From the Gothic nosferatu to pop culture

According to a study done by The Nielson Company, consumers have been drawn to all things vampire since the Twilight series and film became popular, along with the HBO series True Blood. 

Such fans are appearing online to get their next fix of the Cullen clan before the wave of hysteria resumes with the release of New Moon’s film adaptation next month. According to the study, as many as 553,000 unique visitors spent an average of two minutes and 45 seconds on the Twilight site, of which one minute 47 seconds was spent watching the New Moon trailer.

Add to that the increased popularity of Vampire Wars on Facebook and MySpace, and the increasing popularity of sites like VampireFreaks.com and VampFangs.com, Twilight’s success sees Stephenie Meyer, like Buffy, turning the living dead into a mainstream pop-culture. Although the book was marketed to young adults and teens, the unique visitors to the Twi-sites were 25-34 year-olds; women being 44 percent more likely to go online.

The fascination with the vampire, declares the book The Blood is the Life: Vampires in Literature, is in its nature to be both good and evil – a mystifying oxymoron used by Romantics (and Sylvia Plath in “Daddy”) to provide comment on interpersonal relationships. Although varied in form from the Roman lamia to the Victorian aristocrat, the vampire is “the heroic antagonist or living dead”.

Since used by Coleridge, Blake, Poe and Keats (some go so far as to say that even Emily Brontës Wuthering Heights imposes vampiric tendencies onto Heathcliff), vampires have not retained their professionalism or detachment from human society. 

But we can’t blame Stephenis Meyer for this, for Mr Smith in Charles Beaumont’s Blood Brother complains to his psychologist:

“I always likes my steaks rare, but this is ridiculous! Blood for breakfast, blood for lunch, blood for dinner. Uch – just the thought of it makes me queasy to the stomach!”

To add to the growing list of unique visitors, visit New Moon’s official website.

By Jason Esch

Carroll was a professional mathematician

Sombre auteur, Tim Burton, takes on Lewis Carroll in what has been dubbed the new-age Gothic version of Alice in Wonderland. While Burton fans revel in excitement, noted quite conspicuously at Comic Con earlier this year, Alice zealots are worried what effect the imminent and eerie film will have on the much loved children’s classic. Truth is, Alice was not written for children.

Not until Edward Lear or Lewis Carroll did nonsense become a literary genre, and both might turn in their graves to discover that because of them it has. According to Vivien Noakes, lecturer and authority on Lear, nonsense “meant something happy and inconsequential” which resists the definition sought after by literary genres.

George P. Landow, Professor of English and History of Art at Brown University, says that perhaps the idea of nonsense writing is a universe of words “that only occasionally hold tight to what we think as accepted reality.” A combination of elements, including riddles, characters and situations are used to create incongruity which serves to separate words from their meaning, making them nonsensical.

Typical of the genre, is the focus on the sound of the word over the meaning making for some amusing limericks, bad puns and always a stark juxtaposition of a words’ intended and possible meanings. 

One of the unique effects of such a literary device is detachment – notably emotional detachment from the writer and reader to the characters, which, according to Noakes, once established makes “it quite acceptable and not at all distressing to find a man being baked in an oven or coiled up like a length of elastic”, giving the illusion of children’s literature.

The puzzles and mathematical jokes and codes hidden in Alice’s book further compound the notion that the children’s classic was not intended (at least beneath face value) for kids. Joining Alice in Chapter 7 at the Mad Tea-Party, the Hatter and the Doormouse use mathematical reason, namely inverse relationships, to argue that “I see what I eat” is not the same as “I eat what I see”.

More than this however, the book, according to some, serves as a critique of the Victorian society and its absurdity, or nonsense. Three cards painting white roses red to avoid being beheaded takes a satirical look at the war between the red and white queens, where red roses symbolise the English House of Lancaster and white the House of York in the War of the Roses.

Whether for children or not, however, Burton, with his typical flare for musical and horror, such as 2007’s musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, makes him perfectly poised to capture the nonsense lying somewhere between words and sounds. Previews of the 3D remake of the Disney classic look set to please both Burton and Carroll fans, save for Terry Pratchett.

Visit Tim Burtons brilliantly interactive website or the official Disney Alice mini-site or view the Alice in Wonderland – Official Trailer [HD].

By Jason Esch

Turn off the charm ... get rid of your piffling similes ... eat meat, drink blood – Hilary Mantel's advice on writing

When Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel was announced as the winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize last night, it wasn’t exactly a surprise for those of us who had been watching developments in anticipation. She was the favourite in betting circles with odds of 10/11 and fellow contender A.S. Byatt saw her as enough of a threat to denounce her novel to the media. That’s all well and good, but, I wonder, how exactly does one go about incurring Byatt’s wrath and winning the Booker?

