Book Review: No Such Thing As Duty by Lara Elena Donnelly

A blend of the historical and the speculative to linger on the concept of duty in a grim and everchanging world.

The viewpoint character of Lara Elena Donnelly's novella No Such Thing As Duty is William Somerset Maugham. You might have heard of him. An English writer who penned plays, short stories and novels, I certainly had, but knew very little about him beyond that briefest of bios. Nor did I until after I had finished writing my first draft of this review - a deliberate choice, wanting to preserve the experience of the story as a narrative-object, to linger in its tension and ambiguities, without collapsing them down with the intrusion of reality until I had at least captured the rough sense of my feelings in the amber of prose.

Because there are two No Such Thing As Dutys - the first is the one read by someone who knows Maugham's bibliography, the facts of his life and the reality, date and manner of his death. This is a version one must expect of any book which features historical facts, in any form. There is always someone who knows everything, especially when the subject is a famous author. The second is my experience.

At the start of the book, we meet Maugham arriving in a Romania in which he is certain he will die (and glad of it rather than being a Scottish sanatorium). He is suffering from tuberculosis, dizzy with fever and coughing up blood, but seemingly determined to do his duty before succumbing to the inevitable. Already, a branching point of the two experiences of the story. For me, this is tension - does he die in Romania? I don't know. He seems wearily certain of it, a spectre that looms over the story, that intrudes every time he coughs up blood into a handkerchief or a scarf conveniently dark to hide the stain. Arriving as a spy in wartime, he reports in to receive such mission as he might be needed for, following on from his promising activities with less promising outcomes in other fronts of the conflict. But he soon realises his mission, such as it is, seems more of a sop, a bone thrown to make him feel useful rather than something vitally necessary.

And thus, the central conflict of the book. The duty he's doing - to King and Country, as he says - what kind of duty is it, if it is this pity mission? He leaves behind a daughter he cares about and a wife he'd rather avoid, coming to die far away, and if it's not for duty, then what is it for? Are they not also a duty?

But he's there, and the mission is in front of him, and he's dying, so do it he does. And through the course of it, he meets two other key figures. One a man, Walter, seemingly walled off from any sense of duty - seemingly - and another a woman, Mme. Popescu, whose husband died of a duty he didn't even need to do. Three angles on the same problem, though mired firmly in Maugham's. The glimpses of the other two do however serve to colour and explore his, through the lens of his introspection.

And this - his self-critical, thoughtful, writerly narrative voice - is one of the most successful things about a roundly successful novella. I'm not familiar with Maugham's work in reality - another branch point, does his narrative voice sound like actual Maugham's - but I found myself quickly invested in the version of him that exists in Donnelly's. There's an analytical bent to the way he talks about the people around him, a distance that he himself names as he talks to other characters, and a slight rigidity to the prose that does nod back to the time at which the story is set, without overegging the historicity. But it's not just that. He is constantly dwelling on his imminent death (ironic or simply foreshadowing?), the effect that will have on his family, whether being here is the right thing to do, and if he even truly is doing his duty at all. He also dwells on two lost loves and one growing one, because all good things come in threes.

As with the three angles on duties, the three loves all inform one another, shaping how we see Maugham as much as how he sees himself. There's Sue, the woman he wishes he'd married but whom he lost to the man who got her pregnant (and married her out of - yes, there's duty again). There's Gerald, the outgoing soldier he knew in the Pacific, whose strengths shored up Maugham's weaknesses, and whose flaws could be forgiven, and critically who knew, as Maugham knows, when and how to keep hidden from society's eyes what it doesn't want to see. And then the present one, Walter - the man who walls himself off from duty, who refuses to hide himself as Maugham knows he must.

Intersections, wherever you look. Maugham - with his stutter, his orphan status and French early years already an outcast, clinging on to rigid propriety as close as his interpretation of duty. Walter flouting both but charming him in, while also being his mission, a part of his own duty and bound up in the death of Popescu's husband.

All of which leads to wondering about the reality of Maugham's duty - the clue is, indeed, in the title - but whether it's self-imposed too. All around him, people take the rules of society less seriously than he does, whether they be his British handler, the locals, Walter or Mme. Popescu. He dwells on how it was his duty to marry Syrie, the wife he's avoiding, after he got her pregnant. But was it truly? Was it a duty he could have avoided if he wanted to? Did he want to? Will he die in service to this thing that may never even really have been asked of him at all?

That tension and uncertainty about his death is why I resolved not to find out his biographical details until I had settled my thoughts. Because the poignancy of not knowing felt so delicious, and fed in so beautifully to the ethical crisis he was suffering through, that I wanted to treasure it as a lucky gift I chanced to have in reading it.

However, around half to two thirds through the novella, Donnelly introduces a speculative element which complicates things further. Obviously, there were no vampires involved in World War I. And so, however closely the narrative up to this point may (or may not) have married up to the real history and biography, here it diverges. The two experiences of the book briefly coalesce. But only briefly.

In my opinion, vampires are at their best when they are both truly dangerous and also, despite and because of the danger, sexy. In No Such Thing as Duty, the sexiness of the vampirism (and while a little understated, by god is Donnelly's vampire sexy) is corralled in by the physical - blood and bites and hands and tongues - just as the rest of the story is wedded to Maugham's own physicality, of his breath and cough and bleeding, his fever constantly waxing and waning, the scratch of fabric on skin, his enjoyment of food and drink. Donnelly revels in the sensation of drinks particularly, the haze of brandy and heat of coffee, and temperature more broadly - feverish burns and the cool touch of snow. And again, the lingering prophecy of Maugham's death informs this. We read his body in its frailty and potential failure; the vampirism marries that imminent death up with sex but also with the potentiality of death's forestalling.

And so, the two readings once again diverge and split even further. Is the intrusion of the fantastical about to change the facts, and a reader who knows whether Maugham will die about to be surprised by a change, or have their knowledge come to fruition, but its method shifted? And then, again, me, caught up only in the tension of the story itself. Vampires throw a spanner into the works of the greatest inevitability, and so add an extra layer of narrative uncertainty.

Right up to the end, Donnelly preserves that ambiguity. The story ends with implication rather than closure, a situation that made me very glad for my lack of knowledge, but one that, precisely because of the speculative elements, likewise imposes that ambiguity even on a reader who does know, because while the question of "if" might have been settled for them, there still lives a vast expanse of "how" and "why".

And so, ultimately, it doesn't matter if you know the facts or not. The story uses vampirism to crack open the vault of possibility, and ensure that the available endings are uncertain for any reader. I looked up the facts, and learnt that not only did Maugham live into his nineties, far beyond the scope of the life he sees as doomed in the story, but that even the foundation of the story rests on a branch untaken - the Scottish sanatorium the book's Maugham is glad to avoid was the path of reality. A reader who knew his biography was already wrong-footed, because it never cleaved to that reality in the first place. That break from the known path already introduced the potential for change, and the story could become one of the doomed path the real man didn't take.

No Such Thing As Duty wields its ambiguities and potentialities like a scalpel, all the while holding them in delicious contrast to the bitter realities of the physical and the flesh. By using a real historical figure and divorcing him from his reality, Donnelly ties her story to real anchors - there are hints and nods to real, biographical facts seeded throughout - without closing off the opportunities for tension, and the scope of possible endings. The fantastical element is also the most grounding one, the sections in which Maugham is being fed on being some of the most intimately real ones, where much of the rest of the story comes filtered through his particular lens of perception, held at a distance, or made hazy by illness. Only in contact with the unreal does the story fully rear up into feeling quite present. She leaves her questions open - this is not a story with an answer to its moral questions, any more than it is one to set a firm hand on the conclusion of its plot - and the work is all the better for it. It is a beautiful, brilliant book, with exquisitely understated prose and a skilfully managed viewpoint, and one that exemplifies what a good novella can do, or be, by using all its tools, figures and ideas all intersect and coalesce into a gorgeous mess of feeling and thought.

--

The Math

Highlights: Sexy but understated but sexy vampirism, triangulating around the concept of duty, well-crafted introspective viewpoint

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Reference: Lara Elena Donnelly, No Such Thing As Duty [Neon Hemlock, 2025]. 

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

Film Review: Sinners

A powerful example of layered storytelling that blends horror, history, and magical realism with meaningful social commentary.
 

