Wednesday, January 29, 2003
My latest guilty subway reading pleasure is the paperback version of Whitley Streiber's The Last Vampire, his sequel to the early 80's novel The Hunger, subsequently made into a cult vampire flick starring Catherine Deneuve, Susan Sarandon and David Bowie. You probably know there's an entire "vampire" subculture akin to (and often more extreme than) the black-clad Goth movement of the past couple decades or so - the link between eroticism, hipness and vampirism goes back a long time, and Strieber's Miriam Blaylock (Catherine Deneuve's character in The Hunger) and certainly the undead sagas of Anne Rice did much to cement the current stereotype of the beautiful, rich, powerful vampire. To wit, we have Buffy, The Vampire Slayer and countless variations on the theme. Before, vampires were disgusting, monstrous and stanky, like Max Schreck's Nosferatu at worst - at best, they were creepy-looking east Europeans with bad accents. Now, they're richer, thinner, and sexier than we could ever be - and ten times faster and smarter, to boot.
When I read The Hunger years ago, I was haunted by the story of Miriam, an ethereal immortal being with the soul of an esthete and the birthright of an invincible predator. Her story weaved between 1980's Sutton Place in Manhattan and ancient times in Egypt, Rome, the Carpathians and the Renaissance; a wrenching, poetic, and almost Lovecraftian lament. Because the original was so good, The Last Vampire's faults are all the more glaring. I have to say I think Strieber is a notoriously inconsistent writer; his best works, like Nature's End, WarDay (both coauthored with James Kunetka), The Forbidden Zone and Billy are all well-crafted, memorable and profoundly disturbing. But then, aren't only the mediocre always at their best? However, with the controversy surrounding the publication of his Communion, that detailed his experiences as an alien abductee, Strieber's literary star was rather painted with the "crackpot" brush - either you were a "true believer" or you though he was a couple pages short of a chapter. I respect him as a writer with some unique and unusual viewpoints, but whether he was or wasn't abducted really doesn't matter.
Sad to say, The Last Vampire reads mainly like a fan-fiction riff on The Hunger, rather than a genuine sequel: there's so much broken continuity from the original that you have to ask "what the hell happened?" Miriam is painted very differently; she is a panicked, impulsive and addiction-prone creature, and the main story revolves around Miriam's biological clock, as females of her species get only four "breedings" (estrus cycles?) in their near-immortal lives - and she's on the make for a mate. Here's the big problem - which many other readers have pointed out - in The Hunger, Miriam was the last of her kind, the "Keepers", but in this sequel there are apparently many others like her in conclaves around the world, like Asia and Paris. Fine and well if this was the first installment of the story - but a major structural problem for a sequel.
To make matters worse, there's little of the lyrical quality Strieber gave Miriam's recollection of her life in ancient times; everything seems geared to visual action sequences, with lots of slapstick thrown in. Why, you'd think Strieber was writing a first draft of a screenplay.
Centering the story around Miriam's desperation to breed makes her a little too ordinary and vulnerable for the premise of "immortal vampires" to work neatly; she never had to resort to some of the half-baked schemes (like posing as a prostitute to make a kill) we read about here. One other big continuity buster - Miriam was always immaculately fashionable in The Hunger, wearing the latest Chanels and keeping up with human trends to blend in properly. So why on earth is she portrayed as being decades out of fashion and speaking in archaic language (one unlucky Parisian sap laughs at her Voltaire-era lingo) in this book? She even owns Manhattan's most fashionable underground nightclub, "The Veils", for Pete's sake!
Ok, ok, maybe I should chalk it up to "artistic license". I'm no professional, but I can go through the book with a pencil and scratch out entire paragraphs that add nothing but dead weight - and I'd hate to think I know better than the author. But I really think this would have been a much better book if about one third was chucked at the editor's desk - but it would have been a far thinner book.
Ahem. Flip to the back cover. "....[the novel] has been optioned as a motion picture." If this gets made into a movie, it'll probably look like Blade. Yecch. I'm tempted to scream "sellout!!!" - but I keep on reading, because it's a more-than-adequate, page-turner and it helps me ignore the ruckus on the train ride home. It's when I run into some of The Last Vampire's disappointingly potboiled dialogue that I remember I'm eating canned, not fresh.
Oh, Whitley, you've done such marvelous work in the past! Why this? You can do so much better.
By the way, if you're interested in the "unexplained", UFO's, conspiracy theories and similar "edge" subjects Whitley Strieber and wife Anne (executive editor) host a website, Unknown Country, and an associated web-radio show Dreamland (on Live365). Worth checking out. Another (non-affiliated with the Striebers) site worth a visit is Beyond Communion.
addendum, February 4th, 2003 I'm almost finished reading The Last Vampire, and I still agree with what I wrote about it. But - I think it could be made into a decent movie. Maybe if I have lotsa spare time I'll (for my own edification) hammer out an outline for the screenplay, since that's sort of been a longtime secret ambition of mine. It's all in the dialogue, like they say: and they shouldn't say too much.
Who would I cast in the movie? Let's see...as Miriam Blaylock, I think Laurie Holden (she played Marita Covarrubias on the X-Files) would be simply smashing. As Sarah, how about Sandra Bullock or Julianne Moore? Leonore Patterson...let's see, maybe Natalie Portman (but her star's probably too big as this point...maybe would have to be some appropriate unknown). For Paul Ward, I was thinking somebody like Harry Hamlin; it would be a sort of a Rutger Hauer-ish part, but I think he's a bit too Aryan. This could be turned into a fairly classy vampire flick in the right hands, I think.
addendum, February 6th, 2003 Good heavens, I've just finished reading the book...and I can't remember the last time I've wanted to take a paperback and throw it against the wall!! What a frustrating piece of purple prose that was. The last few chapters were so utterly overblown with pulp I couldn't tell if I was going to laugh or yark. Feh!
