Of Vampires and Drivers
18 October 2011 07:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeManaged to get hold of a copy of "The Laughing Corpse" by walking out to a branch library -- it does look as if I'll be able to track down all or most of the 'classic' Anita Blake books by trawling between various far-flung branches, even if they aren't so ubiquitous as the newer editions....
While I was there I picked up an omnibus copy of Charlaine Harris' vampire series ("Now the HBO original series TRUE BLOOD") -- I have seen the TV series well reviewed, although I've never watched it, and Charlaine Harris has been specifically mentioned in my recent Web reading as a replacement addiction for disappointed Laurell K. Hamilton fans. Read the first book ("Dead Until Dark") last night, and... well, I can see why fans would go for the similarities (legal vampirism, graphic sexual content, serial crime: she even seems to be setting up a vampire/werewolf rivalry over the attractions of her heroine), but it really doesn't grab me. (And I have to say that, psychologically, I find it a lot more plausible that it would take five or six novels and a lot of shared non-sexual traumas to get a human into bed with a vampire than that one would take up with the undead without a moment's qualm within a few chapters...)
It's not as if I'm particularly into vampire literature in the first place. I tried the "Twilight" novels, partly because I was curious as to what all the fuss was about and mainly, I have to admit, because feminists started complaining about how un-liberated all this fuss about chastity and self-restraint was: in consequence I wanted to like them, but found the first two nothing wonderful and the last few less and less appealing. I enjoyed the film "Interview with the Vampire" a good deal, the book less so, "The Vampire Lestat" less so again, and gave up on the rest of Anne Rice's output. The whole newly-minted concept of 'paranormal romance' being a specialist genre seems a bit perverse to me -- like the entire 'misery memoir' category in bookshops.
"Dead Until Dark" is perfectly competently written, but the characters don't particularly come alive for me. When the heroine was busy agonising over whether her lover had been killed off in a house fire, I realised I really didn't care very much one way or the other: the only thing that really stirred an emotional response to the book in me was when the author proceeded to reveal a character I'd rather liked as the villain, and I was conscious of a stab of disappointment! The characters and their relationships may develop greater depths as the series progresses, but frankly I wouldn't really have bothered to seek out further books in the series if I didn't already happen to have the next two volumes bound together in the omnibus... as it is, I'll continue reading until I finish the book, as is my custom, but am unlikely to seek out all the rest unless I actually develop some concern over the fate of the protagonists.
What initially hooked me on Anita Blake was not 'paranormal romance' (of which, at that stage, there wasn't any) but the vividness of the world-building, the wry Chandleresque world-view of the heroine, the visceral thrill of the action sequences and the good old-fashioned page-turning narrative: the actual plotline of "Guilty Pleasures", say, may not make that much sense in retrospect (and in fact so far as I recall the detective elements of a lot of the books don't), but every twist as it went along had me desperate to know what happened next. I'm afraid I don't get that out of Charlaine Harris. The Deep South trailer-park setting -- something of which I know virtually nothing, and which could be interesting -- is taken for granted and barely sketched in, while the vampire stuff feels derivative: a character even name-checks Anne Rice, which comes across less as post-modern reference than as a jarring breach of the fourth wall. I did, however, enjoy and appreciate the vampire-Elvis theory (and the way in which the name is never actually mentioned...)
Caught an unscheduled repeat of "The Betty Driver Story" on television yesterday evening: in her pre-Coronation Street career the young Betty had the female lead in the film "Let's Be Famous" in which Sonnie Hale played comic relief, as she describes in her autobiography (reading between the lines, Sonnie, a screen veteran who had been directing films himself only a few years previously, had little patience for the newcomer), and I had been told some material from this film might show up. It did: not only a number of clips from Betty's scenes, plus a a view of the publicity poster with Sonnie's name in large letters across it (clearly, he was still reckoned to be a box office draw), but an actual one-second clip in which he and Betty Driver had a scene together!
While I was there I picked up an omnibus copy of Charlaine Harris' vampire series ("Now the HBO original series TRUE BLOOD") -- I have seen the TV series well reviewed, although I've never watched it, and Charlaine Harris has been specifically mentioned in my recent Web reading as a replacement addiction for disappointed Laurell K. Hamilton fans. Read the first book ("Dead Until Dark") last night, and... well, I can see why fans would go for the similarities (legal vampirism, graphic sexual content, serial crime: she even seems to be setting up a vampire/werewolf rivalry over the attractions of her heroine), but it really doesn't grab me. (And I have to say that, psychologically, I find it a lot more plausible that it would take five or six novels and a lot of shared non-sexual traumas to get a human into bed with a vampire than that one would take up with the undead without a moment's qualm within a few chapters...)
It's not as if I'm particularly into vampire literature in the first place. I tried the "Twilight" novels, partly because I was curious as to what all the fuss was about and mainly, I have to admit, because feminists started complaining about how un-liberated all this fuss about chastity and self-restraint was: in consequence I wanted to like them, but found the first two nothing wonderful and the last few less and less appealing. I enjoyed the film "Interview with the Vampire" a good deal, the book less so, "The Vampire Lestat" less so again, and gave up on the rest of Anne Rice's output. The whole newly-minted concept of 'paranormal romance' being a specialist genre seems a bit perverse to me -- like the entire 'misery memoir' category in bookshops.
"Dead Until Dark" is perfectly competently written, but the characters don't particularly come alive for me. When the heroine was busy agonising over whether her lover had been killed off in a house fire, I realised I really didn't care very much one way or the other: the only thing that really stirred an emotional response to the book in me was when the author proceeded to reveal a character I'd rather liked as the villain, and I was conscious of a stab of disappointment! The characters and their relationships may develop greater depths as the series progresses, but frankly I wouldn't really have bothered to seek out further books in the series if I didn't already happen to have the next two volumes bound together in the omnibus... as it is, I'll continue reading until I finish the book, as is my custom, but am unlikely to seek out all the rest unless I actually develop some concern over the fate of the protagonists.
What initially hooked me on Anita Blake was not 'paranormal romance' (of which, at that stage, there wasn't any) but the vividness of the world-building, the wry Chandleresque world-view of the heroine, the visceral thrill of the action sequences and the good old-fashioned page-turning narrative: the actual plotline of "Guilty Pleasures", say, may not make that much sense in retrospect (and in fact so far as I recall the detective elements of a lot of the books don't), but every twist as it went along had me desperate to know what happened next. I'm afraid I don't get that out of Charlaine Harris. The Deep South trailer-park setting -- something of which I know virtually nothing, and which could be interesting -- is taken for granted and barely sketched in, while the vampire stuff feels derivative: a character even name-checks Anne Rice, which comes across less as post-modern reference than as a jarring breach of the fourth wall. I did, however, enjoy and appreciate the vampire-Elvis theory (and the way in which the name is never actually mentioned...)
Caught an unscheduled repeat of "The Betty Driver Story" on television yesterday evening: in her pre-Coronation Street career the young Betty had the female lead in the film "Let's Be Famous" in which Sonnie Hale played comic relief, as she describes in her autobiography (reading between the lines, Sonnie, a screen veteran who had been directing films himself only a few years previously, had little patience for the newcomer), and I had been told some material from this film might show up. It did: not only a number of clips from Betty's scenes, plus a a view of the publicity poster with Sonnie's name in large letters across it (clearly, he was still reckoned to be a box office draw), but an actual one-second clip in which he and Betty Driver had a scene together!