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is a uniquely crafted exploration of culture, connection, and spirituality contrasted against a relentless tide of oppression, manipulation, and cruelty. Using innovative film techniques, Sinners lures us in with an unsettlingly quaint setting and a group of memorable characters who create an allegory for the larger Black experience. The theatrical trailer for Sinners gives us a general overview of a pair of confident Black gunslingers in 1930’s Mississippi who build a juke joint and end up fighting blood-thirsty vampires. But that isn’t all the movie is about. Sinners is an example of layered storytelling which will mean different things to different people. Every scene, word, and reference is heavy with implications and unspoken undertones. The visuals are gorgeous but quietly haunting and the result is an emotional journey that leaves you wanting to rewatch it to discover all the layers of meaning. 

[MILD SPOILERS]

In 1932 Mississippi, Sammie (Miles Caton) is a likeable young Black musician, nicknamed “Preacher Boy” because his protective father Jedidiah (Saul Williams) is the pastor of the town’s very small Black church. Sammie and his father review the scriptures (which Sammie knows perfectly) for the next day’s church service but Sammie is anxious go into town with his older cousins, Elijah and Elias, nicknamed Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan in a dual role). Smoke and Stack are back in town after an adventurous stay in Chicago. Sammie is starstruck about their time in Chicago versus their country town, but Smoke confirms that Chicago is just as racist and dangerous as Mississippi, and the twins would rather deal with the devil they know in their hometown. Smoke and Stack decide to build a juke joint on the edge of town so the Black residents can have a place to enjoy themselves in peace. They buy a slaughterhouse from a smooth-talking racist but are determined to open the place that same night. In a cleverly filmed sequence of scenes, the twins encounter and gather various characters needed to help open the place on short notice. In the process, we learn the backstory of each character, including old musician, Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) who is hesitant to join them because he thinks a Black business won’t survive. In a hypnotic scene, Slim tells a horrific tale of exploitation and cruelty while sounds from his memories float around him. We also meet smart-mouthed Cornbread (Omar Miller), who works as a field laborer. Two of the stores in town are run by Grace Chow (Li Jun Li) and her husband Bo (Yao), so Smoke hires them to provide supplies for the new place. Stack had gifted Sammie a guitar, and Stack and Delta Slim are both amazed when they hear the stunning way Sammie plays and sings. They also encounter another singer Perline (Jayme Lawson), with whom Sammie is infatuated although she is married. Stack runs into his demanding ex-girlfriend, Mary (Hailee Steinfield) who is white but has some Black ancestry and feels close to the town’s Black community. Meanwhile, Smoke asks his estranged wife Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) to help with the cooking at the new place. Annie understands the supernatural and uses her knowledge to create protection for the twins and she and Smoke revisit their grief over the loss of their baby daughter. But things take a turn when an ancient Irish vampire, Remmick (Jack O’Connell), arrives, fleeing a trio of sharp-eyed Choctaw vampire hunters. Remmick senses the magical power of Sammie’s talent and targets Smoke and Stack’s place. As the evening becomes more dangerous we see how each of the main characters responds to the arrival of a new kind of oppression.

Michael B. Jordan is intriguing in his dual roles as Smoke and Stack, and the entire cast delivers compelling performances. Sinners is not a perfect story and, at times, characters make confusing choices that seem inconsistent with who they are. But it is a powerful example of unique filmmaking that blends horror, history, and magical realism with meaningful social commentary. There are so many thematic elements and symbolic components that viewers may need to see the film several times to catch everything. From a blues jam across the centuries to reciting the Lord’s Prayer while fending off a vampire attack, the film literally gives you a little bit of everything. A few themes particularly stood out. 

Family Relationships

Although the brothers have similar mannerisms, Smoke is more pragmatic and grounded. He is concerned about achieving success through money and power; he is closely acquainted with grief through the loss of his daughter; and he understands true sacrificial love through his connection to Annie. Stack is more lighthearted, reckless, and more compassionate to those who can’t pay the full price. Despite their differences, Smoke and Stack are intensely loyal to each other and they are both protective of Sammie. In a brief but crucial scene, Stack talks about his violent father and asks Sammie about his relationship with Jedidiah, but Sammie confirms his father does not abuse him. We also see a playful scene between Sammie and his mother as they begin the day. Despite his giftedness, both Sammie’s father Jedidiah and his cousin Stack warn Sammie not to pursue life as a blues musician. Jedidiah warns that if you dance with evil, one day it will follow you home. Stack orders Sammie to find a respectable community to settle in and leave the dangerous living to sinners like him and Smoke. 

Economics as Power 

The field workers are paid with wooden tokens which can only be used at the general store. When some of the juke joints customers pay with the wooden tokens, there is a difficult conversation between Smoke who wants real money as payment and Stack who wants to let people have fun and Annie who wants to show compassion for the plight of the exploited Black workers. Despite Stack and Annie’s desire for flexibility, Smoke knows the lack of money is unsustainable and he understands that the larger problem is the manipulative payment which is designed to indenture Black workers and hurt Black businesses. Similarly, in an earlier scene, Smoke takes a moment to teach a young girl how to negotiate a proper salary. 

Literary Symbolism 

The film is filled with archetypal characters and symbolic places: the complementary brothers, the reliable, spiritually attune wife; the angry, selfish girlfriend, the adulterous wife, the wise mentor musician who has seen suffering, and Sammie, the gifted chosen one, who turns out to be the true center of the story. Racist salesman Hogwood (David Maldonado) and slick-talking vampire Remmick are parallel characters, artificially polite, manipulative, and lethal. The juke joint becomes a rebellious center of culture built in a slaughterhouse where the blood has been scrubbed away but the memory of death remains imbedded. In key scenes the doors of the slaughterhouse/juke joint are compared to the doors of the church. Remmick wants to take Sammie’s talent, noting that he once had his land stolen from him. Remmick uses truth mixed with lies to seduce his victims. Sinners has two post-credit scenes and begins and ends with a specific song of encouragement. The music in the film is stunning, and each performance tells its own story. The title of the film gives us a layered meaning of “sinners” as rebellious, independent, broken, cruel, conquering, fearful, and universally all of us who must live with real-life horrors that rival the symbolic horror of the murderous vampires. 

Taking Risks 

A core theme of the story is whether to be bold with your talents or whether to play it safe. That answer may seem simple, but Sinners reminds us that those who are talented become targets for aggression and exploitation. Ultimately, the message of Sinners is finding a path between the extremes of devastation or the safety of hiding. Sinners has echoes of the “Parable of the Talents” where rewards are given to those who take risks with the gifts they are given. It’s a hard lesson for those who want to pursue “goodness” by playing it safe.

Of course, there are many other important messages in the film. And there are layers of meaning that make the story more than just another vampire story. Using unusual film techniques, clever storytelling, and heavy symbolism, Sinners gives us a complex tale that will keep viewers talking about it for a long time.

--

The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Highlights

• Thoughtful visuals and music
• Traditional vampire violence contrasted with unique symbolism
• Memorable, layered storytelling

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction-writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

First Scare: Interview With the Vampire (1994)

A groundbreaking vampire film, tangled with misogyny and old-school monster melodrama

Vampire horror is not my favorite genre, so I generally avoid most of it. My most positive experiences with vampire fiction consist of an ill-advised beach vacation reading of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (which I found surprisingly creepy and enjoyable); Cassandra Clare’s Shadowhunters book series (Magnus, Raphael, and Simon are all very different but likeable vampires); Twilight, which I found reasonably entertaining and, at least, not offensive; and the first season (British version) of Being Human, a slice-of-life story of a ghost, werewolf, and vampire trying to live a normal life in modern-day London. (I will also admit to watching Kate Beckinsale in Underworld more than once.) Beyond those diversions, I generally skip contemporary vampire content since a common premise is often alpha males hedonistically and cruelly murdering innocent people (usually women) to satiate an internal need. So, I unapologetically avoided the original 1994 Interview With the Vampire until this October’s First Scare project.

I remember the arrival of this film in theaters and the resulting rebirth of vampire trendiness. The stars of the film were the then super beautiful Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, and Antonio Banderas (who I forgot was in this story). My college bestie loved the Anne Rice novels and, although I never read them, I understood the movie had several departures from the books. However, despite the traditional appeal of the sexy vampire trope, the film ultimately felt intensely misogynous—primarily violence by men against women, which is ironic since the source material is written by a woman. I know this film is a favorite for many, so I will just say… it’s not for me.

