotten the deal, they were pretty angry.

Anyway, that’s why those beautiful steeds are down there amongst the army of darkness. Hell gave them work when little girls wouldn’t even draw them on their notebooks.

Channel Surfing

I watched twenty minutes of 28 Days Later on the TV, waiting for my favorite bit, where the camera pans back in the church to reveal the note from survivors of the apocalypse, which reads: "THE END IS EXTREMELY FUCKING NIGH."

Having seen my favorite bit, I switch channels and get some kind of documentary on Ronald Reagan, who says, amidst background laughter, “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”

I change the channel up to the triple digits to flee this coincidence, only to find a gaunt man on a rooftop, holding a dry-erase board over his head with the question: "WHAT’S THE BAD NEWS?"

Desolate music swells behind him and I change the TV to anything else, and this anything else turns out to be the recently departed Charlton Heston bursting through a door and screaming, "Soylent Green is people!"

I turn off the TV, rub my eyes and wish there was some way I could share this with others.

Bathroom Monologue: Pun Time

(This was written in a challenge to tell something relating to the above photograph)

“Found it out by second base.”

“No way!”

“I thought they were a myth…”

“It’s real, Whitey. Got to be worth at least a million.”

“Never thought I’d see a real baseball diamond.”

Bathroom Monologue: Kiddy Kitty

Despite having the elevator to themselves, the boy stood so close to Ronald that he almost rubbed against his left leg. Ronald followed elevator protocol and stared at the descending numbers, ignoring his juvenile elevator-mate until the kid tugged on his trouser leg.

“Sir,” the boy said in a voice that was almost a purr, “how would you feel if Tigger, your girlfriend's cat who died nine years ago when you went to Hawaii and forgot to get him a sitter, was reincarnated?”

Ronald pushed back into the very corner of the elevator and asked in disbelief, “How do you know about Tigger?”

The boy pulled a handful of Meow Mix from his pocket and popped it in his mouth. He replied as he chewed, spraying Ronald's trouser with crumbs, “I’m nine.”

Six Sentence Week 4

The hits keep coming, and they come in six packs. It's Six Sentence week again here at the Bathroom Monologues, featuring stories about baseball, literacy, reincarnation and more. Please vote for your favorite on the poll, which should pop up Wednesday. Please comment, too, on what you think of what I'm doing with the constraint; It's always helpful to know if people think I'm doing work worth doing.

Does a semi-colon make it one or two sentences? Will I fool them if capitalize "It's?"

Bathroom Monologue: Umbrellas

"It's bad luck to open an umbrella in the house. Strange things happen, like objects getting knocked off tables, walls getting scratched, and inexplicable increases in the amount of water on my floor. Might be ghosts. Now close you fricking umbrella and wipe your shoes."

Bathroom Monologue: Why Vampires Suck

I originally wrote this for the Fantasy Magazine blog that asked why we loved or hated vampires. It's way too damned long to be a comment, though I did post it over there anyway.

I can’t stand vampires anymore. The children’s expurgated version of Dracula was one of the first novels I read in elementary school, those glow-in-the-dark plastic teeth were the coolest thing in the world in 3rd grade, and I watched Blade an embarrassing number of times in high school. But there came a time when that fiction became dominated by too much trash and pseudoscience for the monsters to be scary or intriguing anymore. I’m afraid they’re reaching the point werewolves and mummies did before them. Their time may be up.

All that is wrong with the modern vampire is not any one element or author’s fault. However, many of the modern vampire’s problems arose from secular influences. There is a pathetic strain running through Horror that sees them tearing through walls, surviving bullets to the head and lifting cars as realistic, but being afraid of crosses as not. I’m not Christian but I could see what very ham-handed writers were trying to do to the Fantasy. They wanted to remove what they didn’t believe from the mythos, but unwittingly insulted the entirely implausible fiction. Suddenly magic was yanked out and there was no cool shapeshifting, no good explanation for the fear of the sun, and the psychic “familiar” phenomenon turned into psychic pseudoscience (when it was explained at all). The clever variations on vampire tropes – like why or how stakes were supposed to work – were dwarfed by a general half-hearted apology for it being fiction, and fiction that apologizes for itself insults both the story and the audience. What the secularization of the vampire did, mostly by accident, was sever the Fantasy creature’s connection to the world. It was like taking night and the moon away from the werewolf. Satan’s overplayed in fiction, but vampires need some mysticism. That they once were one with the night gave them a mythological power they lack altogether today.

In place of magic, now vampirism is a disease – presumably because we’re terrified of STD’s instead of witches these days. But the result is something downright insulting to the ill. I suffer from a neuromuscular syndrome and have mentored a couple of chronically ill girls. Disease does not make you immune to bullets or render you capable of biting through body armor. Reducing vampirism to infectious superpowers is ridiculous, made worse when so many don trendy clothes and black trench coats. They’re the vapid Matrix posers of Fantasy.

The modern zombie does a much better job of expressing the mental and physical degradation of disease, and their far broader potential for infection allegories and apocalypse stories has helped them completely overtake the popularity of their undead brethren. Zombies, popularized in film during the nuclear age, have beaten vampires to the punch. It’s not even a contest. Even in prose, Max Brooks’s World War Z blows away every piece of vampire fiction of the decade on narrative and literary levels.

