Now I usually defecate at least once a day, sometimes twice depending on my meal intake, and when I do, I do what anyone else would given the circumstances; I read. Usually with any good British household, there’s no shortage of reading material in the lavatory. From discarded magazines to spine-broken novels, the bathroom floor tiles of Château Le Mac are where paperbacks go to die. One such item has taken residence within my modest bathroom for quite some time now. Living in harmony amongst this month’s Sky Magazines, this particular book has been a constant source of confusion for my already challenged mind . Every time I find myself sat atop the throne, I pick up this humble slab of literature and begin to read. I flick carelessly through, skimming random pages and commencing perusal of the content. Here, I’m presented with my dilemma; for the subject matter within this novel is so lucid and thin, I never know whether to continue reading , or use it as a substitute for my toilet roll. The item in question: Vampire Diaries: The Return ~ Shadow Souls.

Don’t be fooled by the culturally significant, elongated title. This book is not for you. This book is for young, teenage girls. At least that’s the opinion I generate upon scanning the content. However this genre is rapidly expanding its target audience. Vampires are back in a big way, and they’re casting their nets far and wide, snagging everyone from little girls to middle-aged women, even hopelessly metrosexual men find themselves ensnared within the bloodthirsty fabric of this incomprehensibly popular genre. Then, once your senses have been numbed, like the merciless vampires of old, the vacuous coven of nothing within rapes your body and mind, hypnotises you until you submit , and come to the stark realisation that you must own everything this genre has ever output. And alas, you are aboard the bandwagon.

Vampires used to be nothing more than a sub-genre of horror, along with creature features like; Creature from the Black Lagoon and haunted house pieces such as; Rose Red. But suddenly it seems that the vampire sub-genre has outgrown its prefix and outgrown the parameters of everything that has come before, leading this once meek sub-genre to swell and become a legitimate genre in its own right. And with this exponential growth, comes more branches of this tall and dead tree. Vampire Romance currently being the strongest. A branch so strong that all the hormonal teenage girls in the western hemisphere could swing happily from it for a thousand years. Yes, everyone has an appetite for vamps.

But that’s exactly my problem. With a clear target audience it’s obvious who the novel is meant to be read by. And with books such as Vampire Diaries, Twilight and Vampire Academy it’s clear that the target audience is teenagers, mainly females. But the stories continuously pull in more adult readers, particularly with the recent film and televisual tie-ins such as; True Blood and Being Human. Were the fans of these series to actually study their pieces, I probably wouldn’t be mindlessly typing this article. But then who am I to judge? Perhaps they do. But I can’t help but suspect that when a fan reads a book such as these, they’re not really reading it. They simply enter into a trance-like state of current chic, submitting to popular-culture. Reading this story because they saw someone else reading it on a train, who saw someone else reading it on a bus, who saw someone else reading it in a cafe.

The narrative structure of these items scarcely differs. Vampire meets girl. Vampire stalks girl. Girl falls in love with vampire. Someone gets bitten. Blah. Blah. Blah. Essentially contained within these literary lies are juvenile plots dressed up with delicate 21st century issues; abstinence, adultery, love and lust and all other manner of seriousness. Because of the ‘issues’ addressed within this juvenile fiction, older readers are given sufficient reason to justify their purchase. They think because the topics covered are ‘serious’ it means they can display their front covers proudly amongst other members of the public, and present their middle-class sophistication to the world. It doesn’t. I wouldn’t be seen reading Mr. Worry in the public domain, even though it is a serious tale centering around specialist phobias and fear-inspired scaremongering within 21st century social media. Nor would I be seen reading Mr. Greedy, despite it’s significance as a damning tale of corporate greed and economic indulgence.

Maybe I wouldn’t be so against this new wave of pointy-toothed pre-historic sex pests had they managed to preserve some of the integrity of literature’s finest mythical monsters. But they just haven’t. Vampires used to be one of two things, either terrifying beyond belief or infinitely stylish, often a sexual mixture of the two. But the visceral threat left behind by a legacy of shrivelled and moistureless corpses has been all but pissed away, thanks to all this insipid emotion. I, for one blame the alarming levels of oestrogen in the water. Suddenly one of the most revered mythical creatures, a creature so badass it’s sucked more blood and had more sex than a century’s worth of stag-weekends in Amsterdam, has been whittled down to nothing more than an acne-ridden adolescent with 4.5 GCSEs. Gone are the suave and sophisticated vampires of old. They’re sadly extinct and have been replaced by hormonal pretenders, not fit to be members of the same species as my old mates; Drac, Vlad and Varney. Shit, even Count von Count’s got more swagger than Edward Cullen. And don’t even get me started on Count Duckula.

MacTingz

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