The story begins in the present (1994), with the eternally young vampire, Louis (Brad Pitt) telling the story of his life to a skeptical newspaper reporter (Christian Slater). Then we move to the flashback. Our protagonist Louis is a 1700s slave plantation owner in Louisiana. So, yes, any possible sympathy from me went out the window. His wife and baby have recently died so he’s depressed and making poor choices (nihilistically carousing, etc., because he wants to die due to his grief). Along comes Lestat (Tom Cruise), a blonde, French vampire hanging out in Louisiana. He offers Louis a variation of death: vampirism, to which Louis agrees. Again, no sympathy. After he becomes a vampire, Louis has some buyer’s remorse and is a bit disturbed at having to drink the blood of living creatures / humans (killing them) to live. Lestat has no such concerns and kills (mostly women) indiscriminately. Louis shows his moral outrage by initially mostly drinking rats’ blood, which Lestat eyerolls. However, Louis has no problems killing his Black female slave (Thandie Newton), especially after she says, “you haven’t come by the slave quarters lately.” Ugh. When Louis hands the dead woman back to the rest of his slaves, he laments that he’s a bad person. At this point I was definitely ready to stop watching. Then he randomly tells them to leave (they’re “free”). I mean, it’s the 1700s in the American South. They’re obviously not free. He can’t even be bothered to write an official document for them.

Later, during a plague epidemic in New Orleans, Louis finds a little girl (Kirsten Dunst), with her dead mother, and vampire-kills the child. Presumably, he thinks she has the plague too and is doomed anyway. Unclear. However, Lestat turns the child, Claudia, into a vampire so that she can be a companion for the always brooding / whining Louis. The three become a creepy family until little (one hundred year old) Claudia has had enough of Lestat’s controlling behavior and decides to put an end to him. Then the story shifts gears to true, epic violence.

I was surprised by how dated the actual, physical film looked and how dated the acting was. Lestat and later the European vampire king, Armand (Antonio Banderas), are so melodramatic as the alpha vampires that I struggled to take them seriously, despite the carnage. Louis is angsty, but simultaneously complicit in killing, in a way that becomes annoying. The second half of the film mostly consists of women being murdered while begging for their lives in some sort of sexualized context. Again, not for me.

Kirsten Dunst’s Claudia is the main bright spot in the story. She is wonderfully sharp-tongued, creepy, feral, and intense, and she is the only bit of girl-power in this story. Louis’s big revenge scene is somewhat satisfying, as is an earlier moment when Lestat goes monster-y feral after being set on fire. Other than that, this classic film is not one I’ll be watching on repeat. I can see why AMC thought a remake was needed. Apparently, I prefer my fictional vampires to be more grounded. I also, admittedly, prefer stories with at least one sympathetic protagonist. This film has none. In Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, there is at least a team of heroes trying to stop the killing. In Shadowhunters, there are vampire heroes and vampire villains, and meaningful discussions of the label of “downworlders.” Those stories are all more to my taste. But I appreciate Interview With the Vampire for its role in reimagining the vampire genre, taking it from monstrously alien to familiarly human, with all its flaws and moral questioning. In doing so, it opened the doors to a range of new interpretations, including many that I quite enjoy.

Highlights

• Another film carried by the child actor
• Problematic misogyny
• A groundbreaking change of pace for the vampire genre

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction-writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

First Scare: Dracula (1979)

The one that was color-graded with extreme prejudice

With this being the fourth Dracula adaptation I watch for this series, I start to wonder: is it humanly possible to tell a Dracula story where women actually make choices of their own? Even in this unabashedly horny version, directed by John Badham, Lucy's vehement wish to spent eternity with the Count can be attributed to magical coercion. It's as if there were no such thing as freely desiring your predator; with Dracula there must always be a pinch of deception thrown in the mix, a hidden hand pushing the will that believes itself free. Where human seduction depends on mutual offering and suggesting, vampiric seduction is all about control. The trick is to hide that control under a charming façade, to convince you that your surrender was your own idea. The vampire is one of those predator species that prefer a docile prey. Like an anglerfish, but hot.

The trope of the vampire as a sexual threat has been present since the very earliest vampire fiction: both Polidori's The Vampyre and Le Fanu's Carmilla revolve around serial seducers of unsuspecting maidens. It became a perennial trait in fiction even until the early years of the 21st century to handle the topic of desire with a certain deliberate ambiguity where vampires were involved. Those stories look very different now through the lens of our contemporary notion of consent: for us, upholders of bodily autonomy and personal agency, any degree of coercion is unacceptable, no matter how sugarcoated. And it's a sign of the progress we've made that the authors of classic vampire tales would have found our perspective odd, maybe too reductive. So if you're going to dive into the literary tradition of sexy vampires, you need to keep in mind two conflicting stances: that of today, according to which anything less than free consent is inarguably assault; and that of the authors, whose understanding of seduction was most likely less egalitarian.

Badham casts a handsome Dracula, removing part of the character's mystique. While it makes the movie's romantic storyline more digestible to the audience, I find that it alters the character too much. Dracula is supposed to be a master manipulator; a key component of his scare factor is that, even if he presented himself in public like the stinking, rotten corpse he actually is, his victims would still be incapable of resisting his embrace. Dracula pulls the strings of human desire in the service of his own desire, which is what makes Nosferatu so effective. If Dracula is good-looking, it doesn't strike us as horrifying that someone would desire him—even if he's using his mind control powers. With the air of effortless charm that Frank Langella gives to this character, it's entirely believable that someone would want to be possessed by him—even if he's not using his mind control powers.

Here your mileage may vary. For a segment of the audience, the fact that he's already attractive before he starts controlling you will make him feel more dangerous. In my case, I'm fascinated by the idea of an inhuman monstrosity that can nonetheless reach into your most intimate feelings and twist them against you. And here we need to invoke cultural attitudes around lookism. By making Dracula handsome, this movie joins the long tradition of folk tales that question the idea of a link between external and internal beauty. Think of the Greek siren, or the medieval succubus, or the Japanese jorōgumo: extremely beautiful, equally evil.

For this version of Dracula, the reshuffling of characters goes like this: Jonathan is engaged to Lucy, who is the daughter of Dr. Seward. There's no Arthur, no brides of Dracula, no earlier visit by Renfield, and no ruse from Dracula: he readily admits that he's visiting England as a consumer. Of more consequence is the rewrite that turns Mina into Dr. Van Helsing's daughter. This time, he isn't an established vampire hunter; he learns about vampires along with the audience. This change allows for a scenario I like to see: Dracula infiltrating human society. Langella plays the Count as a worldly hedonist who enraptures people with his vast talent for conversation. Instead of keeping to the formalities of high society, like Lugosi's Count, Langella's is almost scandalous in how openly he seeks and enjoys female attention.

Thick volumes could be written on the Freudian symbolism of the vampire as a dual object of the erotic impulse and the death impulse, on the alarmingly easy way our basic desires can be warped toward our own destruction. Badham's Dracula aims to present a believable scenario of such distorted passions. Much like desire itself, your response to this piece of art will be uniquely yours. Maybe you'll fall under the spell. Maybe you'll remain unmoved. Taste is a mystery, like life and death.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

First Scare: Dracula (1974)

The one with the excess of close-ups and the perpetually constipated grimace

Ideally, Jack Palance should have been a great choice for the role of Count Dracula. His suitability for the role was so widely acknowledged that Marvel Comics used his likeness for the series Tomb of Dracula years before Dan Curtis cast him in the role. This was the same Dan Curtis who created the TV series Dark Shadows. Add Richard I Am Legend Matheson writing the script, and this movie had the right pedigree to be spectacular. Unfortunately, someone must have given Palance the wrong acting instructions, because from the start to the end of the movie, he only knows how to make one face: that of the unlucky vampire who forgot to add some fiber to his all-blood diet, and is now in urgent need of a laxative.

It's not like Palance is wasted on the role. When he speaks, you believe that he's the right actor. He says his lines in an unnervingly calm, low voice, in the tone of an immortal who has seen everything and can no longer be surprised. His acting choices resemble those of Bela Lugosi in his manner of staring, standing, and carrying himself. However, where Lugosi could own a scene by raising an eyebrow, Palance invariably contorts every muscle on his face, as if the director were pressuring him to choose which emotion to show.

The director himself is no help on this matter, with his strange habit of resorting to a zoom-in to mark every emotional beat. He does make effective use of low angles and the occasional Dutch angle to underline a character's interaction with the realm of the occult, but his overreliance on close-ups becomes a form of self-sabotage against the serious tone he's clearly going for. Matheson's script keeps a tight rein on the pacing of events, an essential skill to have when the audience already knows the plot by heart, and the directing style falls short of what this script deserves.

