A personal first: Vampires among us

Vampires among us
by Rosemary Ellen Guilley
(ISBN: 0671723618)



This book is pretty special to me because it's the first nonfiction book on vampires I ever owned. I bought it at a used bookstore over a decade ago and I read it cover to cover about every year or so. Without this book, I doubt I would have gotten heavily involved in the vampire subculture.

I see many of Guilley's works as gateway books for goths, much like Edith Hamilton's Mythology is a fair to middling starter book for students of Greek, Roman, and Teutonic myths. Vampires Among Us is no exception. Written in 1991, several years before the vampires flocked to the Internet, Guilley relies on vampire legends and personal interviews to fill the book and converses with everyone from practicing British vampires to an American who spent a night in Vlad Tepes' rediscovered castle. Guilley also includes sections on literary vampire fan clubs and briefly mentions psychic vampirism.

The interviews fascinate me the most, and the chapter on the British vampire couple most of all. Damien and Damon (female and male--it's hard to tell from the pseudonyms) sought Guilley out in London on a referral from a mutual friend. Survivors from the 1970s, when Christopher Lee and Frank Langella spurred a Dracula revival with a few remakes, Damien and Damon seemed to possess a sort of preternatural ennui. Their black hair and clothes, heavy makeup, silver jewelry, and pointed nails and teeth practically screamed bloodsucker. According to Damien, "the blood drinking is secondary to being a vampire. You've got people who drink blood who are sadistic. They're not vampires. Even as a vampire, you don't have to drink blood. The sooner somebody dresses like and calls himself a vampire, he's on the right ladder" (36).

Nearly twenty years later, the non-vampiric blood drinkers, now better known as blood fetishists, still cause ripples through the community. However, when it comes to extreme costuming, people are still divided. It's been years since I first read that, and it's been years since I felt the need to wear black to prove something. I'm almost as old as Damien when she gave the interview. Instead of seeing vampire mystique in Damien, I see a portrait of a mixed-up young woman, forced to give up her first child when Social Services deemed her an unfit mother, unable--or possibly unwilling--to hold a job due to her diurnal sleep cycle, and unable to find peace in Germany with her lover Damon due to their lifestyle choices. I have to ask myself, how much of their grief did they bring on themselves? How often did they find themselves choosing between the life they needed to life and the life they wanted to live?

And sadly, Guilley doesn't ask these questions, wrapping up the interviews in a neat bow before racing ahead to describe the Dracula Society or the Highgate Vampire or dream vampires or psychic vampirism. I wish she could have picked a format and stuck with it--a book of discourse, a book of modern vampire media lore, a book of interviews, something.

So why do I own this? Again, it's a starter book. When reading anything nonfiction, the bibliography in the back names other resources for more information. If you happen upon this in a bookstore, like I did, buy it for the list of books on the last few pages and order those. And while your waiting for the detailed books to arrive, give this one a read.