The Beauty of Being Dead
After decades at the drive-in and centuries spent on the bestseller lists, it’s pretty amazing that vampires haven’t gone the way of floppy disks, Windows 95, and the Spice Girls. But somehow, these fanged fiends have retained their popularity. In fact, not only have they tapped the commercial vein of each generation, they’ve managed to turn even more beautiful, more powerful, and arguably, more fascinating than their pale-faced predecessors.
When I began writing The Crimson Corset, I didn’t think about what makes vampires so interesting. I had a story to tell, and vampires served as a perfect means of, er, execution. But as I researched these beasts to better understand them, I was thrust into a world so expansive, so intriguing that the question - What makes vampires so fascinating? - was answered for me before I had the chance to ask. The truth is, there isn’t a single reason we can’t get enough vampires - there are many, many reasons. Here are a few of them.
1. Vampires are sexy as hell. While this wasn’t the case in the early days of the damned, modern-day vampires have evolved to become not only sexual, but physically beautiful as well. Today’s most popular vampires are in equal parts deadly and delectable - the kind of folks we wouldn't mind going under the fang for.
2. Vampires never die. Okay, this one is pretty obvious, but vampires have something all of us want to one degree or another - immortality. In much the same way they refuse to perish on the bestseller lists, vampires live forever, and with enough persuasion, they might give us eternal life, too - a claim only vitamin companies and televangelists dare to make! In fact, vampires aren’t really so different from many religions in their promises of everlasting existence, and the cool part about the vampy version of eternity is that you don’t even have to go to church to earn it!
3. There’s a vampire for everyone. While I was developing my vampires for The Crimson Corset, the hardest part was deciding what qualities I wanted them to possess and which ones I preferred to forego. Needless to say, my research showed the list of vampire qualities is as long as their lifespan. There is, quite literally, an all-you-can-bite buffet of bloodsuckers out there, and if you don’t like the kind that can kill you, you can always hang out with the ones that sparkle and go to high school.
4. Vampires get to sleep all day. Seriously. What’s not to love about this?
5. Vampires get all the girls. While Edward Cullen might not be your cup o’ hemoglobin, it’s not surprising that he won the hearts of girls and women worldwide with his bronze hair, broody-moodiness, and marble-like firmness - but to understand the real sex appeal of vampires, we must go beyond the undead dreamboats of modern fiction and look at some of the less savory types. Take Dracula, the daddy of the damned himself. He had hairy palms, long yellowed fingernails, and bad breath - and yet, Mina couldn’t keep her hands off of him. Obviously, on top of having the power of twenty men and being able to turn to mist, vampires are hung like horses, too - which is an as yet unexplored vampiric trait that, yes, I do address in The Crimson Corset.