This time, the reshuffling of characters is less drastic than in previous adaptations, but there's one key detail to pay attention to: the addition of the subplot about the Count's long-dead wife whose likeness he randomly encounters in the present. Coppola would use the same subplot in his 1992 version. This is another way of solving the eternal question about the Count's reason for moving to England: in this case, it's because he's a hopeless romantic. From his dialogues (and bizarrely melodramatic flashbacks) it can be inferred that he'd be happy to remain in his castle if it weren't for the armies that have continuously come to pillage his land and/or murder his wife. If you will just let him keep his wife, he won't have to come to kill you. This version of the Count is no less a seducer than previous ones, but here the story emphasizes his sexual needs instead of Lucy's or Mina's. In fact, the female characters in this version perform the function of hypnotizable MacGuffins rather than people. They're there for the Count to pursue and for Arthur and Van Helsing to chivalrously defend.

It's funny how the space left open by removing Jonathan Harker from the action in London raises Arthur Holmwood to an almost protagonistic position, yet the script keeps him restricted to serving as an appendix of Dr. Van Helsing. They do everything together, go everywhere together, investigate each clue together—you could remove Arthur from this movie and the only change you'd notice would be that Van Helsing would have to recite his infodumps to himself. Even Mina is almost an afterthought: her close friendship with Lucy is more told than shown, and what little autonomy she has in the plot is gone once she's fed Dracula's blood.

Changing Count Dracula from a predator to a heartbroken widower isn't enough to arouse sympathy for this character. There are still good reasons why the common folk who live near his castle shudder at his name. And on a more pragmatic level, the rough, hyperangular features of Jack Palance's face are a bad fit for a romantic lead. But the movie wants to present the Count as a suffering, tragic man who has endured loneliness for too long and just hopes for a second chance at happiness. Again, this is the same angle Coppola would try some years later, but Coppola succeeds at it because his Dracula is legible to us, because his flashback actually does the job of explaining the part of the story we need to understand instead of giving us mere hints as in this movie.

Dracula's manner of death in this version is overacted as all hell. Once the curtains are ripped open to let the sunlight in, the Count staggers and pauses multiple times to make sure you see him pose in pain from all sides. Then he helpfully gets himself in position for Van Helsing to impale him, a process that takes way more camera cuts than it needs. Overall, this movie is not without enjoyable moments, if your idea of enjoyment allows for frequent, abrupt shifts in PoV and a plot structured like a game of cat and mouse.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

First Scare: Dracula (1958)

The one sadly afflicted with pink eye

A few years ago, I did the experiment of watching all three film versions of Carrie on one day. It taught me a lot about the minutiae of adaptational choices: what effect it has if a certain dialogue scene is moved to a different moment in the story, what actions need to be condensed if a location is removed, how far an emotional setup needs to be from its eventual payoff. (My verdict is that 2013 has the best Margaret, 1976 has the best Carrie, and 2002 has the best prom massacre.) Watching various adaptations of Dracula is turning out to be a similar learning experience, with Terence Fisher's 1958 film a fascinating example of how drastically you can strip down a story while keeping its core intact.

If I was surprised by how much the 1931 film shuffled around the novel's characters, this version goes even further: Renfield and the sanatorium are entirely removed, as is Dracula's journey by ship, while Dr. Seward is reduced to a very minor role. Arthur is now Lucy's brother instead of suitor, and he's married to Mina. The bulk of the action is moved from England to Germany so that trips to and from Transylvania are less impractical. The most consequential change is that Jonathan Harker doesn't visit Castle Dracula as an innocent clerk bringing paperwork, but as a sort of secret agent already tasked with killing the vampire. This means that it's not the Count who lures Jonathan to his land, but Jonathan who takes the initiative to seek the Count. It also means that the Count's evil nature is known all along, so he doesn't get to mingle with human society.

Removing the Count's pretense of being a normal human massively reduces the contact he can have with the rest of the cast, which forces the director to make the most of his very few on-screen appearances. The tradeoff works: this is one of those monster movies where we get to see the monster very rarely, but each time we do, it lands with full impact.

The changes to the whole Jonathan/Mina/Lucy axis help provide a practical solution to the biggest loose thread in the novel: why did Count Dracula want to leave Transylvania in the first place? In this interpretation, Jonathan sneaks into the castle crypt in the first act and kills the Count's bride, who may or may not be desperate to be rid of the vampiric curse. This event gives the Count a clear motivation: you take my bride, I take yours. And that's why he goes after Lucy, who in this version is Jonathan's fiancée.

Jonathan doesn't make it past the first act alive (for which I was thankful, what with actor John Van Eyssen being rather mediocre in the role), so the film promptly shifts to introducing Dr. Van Helsing, who ends up being the true protagonist. As Van Helsing, Peter Cushing does a stellar job. He's helped by the script, which cleverly remolds the novel's crusader/pest exterminator into a detective-esque figure. He's apparently been on Dracula's trail for a while, and he frames his mission in terms of protecting the world from what could become a plague of vampirism.

However, precisely because the story has been stripped down to the basics, this whole talk of a threat to the world sounds incongruous. The action is confined to about half a dozen sets, beyond which the rest of society might as well not exist. Van Helsing does visit a customs officer and an undertaker in the course of his investigation, but those spaces just play their part and are quickly done with. If not for the dialogues, we wouldn't even know that Arthur and Mina are living in Germany instead of England. And the Count doesn't help sell his menace factor either; he's more interested in replacing his dead bride than in going on a biting rampage. The main conflict in this film is a strictly private affair, but the dialogues insist that Dracula sits at the head of a "reign of terror" that must be defeated yet is nowhere to be seen.

So instead of the usual dynamic in a Dracula story of the foreign Other quietly invading the civilized metropolis, here we have the civilized heroes going out into the land of the foreign Other to stamp down the threat it represents. Not a very subtle sentiment for a film produced while the Cold War was getting started (it doesn't escape the viewer that the undertaker's shop where the Count first goes to hide has the last name Marx, of all things).

This version of the vampire doesn't bother with theatrics. No beastly transformation, no fog cloud, no magical stares. His power is raw, brutal hunger (and his female victims welcome his assault with equal hunger). When he finally meets Van Helsing, he doesn't try to control his mind, as in the 1931 movie; here he goes straight for the jugular, and is only thwarted because he lets himself grow overconfident.

For a limited special effects budget, Dracula's death in this movie is impressive. Instead of erupting in flames when exposed to the sun, he simply crumbles down into a pile of ashes. It's very simple, very repulsive, and very effective. Unfortunately, the Technicolor process left many scenes more illuminated than they're implied to be, which makes it look like Dracula is walking outdoors under more sunlight than he should, so the dramatic shock of having the sun hit his face at the end is somewhat less effective. Still, this is a enjoyable watch. It's like going to the doctor's office for a needle jab: just the briefest glimpse of blood, and it's over before you feel any pain.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

First Scare: Dracula (1931)

The one with the intense stares

Tod Browning's Dracula is derived from a 1924 stage adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel, and it shows. It keeps several of the hallmarks of a traditional theater script: lengthy infodumps via dialogue; time jumps that relegate some plot developments (especially the violent ones) to the implicit space between scenes; extended, continuous use of the same set for several consecutive conversations; and a marked preference for telling over showing. I understand that Western theater has a long tradition of keeping the violence offstage; what I cannot understand is how, when you translate the stage play into a movie, you produce what eventually becomes the most memorable, most revered, most iconic interpretation of The vampire without showing me one single instance of biting.

It goes without saying that Bela Lugosi carries this movie on his shoulders. Despite the excessive wordiness of the script, the obviously fake bat puppets, the lack of a music soundtrack, and the scattered, ill-advised attempts at humor, it only takes one look at the titular vampire's intense gaze to fall under his spell. When he's not engaged in the social pantomime of small talk, in a strenuous but futile effort to pass as a hot-blooded, cheerful human, his presence fills the screen with an unblinking, commanding aura of evil. Wikipedia tells me that almost a dozen actors were considered for the role, but now that I've seen the movie, the possibility of giving the Count any other face strikes me as inconceivable.

Fancy clothes and impeccable haircut aside, this version of the vampire is still very close to Nosferatu, an almost irrational monster guided by the hunting instinct, without the sentimental appeal that later reinventions would add to the archetype to create a more relatable figure, desperate to find love but cursed to see people only as food. When his character is free from the need to pretend to be a normal human, Lugosi puts on the face of a predator, giving his victims not the natural recognition of a fellow person but the hungry stare of a beast preparing to jump. He delivers a terrific performance, which anticipates later occurrences of the single-minded, uncaring killer that can be found in Alien or The Terminator.