Noting that the decision was not a unanimous one, chairperson of the judging panel, James Naughtie, attributed the ultimate outcome to “the sheer bigness of the book: the boldness of its narrative, its scene setting”. Sensing that my quest would not be satisfied by a less-than-empirical description like “sheer bigness”, he elaborated that the novel counts as “an extraordinary piece of story-telling”. Criteria one and two: scope and narrative skill.

Last year’s winner of the Booker Prize was more of a surprise. First-time novelist Aravind Adiga and The White Tiger beat out favourite Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture by a narrow margin. According to Michael Portillo, the chairperson of that judging panel, “What set it apart was its originality. The feeling was that this was new territory.” This reminds me of something I read in an interview with judge Lucasta Miller, who prioritised writers with “a strong individual voice”. Criteria three and four: originality and individuality.

Having unearthed these four criteria, I turn to the website for guidance. The competition’s slogan is that it “promotes the finest in fiction by rewarding the very best book of the year”. “Finest” and “best” are not exactly empirical measures, although they suggest that successful novelists have a literary, rather popular, bent. Criterion five: literary value.

Looking at the winners of the prestigious award over the last 40 years (most of which I confess I find difficult to digest and more putdownable than un-), I contemplate what rewardable literary merit, with its five prongs, looks like. There is only one exception to the rule, as far as I can see, and that would be Yan Martel’s The Life of Pi, which, although original, doesn’t rank high in any of the other values. I wonder how the Possession author feels about this interloper? If the answer is wrathful, could I count it as criterion six?

By Camilla Lloyd

How Pride was meant to end

Seth Grahame-Smith’s re-write of the famous classic Pride and Prejudice recounts the much-loved classic in 19th Century English glory, the way only Jane Austen could, but with zombie mayhem. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies sees Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet return to battle against both the stifling conformity of Victorian social norms and the undead in the civilised countryside of Hertfordshire, where gratuitous amounts of severed limbs fall lifelessly among the burrows of hares and other woodland creatures.

Liz’s father, an expert in the field of martial arts, teaches his daughters to hold their own against the fully-grown, salivating zombie army, while Mrs Bennet whiles away her days by looking for suitors for her beloved offspring. Deciding between bearing such “unladylike” accessories as a musket and appearing elegant, Liz and her siblings find themselves in a most inconvenient situation. Yet life continues as it once did before the rotting corpses of England’s past began walking the Earth, with marriages and proposals.

As a result of breaking  up the union of Mr Bingley and Liz’s sister Jane, Mr Darcy goes head to head with Elizabeth in a grueling battle of wit and kung-fu that leaves Darcy injured and frightened. Fearing his life he flees the sophisticated slayer and writes a letter in true romantic fashion explaining his belief that Jane was a carrier of the mysterious plague that led to the consumption of Bingley’s staff. As her overwhelming hatred for Darcy turns into only a slight annoyance, Liz must massacre her way through the zombie horde with her trusty katana to encounter him at Pemberly where she re-evaluates her first impressions of this grossly misunderstood man and zombie mercenary. Hoping to be with Darcy as Jane is with Bingley, Elizabeth must battle Darcy’s Aunt Lady Catherine and her entourage of ninjas  to the death for a non-severed hand in marriage.

This delightful novel adds a bit of drama that the original Pride was lacking, making it a well-developed piece of fiction with rounded, self-sufficient characters who can converse on any number of topics including art, music and zombie-destroying maneuvers. An excellent redraft with breathlessly awaited film to be released 2011!

By Jason Esch

Brown returns with Solomon's Key

Perhaps the only person left on English-speaking earth who hasn’t read The Da Vinci Code, I’m excited about The Lost Symbol. Ordinarily I boycott media-hyped books because I rebel against society in small and mostly irrelevant, unnoticeable ways. This means that Nora Roberts and her 10 aliases will most likely never make their way onto this blog. Unless she uses Twitter to make fun with her next title, like Dan Brown.

Later this month, Dan Brown is set to release his hugely awaited The Lost Symbol – the third installment of Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon which almost wouldn’t interest me in the slightest, because I don’t care if there’s an American flag on the moon or not. The only reason I am interested in The Lost Symbol is because it allows me to play with social media. The pre-marketing hype of the book takes the form of a long line of “codes, cryptic trivia, puzzles, secret history, maps and aphorisms” on Twitter and Facebook. The book even has its own website countdown to the launch of the book – which is especially great if you don’t know how far away the 15th of September 2009 is from now, in seconds.

Very little is being released regarding the plot but what we do know is that exactly 6.5 million lucky readers will be able to purchase the book on launch day – a record first print for Random House international, only half of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which is what anyone who isn’t J.K. Rowling or Stephenie Meyer could hope for. Nine years after Da Vinci Code, which became the best selling hardcover adult fiction of all time, Brown steps up to reclaim his title as Best Seller.

By Jason Esch