Then there’s what vampires have actually done in their new pseudoscience domain.

Since Carmilla’s lesbianism and Dracula’s creepy harem, vampires have always had sexual themes. Some directors used those to probe rape and homosexuality when the political climate was less tolerant in visual arts. But Post-Anne Rice, vampires are insipidly horny. Twilight’s teen angst romance and True Blood’s constant banging do little to remedy this. Not to insult the author of a recent blog entry around here, but neither Twilight’s hesitance towards pre-marital sex nor True Blood’s fascination with as much pre-marital sex as possible is interesting. Not with vampires. Not without them. Contrary to popular belief, sex is not mature – kids have sex all the time, and most sexual vampire fiction shows a distinctly adolescent fascination with rutting. That’s certainly part of why I detached from it. I remember when I first turned against the idea of the vampire – reading Rice’s The Vampire Armand, with a slave begging his master not to whip his thighs as he was “disciplined.” Vampire sexuality rapidly descended into the prurient and titillating, which is to say, it became trite. That’s the coffin where vampire sex has laid to rest.

I miss the coffins. Damn, do I miss the coffins. They could be hokey, but at least hokey is the attempt to feel authentic. Somebody who sleeps in a coffin is way more interesting than someone who sleeps on satin sheets, even if a supermodel joins him. Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot was the last truly great piece of vampire fiction I can remember, giving us a town too full of its own trivial drama to realize the layers of evil unfolding around them. King wanted modernize the vampires he loved so much, and so while he had them handling land deeds and swarming in a school bus, he kept the stake, the cross, the coffin, the transformations and familiars. He maintained the regal air of the father vampire while sowing the notion of the local, lesser child, and in doing so maintained the dread of infection and the bravery of the hunt. He also had broader vision than most Horror writers, also including a creepy abstract version of the classic haunted house to play influence over his classic critters.

For vampire fiction to live it had to outgrow the Dracula model King used, but it didn’t grow into anything compelling to a mind that grew up with it. Buffy and her quirky crew lived on their rapport. Fans watched for the characters, not their challenges, and “Vampire Slayer” quickly became an inaccurate title as they wound up stabbing Frankenstein-rip-offs, giant snakes and demons. Hence why they started just calling her “The Slayer” instead. The current Supernatural is much more entertaining to me, in no small thanks to its openness about a wider variety of baddies going bump in their nights. Those shows are carried by the cast and the characters they make. The Fantasy is a backdrop, and it can be a pretty shallow one.

Where it wasn’t founded on ensembles, popular vampire fiction mutated into exaggerations of old tropes. How many movies have riffed off the classic black and white Nosferatu and Dracula? Anne Rice exaggerated the sexual element to titillate readers. True Blood is now telling a white trash town drama story, plus things that bite and the people who hate them. The 30 Days of Night comics are just Salem’s Lot again, turned much bloodier (and in the film they might as well be werewolves). Marvel Comics dusted off Blade to make an action hero out of the Van Helsing model. Unsurprisingly, Van Helsing himself exploded as an archetype, and then an actual character, including a film bearing the name (and bearing no resemblance to Stoker’s good doctor).

The last vampire story to make me give a damn was the anime, Hellsing. It kills me as a writer and voracious reader that it was a cartoon I liked instead of a book. But the Japanese took the tropes of shapeshifting, night, the bite, the familiar, the dungeons and the legacy of Stoker, and built something visually cool and disturbing. Their Alucard had distinct style in the way he dressed, the way he moved, and the way he dealt with the modern vampire punks (inadvertently punishing many of the crappy stereotypes of modern vampire fiction). Along the way he got a busty, blonde sidekick who somehow managed to go the whole series without getting bent over HBO style.

Yesterday I got my haircut by a young woman who was reading Stephanie Meyer’s Eclipse. I asked her to tell me about the series – just to listen to somebody who genuinely enjoyed reading. Meyer is not for me. Sentence-by-sentence she simply can’t hold me, sparkly vampires are too silly, and at 27, I may be too old for Romeo and Juliet with fangs. Even my friends who enjoy younger-targeted fiction feel they’re too old for this. ‘Vampire sparkles’ are a joke amongst us. But I was happy for the haircutter, because she was excited to read something, and that will always be a gift, no matter how trashy the writer (and there are worse than Meyer). The funny thing, and sad thing, is that in ten minutes she didn’t describe any character, plot or variation on vampires. For ten minutes she only had variations of “It’s good,” and that she hoped there would be a fifth book. Speaking the allure of vampires, she was equally enthused to read The Host, which she described as being about robots who take over the world.

That’s where I am as a lover of the creepy and the fantastic. If, in our world of remakes, somebody could do something cool with the vampire without insulting its legacy, I’d be game. Since Salem’s Lot it seems like my favorite vampire stories have all been riffs – Shadow of the Vampire being a movie about making a vampire movie, and Christopher Moore and other authors straight-up mocking the lore in print. Those were fun, but they walked no new paths. There is no prose equivalent of Hellsing. Even I’ve written a couple of short stories in attempts at novelty in the neck-biters. I’d like to like them again. I’d love for an author to give me a good reason.