The liberties taken with the source material are a double-edged sword. For one part, the early scenes about a real estate lawyer visiting the Count's castle are given to Renfield instead of Jonathan Harker, a change that strengthens the causal cohesion between the first and second acts. Also, Dr. Seward, who is in charge of the hospital where Renfield ends up locked in, is rewritten to be Mina's father instead of Lucy's suitor, which gives the Count a convenient reason to get close to Mina. The downside is that the role of Jonathan Harker is greatly diminished, Mina is reduced to sexy lamp status, and Lucy's death and subsequent undeath lose the weight they should have in the plot. There isn't even a scene to purify Lucy's corpse; she's simply forgotten halfway through the movie.

From our position in this century, accustomed to hundreds of variations on the vampire mythos, it would seem easy to forgive such misfires; there's always another version out there with its own aesthetic, its own vision, its own reinterpretation of the story. But in 1931, Dracula was yet to enter the public domain. The choices made by Universal Pictures did more than express artistic freedom: they set canon. There's an entire period in the history of horror during which Universal's Dracula was the only authorized Count on screen. Just like the present generation only knows Ian McKellen's version of Gandalf, and will forever think of Gandalf in that image, there was a generation whose idea of the Count was shaped by Bela Lugosi's acting style. It's the kind of first-mover advantage that forces every subsequent moviemaker to make their art as a response to it.

The irony is that Nosferatu came first, however illegally, which makes Universal's Dracula, for all its intentions of defining the character on its own terms, a response. Whereas Orlok is a cadaveric nightmare heralded by pestilence, Lugosi's Count comes across as a dusty relic of the Ancien Régime, a ruler over the human heart who repays obedience with madness. Both are corrupted, bloodthirsty abominations, but Lugosi's version knows the tricks of a stage magician, most notably the dramatic effect of a well-timed fog machine. Moreover, Nosferatu is silent, while Dracula lets Lugosi make full use of his heavy Hungarian accent to leverage the audience's learned Orientalism. Orlok feels like the fearsome Other because he's a walking corpse; Lugosi's Count feels like the fearsome Other because he's a foreigner with weird tastes.

My notion of the vampire was shaped by the film adaptation of Interview with the Vampire and Coppola's reinvention of Bram Stoker's material (plus smatterings of The Munsters Today, Forever Knight, Count Duckula, Drak Pack, and Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School). Somehow I never came into relevant contact with Dark Shadows, Salem's Lot, Hellsing, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Castlevania, True Blood, or The Vampire Diaries. I did meet Blade, Underground, Vampire: The Masquerade, and Twilight, although at an age too late for them to influence my personal mythology. (Namely: if you ask me to think of vampires, the thing about sunlight that hurts them is not the UV light, they are not at war with werewolves, they have no connection with Biblical characters, and they Do. Not. Sparkle.) I don't view vampires as tragic figures or forbidden seducers; I view them as the perfect symbol for the parasitic nature of aristocracy.

Alas, I am a child of my time. This version of Dracula didn't particularly frighten me. Some of the scenes where the Count uses his mind control powers straddle the very thin line between the sublime and the ridiculous, and the uneven editing kills all sense of dramatic momentum in the last third. Worst of all, in consonance with the theatrical conventions of its time, but absurdly for a big classic of horror, we're not allowed to see the Count die. I feel sorry for the masterful lead actor who was dragged into this less than expertly made movie.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Review: Salem's Lot (2024)

This movie rushes through its vampire-infested, small Maine town, eschewing exposition in favor of trying desperately to come off as a Mike Flanagan project

Spooky season is upon us! And Max has finally released its modern retelling of Stephen King's classic vampire novel. Interestingly, this movie was shot in 2021, but it's only just now being released. Something definitely happened in the interim, as there are glaringly huge holes in the storytelling—release the 3-hour director's cut now, cowards! After all, the novel on which Salem's Lot is based is incredibly dense, and the 1979 TV-movie version (directed by Tobe Hooper of Texas Chainsaw Massacre) was 2 episodes long and 183 total minutes.

The plot

Ben Sears, a famous writer, has returned to his hometown in Maine to get inspiration for a new book—specifically the old spooky Marsten House. Vampires start showing up, however, and quickly the locals all begin to get turned into bloodsucking, ghoulish creatures of the night. Ben teams up with a shockingly competent child, a local woman, a doctor, and a high school teacher, and together they battle the undead and try to convince the cops to do something.

What works

This movie is slick, and it definitely has some very cool practical effects re: vampire faces. The overall vibe is fun and spooky, and the way crosses light up when vampires are near is very cool. Lewis Pullman—most recognizable as Bob from Top Gun: Maverick—anchors the film very well. Fun note: While watching, I was like, "Man, he looks like Bill Pullman! Wait...Pullman..." then I checked Wikipedia and sure enough, Lewis is his son!

What doesn't

Unfortunately, this new retelling is almost all style and no substance. It wants desperately to be as engaging as any one of the recent Mike Flanagan Netflix shows—think Haunting of Hill House, Bly Manor, and Fall of the House of Usher—but it doesn't quite hit the mark.

The main issue with this movie is that when you adapt a Stephen King novel, you have to spend some time with characters. King creates characters not out of thin air, but out of pages upon pages of fully realized backstory. Either you love it or hate it, of course, but you'll never be able to say that he doesn't make a fully lived-in feeling in his worlds. The parts they do keep tend to be King's rather dated, somewhat clunky dialogue. They should have updated that, too, since they changed other parts.

Salem's Lot (2024) doesn't do this. The film sacrifices tons of much-needed exposition for basically just spooky vampire moments. And even though I hadn't read the book in a few years, I could tell that missing links between characters were just glossed over. Ben and his romantic interest, Susan, have maybe one date and then they're just together. (Interestingly, I was transfixed by the actress who played her, Makenzie Leigh, because she has the most intense case of iPhone Face I've ever seen. (What's iPhone Face, you ask? It's when a modern actor looks a little too modern—as if you're unable to believe they've never not seen a smartphone and are thus out of place in films set in more analog times. The exact of opposite of iPhone Face? Jon Hamm, Eva Green, Keira Knightly).

Reader, even national treasure Alfre Woodard (with a Maine accent) couldn't save this movie.

It's not horrible—you'll have fun on a cool October night if you just want some spooky vibes. But don't expect a lot of backstory or depth. Think surface-level vampire frights that won't keep you up at night.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal is a lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

Microreview: Dracula's Ex-Girlfriend

After surviving the worst of breakups, can you ever feel human again?

The usual list of vampire superpowers happens to match pretty well with the traits of abusive partners: they manipulate your mind, drain your lifeforce, change forms between a breathtaking charmer and a furious beast, leave you empty on the inside, and lack any reflection. They're practical devices for a writer who wants to explore the ways in which the dynamics of desire and surrender can end in disaster.

The Nebula short film Dracula's Ex-Girlfriend, written by actress and philosopher Abigail Thorn, centers on a catch-up meeting over dinner between old friends: Fay, who chose to walk away from the tumultuous elite lifestyle involved in dating the literal Dracula and being part of his multinational fashion business; and Belladonna, the new girlfriend who takes a perverse pleasure in rubbing her status in Fay's face.

Except Fay can't be shamed by Belladonna's boasting. What's really happening is that Belladonna is desperate to confirm that Fay wants what she has. But Fay is past that, no longer under Dracula's spell, and hoping to shake Belladonna out of the harmful delusion she's willingly jumped into.

The tagline for Dracula's Ex-Girlfriend is "Bit people bite people," a recognizable allusion to the common refrain in trauma therapy circles, that describes the pattern by which cycles of abuse can perpetuate themselves. Here the effects of the vampiric bite are a metaphor for the lingering hurt that a victim can carry inside and sometimes inflict on others. During the dinner, Belladonna narrates with glee her adventures drinking the blood of unsuspecting strangers. Fay responds by mentioning that she's now in a healthy relationship built on respect, which Belladonna finds horrifyingly boring.

The emotional tone of the conversation is helpfully highlighted by changes in the illumination of the scene. Since this is a conversation between vampires, it's not beyond belief that the turbulent passions deployed in their clash of viewpoints would color the air around them. However, even for a film as brief as this, multiple repetitions of the same trick of lights can get tiresome.

