"nice" cannibalism - bones and all and the good vampire's guide to blood and boyfriends
i'm reading another vampire book and i'm now making it everyone's problem
i've recently found myself reading a frankly concerning number of vampire books. a pattern that is made more obvious based on my choice of music, movies, and video games as of late. but that's really only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to my interest in vampires. vampires, and cannibalism. i am fascinated by cannibalism. not the like real thing, i guess, if that makes you feel better. but the metaphorical gold mine cannibalism is. one of my favourite movies that features cannibalism is luca gaudagnino's adaption of bones and all; the holy grail of eating people metaphors. i think there is a part of me that is just enamoured by that movie in general; the style, the costumes, the acting, but i keep going back to it because of the way that it handles cannibals in a larger societal context. i just keep re-watching it and now i've read camille deangelis's book which the movie was based on. and i am constantly spoiled by the way that i am challenged in my interpretation of the subject matter. if you've never watched the movie, or read the book, i can't recommend them enough. here's the crash course to get you started (there will be spoilers later in this post for bones and all so keep that in mind):
bones and all - a detour
imagine that your love language is eating people, bones and all. that's the book. now imagine that your need to eat people is also a metaphor for being queer. it also stars the most bisexual looking people you've ever seen. that's the movie.
vampire books, or some shit
my most recent interactions with vampires have been listening to the audiobooks of jenna levine's books my roommate is a vampire and my vampire plus-one. i was interested in these books after seeing them at work and noticed that they were available at my local library and they are nice! they are about as enjoyable as you would expect from books with those titles. they are sweet, cutesy little romances, which at the time was exactly what i was looking for. but…
there was something that i was missing. i wasn't really sure why, but i just didn't like the ways the vampires were portrayed. there was no tension. these vampires were deeply uninteresting as vampires. not because they were romance novels about human women finding themselves inexplicably attracted to vampires; but they were missing something deeper in their vampire jeans genes. at the time though, i wasn't able to place why. but i went on with my day, continuing to read and engage with far less vampire and cannibal media in the last couple of months. until i saw a new book at the library.
the good vampire's guide to blood and boyfriends
jamie d'amato's the good vampire's guide to blood and boyfriends is a doozy. the main character, brennan, has recently been turned into a vampire and spends most of the novel trying to decided how he's going to react to that fact. and perhaps, this is where my problem lies. this vampire book looks at vampires as vampires. (stay with me)
maren (taylor russel) and lee (timothée chalamet) are people. in bones and all, the one thing that both characters are fiercely protective of is their humanity. they call themselves "eaters," the various individuals and groups that maren and lee meet all take different precautions to make sure that they do the least amount of damage to the people around them (or not), but the eaters are people. and much of the tension comes from the fact that they are fundamentally normal people who happen to eat those closest to them. and you kind of just have to accept the fact that can happen. but i realized in reading good vampire that d'amato, and levine, see vampires not as people, but as monsters, as other. instead of a vampire's conundrum being "i must seek to destroy my fellow man" it is "i must seek to destroy something." but lee must wrestle with the fact that he literally ate his dad. his own dad. and maren eats lee by the end of the story. and she has to deal with that not only did she eat someone (something she's done throughout her life but still has qualms with) but has now eaten her friend, her lover, the only person who has really understood her, someone who she has a deep and personal relationship with. she has gotten too close to him, and she has eaten him and now her companion is gone.
so what is good vampire doing to come even close to the emotional devastation that is happening at the end of bones and all? well, nothing. and it's not trying to either. brennan is not wrestling with the same things that maren and lee are wrestling with. brennan is now different. he is not like other people. he is not people anymore. so the problems that he is faced with are, "is my life worth more than something else's?" and we already know what it feels like to decide that my human life is worth more than a non-human one. that's called eating meat. and you know how i know that? because brennan is literally a vegan. like before he is turned. its mentioned more than once in the first 30% that he and his mom are both vegan together. hearing that was the moment when everything about this book, levine's books and every other odd piece of vampire lore made sense.
nice cannibalism
nice cannibalism says that something killing and eating another something is bad. "i must destroy something" is an interesting story hook. all encompassing destruction of anything, person or otherwise, is the center for lots of horror. and lots of creature horror, as well. i would argue that's the idea of werewolves; becoming "the other." but i have to wonder why this idea is being applied to vampires when that is not what the vampire horror is (or at least what my ideal vampire horror is). i think there is already something so horrifying about vampires having to give something up, something as important as the sanctity of human life. that's what i love about vampire stories. that's what's awful about bones and all and astarion's character in baldur's gate 3 and v.e. schwab's bury our bones in the midnight soil and louis in amc's interview with the vampire and. and. and. brennan is other, else, and, therefore, does not have to face the cannibalism of his own connections, because he does not experience a compulsion to kill vampires (other others). people are now so unlike him that whatever he does is no longer cannibalism. the humans that brennan is around are more similar to pets than they are to brennan.
the point, maybe?
i get that bones and all and good vampire are not trying to tell the same story and i understand that had i should have put good vampire down if i felt this strongly about the way it handled vampires. but i think its interesting. isn't there something so much more compelling about the thought of being so close to someone that you are compelled to eat them? to be so stricken with blood sickness that you kill and bleed dry the man you taught to kiss you? to love the people around you so much that starving yourself for millennia is better than drinking from someone who told you to feed on them? to not trust yourself to not drink every last drop of their blood? nice cannibalism decides that eating living things is bad. its bad to kill something. bad cannibalism wonders if it's really that bad to eat your wife if she was going to die anyway.
maybe just a taste…