Where the true brilliancy of the film lies isn't in its direction, but in its razor-sharp script. Thorn uses the trappings of vampire romance to comment on the many predations we bring upon each other: if we're sufficiently poisoned by inhumanity, we can drain our fellow humans of their time, or their money, or their devotion, or their labor, or their dignity. It took a massive effort for Fay to start healing from what Dracula did to her, and it's going to be at least as difficult to make Belladonna start to see the truth of her situation.

In fact, this dinner occurs at a delicate moment in Fay's new relationship, when she's just on the verge of reproducing Dracula's behavior. While Belladonna needs what Fay has to say about knowing when to escape from a toxic partner, Fay also needs to hear herself say it before she becomes what she struggled so hard to leave behind.

There's a conversation near the end, which on a superficial level may seem unrelated to the story, but which actually summarizes its theme. Fay explains her newly acquired smoking habit by enumerating the important moments in her day that are connected to each cigarette. When put like that, it has nothing to do with Dracula. But what the script is doing here is to repackage the strangeness of a supernatural premise and translate it into terms that human viewers can relate to. Cigarettes will eventually kill you, but they feel so good right now. Just like a lover that you know isn't good for you, that you know will break you into pieces, but for whose momentary delights you keep shutting down the part of your mind that screams warnings at you.

Dracula himself doesn't even make an appearance, but his dark shadow dominates the entire plot. It's amazing how a film made of just half an hour of dialogue can contain so much meaning, so much raw intensity. This short is a slap in the face by a well-meaning friend. It's a much-needed dose of tough love. It's a blunt reminder that we can turn into our own worst enemies when we get addicted to lying to ourselves.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

First Contact: Nosferatu

The classic that codified vampires on screen for all eras

Previously in the First Contact project…

We've discussed how German Expressionism used extremes of shape and shadow to convey emotional content. Well, what better medium to tell a story about hungry things that lurk in the night? The 1922 film Nosferatu, an illegal adaptation of the novel Dracula (the ensuing copyright lawsuit forced the studio to declare bankruptcy), keeps its most iconic images confined to one short, climactic scene. But what a scene! Making the most of the technological possibilities of the time, the ending of Nosferatu uses one of the most effective tools of horror: suggesting instead of showing. It's just a silhouette moving up the stairs, just a silhouette extending toward a door, just a silhouette grasping a heart… and this little trick suffices to represent the supernatural profanation that has taken place. It's a master class in using a minimum of visual cues and letting the actual horror play out in the viewer's mind.

Nosferatu has both the strengths and the defects of a freestyle adaptation. It omits a handful of superfluous characters from the novel and streamlines the plot down to its basic components. The details that it adds (the references to occultism, the plague outbreak, the town's hunt for a scapegoat, the new method for defeating the vampire) are a natural fit for the heightened sentimentalism of this movie's tradition. However, the character of the young real estate agent who brings the purchase papers to the count's castle is made less interesting in this version. In the first part of the novel, the growing sense of dread comes from reading this character's gradual suspicions about the count's private habits. Nosferatu portrays him as blissfully oblivious to what's going on under his nose. Once the count settles into his new property, the novel switches to detective mode as our protagonists track down his movements and begin strategizing a way to kill him. In Nosferatu, the answer is conveniently found in a literal Monster Manual that the young man already owned, and the count jumps straight to the final confrontation as soon as he moves in. In striving to lose no time, the movie loses much of the novel's suspense.

The least enjoyable part of Nosferatu is the underwhelming way it ends. The method for defeating the vampire is too passive, and the special effects used for the vampire's death by sunlight are disappointingly simple, especially when seen just moments after the expert play of shadows that precedes it. Romanticism is all about feels and vibes, so a damsel's self-sacrifice is par for the course, and the script gets bonus points for the brief dialogue at the beginning where dead flowers foreshadow the loss of something beautiful, but, as I said above, the final scene is where you find the bits that you'll remember.

Apart from the titular villain, the quality of the acting is nothing remarkable. The suffering damsel knows clearly what her role is: to look vulnerable and helpless. She spends the movie visibly sighing with the oh so tragic demeanor that in any other movie would presage a death by tuberculosis. The friends she stays with for most of the runtime are basically skippable, and the madman who waits in jail for the count's arrival comes off more as comic relief (and possible anti-Semitic caricature) than as a supposed secondary antagonist. The young man who visits the count at his castle is consistently clueless, even cavalier about dining with an undead abomination, and after he returns home, he ceases to have any impact on the story. Only the sailors who unwittingly transport their killer do an interesting job in terms of acting, and they're promptly dispatched offscreen.

What Nosferatu lacks in scriptwriting it makes up for in visual memorability. Orlok, Nosferatu's substitute for Dracula, has a fantastic design. Cadaveric yet imposing, frail yet ravenous, this is a monster perfectly made for silent cinema. It's impossible to avert the eye from his unnatural presence, enhanced by a judicious dose of the stop-motion technique in some scenes. The performance is deceptively simple: his facial expressions don't hint at any reasoning intelligence behind the appropriately dead gaze he wears at all times. It's as if the rats that travel with him, spreading his curse of pestilence, had eaten his eyelids and left a hollow, desiccated set of eyes to haunt mortals with. That said, it's regrettable that Orlok's look also happens to match several anti-Semitic clichés. The Germany that birthed Nosferatu had a long and painful road ahead before reckoning with its theretofore unexamined prejudices.

To a viewer of this century, Nosferatu isn't exactly scary, much less after the many ways its memetic potential has been reused and remixed. Vampires have been everything: sublime, detestable, pitiful, sexy, cartoonish, fearsome, pathetic, elegant, repulsive, otherworldly, relatable, beastly, aristocratic, demonic, sparkly, allegorical, ostracized, dominant, solitary, clannish, contagious, playable, killable, dateable. To watch Nosferatu after seeing the plethora of movie vampires that followed grants a humbling perspective on what infinite malleability can result from a modest first showing. By virtue of its own, small addition to vampire lore (killing them with sunlight), it taught writers that more variations were acceptable: garlic, crosses, holy water, silver bullets, dead blood, a lucky roll of Turn Undead. Carmilla, The Vampyre and Dracula brought vampires from the obscurity of folklore into world literature. But it was Nosferatu that positioned them as staples of pop culture. If for nothing else, we must thank it for that.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Film Review: Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person

We can sometimes feel broken, until we meet someone whose broken pieces fit ours perfectly

I promise you, a very brief tangent about Doctor Who is relevant here.

Last week, Doctor Who aired the episode "Rogue," where the Doctor meets a charming bounty hunter at a posh gala ball. As part of the plan they devise to lure out the Monster of the Week, the two men dance in public view of the easily scandalizable guests. Commenting on this scene in her video review of this episode, Jessie Earl praised the scriptwriters' choice to have queer characters take control of the dynamic of marginalization and weaponize it in their own favor. Coming up with a way to turn an element of your oppression into a tool you can wield against your oppressors is greatly empowering.

I was reminded of that interpretation while watching the Canadian dark comedy film Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person.

Our protagonist is Sasha, a vampire girl who cannot hunt for victims because she's unusually empathetic for her kind. She absolutely needs human blood to survive, but watching her fellow vampires kill for their meals has always been too shocking to imitate. The way of life that defines her family feels cruel to her, and for her entire life she's depended on her parents' supply of human blood. However, when her parents decide that she's old enough to feed herself, she faces a serious dilemma: how can she avoid starvation when she can't bring herself to kill anyone?

This premise is very interesting at the literal level, but it's even more so when one reads the emotional currents that course underneath. Sasha's family situation is heavily coded with the signifiers of transgenerational abuse. Remove the vampire trappings of the movie, and what remains plain in sight is that matter-of-fact cruelty has been normalized at her home, and her parents actively pressure her to reproduce the same cruelty. Her principled refusal to comply and her determination to find a way to live without more violence resemble the inner process survivors of emotional abuse undergo when they decide to break the cycle.

Her yearning to define herself in her own terms finds its outlet when she meets Paul, a depressed teenager whose experience with intense bullying has driven him to suicidal intent. Again, at the literal level, there's plenty of morbid humor to extract from the absurd encounter of an obligate predator and an all too willing victim. But in terms of emotional content, what's going on here is the forging of a mutually supportive bond between two abuse survivors who discover that their respective weaknesses can make each other stronger. To refer back to Jessie Earl's video, the specific ways they've been mistreated happen to equip them to be each other's best support.

In trauma recovery it's common to hear the refrain "Hurt people hurt people." But hurt people can also empathize with the hurt that others have gone through. To be clear, the movie's plot is not aspirational. No abused person should have to rely on the coping strategies that emerge from living in permanent crisis mode. But it's a positive change when they find that they can. The close friendship that forms between Sasha and Paul is an extremely anomalous solution to extremely anomalous circumstances. He gives her a way she can satisfy her needs without becoming a monster like her parents, and she gives him a way to find purpose outside of the harmful environment he's been so far limited to.

Spoiler alert: Paul's journey doesn't result in suicide. At the end of every "I don't want to live" is an asterisk that points to the footnote "… like this." The director-writer duo of Ariane Louis-Seize and Christine Doyon evidently understand this point. It takes a very delicate touch to make a story about suicidal depression that manages to be funny without being insensitive, frank without being sensationalist, uplifting without being naïve. It can sound outlandish to call a movie about centenarian bloodsuckers realistic and relatable, but these characters' struggles reflect many real problems that occur in toxic families and negligent schools.

The ingredient that helps this recipe achieve the right flavor is the impressive casting for the two lead roles. Sara Montpetit as teen vampire Sasha conveys a rugged vulnerability that underscores her character's desperate need for acceptance while maintaining an anxiously practiced distance from the ever-present threat that she poses to every human being she meets. Félix-Antoine Bénard as high schooler and part-time worker Paul is the sweetest incarnation of self-destructive self-defense. His daily life is a continuous string of "What did I ever do to you?" that he deals with by preferring to do nothing to anyone. He's a sort of mirror to Sasha: the two of them are loath to harm those around them, but while the supposedly well-meaning but ultimately unreliable adults in Sasha's life fear that she won't cause harm, the supposedly well-meaning but ultimately unreliable adults in Paul's life fear that he will.

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person makes a potent argument for rejecting inherited patterns of abuse. Behind the acerbic comedy of a family of people-eating fiends, you'll find a compelling demonstration that the way you've been taught to relate to others doesn't have to be the way you stay stuck in. It doesn't matter how lowly you may think of yourself; even a bored, long-lived, unnatural monstrosity can learn new tricks.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Film review: El Conde

We need to laugh at the monsters so they'll lose the power to intimidate us

What if Augusto Pinochet were an unholy, blood-drinking abomination excreted from the bowels of hell? Ask any Latin American antifascist, and the likely response will be, "What do you mean, 'if'?" The Chilean dictator, forever accursed be his memory, left a frightening legacy of thousands of assassinated opponents, tens of thousands of torture survivors, and hundreds of thousands of exiles. To this day, the whereabouts of many disappeared Chileans remain unknown. Pinochet's regime boasted a gruesome creativity in devising torture and execution methods, and the nation's collective trauma will take generations to overcome. To imagine him as a vampire whose depravity hungers for the hearts of young Chileans doesn't feel too far from reality.

Pablo Larraín's film El Conde, released to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the US-supported coup that threw Chile under military rule, paints the 21st century with a black-and-white palette that warns the viewer: this isn't over. The shadow of the beast hasn't left this realm. With enough hearts in his grasp, he can rise again. In this version of events, Pinochet is revealed to have been a French royalist soldier who escaped the Revolution's guillotine and swore to combat the egalitarian cause wherever he found it. After centuries of cruel predation and countless battles on the side of tyranny, the monster found his way into the Chilean army, where he ascended the ranks until becoming the deadly general known to history.

Fast-forward to the present time. Retired into self-imposed anonymity, having staged a fake death to evade justice, the ex-dictator still emits an all-polluting aura around him. The film refuses to give the viewer a distanced character from whose perspective the villain can be comfortably judged; the general's entire circle is rotten. His wife wants his immortality, his children want his secret fortune, and his butler wants the return of the old days when he was a teacher of torturers. The subtext is close to the surface: for as long as there has been fervor for emancipation, there has been authoritarian reaction, and anyone senseless enough (or soulless enough) to try to use its tainted gifts becomes used by it. El Conde undertakes the delicate challenge of maintaining the audience's investment in a story where every single character is horrible. Even the pious nun sent in a secret mission to cleanse the old vampire from his demonic stain has a secondary agenda to search for any of his undeclared assets that might be of use to the Church. Acting upon the arrogant belief that the Church can profit from evil without becoming one with it, she willingly falls under his corrupting and treacherous curse.

By this point you must be wondering why El Conde is being announced as a comedy.

It's a macabre type of comedy, one where characters have no trouble speaking of the unspeakable with a deadpan shrug. Atrocities worth multiple capital sentences are mentioned in passing, with the casual tone one uses to talk of the weather. The absurdity of listening to these absolutely irredeemable people provokes in the viewer the kind of nervous laughter that is the last resort when no shriek will do. Undead antics aside, the portions of the film that would conventionally be classified as horror are transmuted by the audience's knowledge that each monstrous act described in the dialogues actually happened in real life. This is not the safe viewing experience of your typical slasher romp, where you know it's all props and makeup. Nor is it the comedy of Halloween farces, where the trappings of decay are mere setup for an inoffensive jump scare. This is the sweaty chuckle you blurt out almost involuntarily as a wolf slowly advances toward you.

This incredibly difficult blend of tones is helped by the choice to film in black and white. For one part, it disguises the rather crude visual effects, which instead of cheap look uncanny, in consonance with the forbidden powers they represent. But also, the use of black and white gives the story a somber atmosphere, not only symbolic of how contemporary Chile still hasn't rid itself of Pinochet's spell, but also aesthetically captivating. It's as if this story couldn't be told except in chiaroscuro, with the black void of the vampire's silhouette infusing the world with his pervasive miasma, never letting the light of day reach its full brightness. The world is a dull, gray place because Pinochet has passed through it. And for a few seconds we get a quick scene in color, and we start to believe the nightmare might be over, but it's only to show us with more clarity that we're not safe, that the seeds from which this evil emerged may yet bear more poisoned fruit.

Nerd coefficient: 9/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Microreview: Silver Under Nightfall by Rin Chupeco

This fast-paced romp in a gothic fantasy world is full of blood, lust, and intrigue.

What a great time to for vampire literature! There are so many additions expanding vampire lore, and Rin Chupeco’s secondary-world fantasy provides a break from the urban fantasy vampire. Silver Under Nightfall is a fantasy adventure with plenty of sexual tension.

Remy Pendergast is the son of a famous but disgraced vampire hunter but also dismissed and disrespected as a “cambian,” the human child of a vampire. Whether or not this is true, Remy has to fight for every scrap of respect among the other vampire hunters in the kingdom of Aluria. With his multi-bladed killing tool Breaker, Remy has honed himself into a deadly weapon. But, things are changing in Aluria. A truce is being brokered with some of the vampire courts even while a new type of vampire is showing up in the countryside—one much harder to kill.

Even though Remy’s father, the famed Duke of Valenbonne, is unable to hunt due to his injuries and has fallen out of favor in the court due to his personality, the Duke still needs Remy to keep him informed of happenings with the other vampire hunters. From a young age, the Duke has ordered Remy to use his good looks to attract the wives of the other dukes, which has left Remy emotionally drained. One of the few people to show him friendship is Elke, a vampire that lives in hiding in the city. While Remy lives to kill vampires and avenge his mother, dead at the hands of the cruel Night Court, he also feels pity for vampires who have not lost their humanness.

This kindness is what separates Remy from the traditional gruff vampire hunter and what flavors his relationship with the other two main characters: the powerful vampire Song Xiaodan and her fiancé Zidan Malekh. Their respective courts have been working to broker peace between humans and vampires in hopes of bringing about a new age. They are building the truce with Aluria’s queen, and Remy runs into Xiaodan at a ball. They flirt, and Remy is instantly attracted to her confidence—until her fiancé joins them. Remy had already run into the equally attractive, if reserved, Zidan and tried to fight him. Of course, the nearly 900-year-old vampire defeated him easily, but that doesn’t stop Remy from trying to butt heads with him at every turn.

Except, both Xiaodan and Zidan have more in mind than fighting. The attraction that Remy and Xiaodan felt for each other continues to grow as they work together to keep the truce between the vampires while a new type of vampire is going on a killing spree in the rural areas where hunters are less prone to risk their lives. After the trio examine the bodies, it appears some sort of mutation is creating a super strong form of vampire-zombie that can’t be reasoned with. Only Xiaodan can destroy these vampires as they continue to regenerate. She holds a legendary vampire weapon, which makes her an outcast, much like Remy.

As they work to unravel the secret of the mutating vampires across Aluria, Remy’s attraction to Xiaodan grows. The two vampires are equally attracted to his good looks, but also his kindness and emotional vulnerability that so few cared to cherish about him. Not only the mystery but their interest in one another draws the three together as they must defend their homes.

Two areas make Chupeco’s book standout: the worldbuilding and the romance. Because this vampire story happens in a secondary world as opposed to our world, Chupeco opens up the possibilities around vampires. My favorite piece of worldbuilding added some of the depth we see in fairy stories by giving the vampires “courts,” such as Zidan’s more egalitarian summer court. Blending that bit of fairy lore into vampires made the world feel more expansive, and I hope they will continue to explore the different courts in the remaining book. Fans of Castlevania will enjoy the gothic details and dreary castles. 

While romance and sexual tension is a staple in vampire stories, I appreciated how this polyamorous relationship included an emotional component. Remy struggles to feel loved due to the abuse from his father and people taking advantage of him as a young man. His relationship to sex was, early on, about spycraft and wheedling information from the wives of different dukes. Because Xiaodan and Zidan are not only powerful vampires but involved in the kingdom’s politics, it is at first hard for Remy to separate himself from these feelings, and much of the early romance is building up that trust while keeping up the sexual tension. 

As the romance burns, Chupeco does a good job differentiating between the relationships Remy has with the kind and loving Xiaodan and the more aloof Zidan. Remy is attracted to them for different reasons,--he wants to help protect the more powerful Xiaodan while he recognizes the physical strength of Zidan will always overpower him--and this separation helps keep the romance fresh.

One place the sexual content fell flat was the balance between romance and actual, on-the-page sex scenes. Much of it is summarized, which can work great for a less intense book, but because the sexual tension is so strong and the sexual acts that are hinted at are more than the typical tryst, I either wanted more on-the-page content rather than hints or less hints and more of a cut-to-black style when describing the sex. Readers who want more spice will be disappointed, and readers who prefer less sexual content with their stories might find it to be too strong for their taste. 

Overall, the first book in Chupeco’s duology is a violent, exciting romp in an epic vampiric world. The queer polyamory is refreshing addition to vampire literature, and Chupeco balances fight scenes, romance, and intrigue with characters who deeply care about each other. 

--

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Reference: Chupeco, Rin, Silver Under Nightfall. [Saga, 2022] 

Posted by: Phoebe Wagner is an author, editor, and academic writing and living at the intersection of speculative fiction and ecology. 

Microreview [Book]: Dreadful Company by Vivian Shaw

Dreadful Company builds on the strengths of the first volume in the series, delivering another solid urban fantasy adventure.

Dreadful Company is the second novel from Vivian Shaw in the Dr Greta Helsing series, following last year's Strange Practice. Readers who follow a fair bit of fanfiction may have already come across Shaw's works in the Homestuck, the MCU and Star Wars fandoms as coldhope. This background puts Shaw in a strong position to bring some of the most interesting aspects of transformative fiction to this original series, which takes such venerable members of the vampire canon as Lord Ruthven and Varney the Vampyre, and effectively sets them in a modern AU, showcasing them in a new environment without needing to focus on their process of adaptation. As her surname indicates, Greta is a descendent of Abraham Van Helsing -- though the family dropped the "Van" a while back -- and she's inherited the family business, but it's not the one you'd think: instead, she runs a medical practice dealing with the problems of London's supernatural denizens. Greta has built a strong community with the undead of London, and most of the undead cast have happily established their niche in 21st century London, and are strongly invested in protecting it against those who threaten it in any way.

Dreadful Company picks up the narrative some time after the end of Strange Practice, with Greta and Ruthven on a visit to Paris as Greta prepares to present a paper at a supernatural medical conference. Before they get there, however, there's time to visit the opera and get in their contractually required Phantom references. To Greta's surprise, while there's no ghostly apparition in Box 5, there is a creepy vampire in need of a haircut staring at her from another of the theatre's boxes. Said vampire quickly makes his terrible aesthetic and coven management skills - and his vendetta against Ruthven - into Greta's problem by abducting her to his lair in the conveniently atmospheric catacombs of Paris, where she comes into contact with the rest of his terribly-dressed coven and the mess they have made of 1) the city, 2) themselves and 3) the fabric of reality.

The coven, their politics, and the weird pet-creatures one of them keeps summoning through a rift in reality, are the highlight of Dreadful Company, which is for the most part a pretty claustrophobic narrative. Corvin, the coven leader, hits just the right blend of absurd and dangerous. His obsession with image, and with a particular type of stereotyped "vampiriness", gives Shaw lots of material to poke fun at particular aspects of the vampire myth, but at the same time the narrative is very clear that this isn't what makes him villainous: rather, its one symptom of his toxic fixation on power and control. Corvin's weary second-in-command, Grisaille, perhaps gets a more sympathetic ride in the book than I'd like, but he makes an interesting foil to Corvin's excesses. Greta's predicament, and the wider happenings in Paris, also pull in some other members of the supernatural community, including werewolf Alceste St. Germain, and "remedial psychopomps" Dammerung and Brightside, whose job is to seek ghosts who missed their trip to the afterlife the first time around. On our heroes' side, there's a practical, cooperative air to the inevitable rescue mission that reflects the attitude of Greta herself - she is a medical doctor, after all - and, again, contrasts wonderfully with the behaviour of the coven. Like Seanan McGuire's Incryptid series, Dreadful Company is a book where monsters are just people, and one of the underlying messages here is that healthy personal identities shouldn't be constructed from mystery and ego, even if you are an ageless vampire.

Unfortunately, I found Dreadful Company to be a book where my opinions on the aspects that fell short are unusually strong, despite how much I appreciated it overall. Some of those annoyances are pretty specific - for example, my initial excitement at learning Hell has a Monitoring and Evaluation department (my job! in a book!) didn't survive the descriptions of what that bureaucracy looked like in Shaw's world. I'm also tired of authors taking side swipes at "sparkly vampires": Twilight's vampire physiology was never an accepted feature of the genre, and that means its not a trope that needs deconstructing; rather, it's an innovation of a single problematic-but-successful female author whose work is now open to unquestioning mockery. It frustrates me that modern YA vampire tropes aren't given nearly the same care and critical attention in Dreadful Company as Victorian ones seem to be, and that comes across as a significant oversight in a series that is so focused on what vampire mythology looks like in a 21st century world.

I was also disappointed that, like Strange Practice, Dreadful Company is a highly male-dominated novel outside of Greta herself. In the previous book, several women appear briefly in the background as fascinating characters that the narrative is completely uninterested in, particularly Greta's colleagues at her surgery. Dreadful Company moves us to Paris, thwarting any chances of seeing those women again for now, and instead gives us two women in Corbin's vampire coven: Lilith, Corbin's partner, who is introduced to us via a male POV character as highly strung, stupid, shallow and irrational, and is given very little opportunity to prove us wrong before the narrative overtakes her (she's also the aforementioned pet-summoner); and Emily, the youngest vampire, who is also portrayed as out-of-control and useless although, thankfully, given more space to grow. It's also hard to miss the fact that Greta spends over half of this book trapped with Corbin and awaiting rescue - although she's far from passive through this process, or the eventual escape. I know I have high and specific standards when it comes to representation of women in my reading, and there's space for books that focus on interesting male characters, but the Greta Hellsing series has been particularly disappointing in that it feels like it shouldn't be falling short on this front to the extent that it has so far.

With that said, I'm aware that I'm passionate about the things I disliked in Dreadful Company precisely because I am so invested in the ways the series is going right. I like Greta, even if she could do with diversifying her adventuring companions occasionally, and the underlying themes of this series are strongly in line with what I want to read in the limited space I have for urban fantasy in my wider SFF diet. I'll be continuing to keep an eye on this series as it comes out, although I will likely be scanning initial reviews and previews of Book 3 quite hard for evidence of more not-men in the narrative driving seat beyond Greta herself. Still, if you want down-to-earth, self aware urban fantasy with an excellent critical eye for horror tropes and transformative, character driven fiction, this is definitely a series to look out for.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 Surprisingly adorable hair monsters!

Penalties: -1 Twilight alone has not made a generation of young women believe vampires sparkle by default; -1 Please can we have some powerful but matter-of-fact ageless supernaturals who aren't dudes in Volume 3?

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10, "A mostly enjoyable experience."

POSTED BY: Adri is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy.

Reference: Shaw, Vivian. Dreadful Company [Orbit, 2018]