Sime~Gen Inc. Presents

ReReadable Books

October 2004

"Receiving Divine Messages 
Part 4
The Soul"

No branch of literature is better at discussing The Soul than the Vampire Novel, often without mentioning it.

Not all Vampire novels are Horror novels. In fact, today, most Vampire novels are in Fantasy or Romance or some genre mix (Historical Horror-Comedy or Contemporary Western Parody.)

Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel are two TV shows in "The Buffyverse" which deal with two vampires, Angel and Spike, who have regained their souls.

Both shows have a scholar of Magick to research old curses and spells in dead languages often about souls. And both shows have a plethora of demons and ancient magical beings out to destroy reality as we know it. But the two shows aren’t anything alike.

In Seven Seasons of Buffy: Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Discuss Their Favorite Television Show, I have an article titled The Power of Becoming that speaks at length about Buffy and Willow and their respective initiatory paths. In Five Seasons of Angel: Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Discuss Their Favorite Vampire my article discusses Angel as a champion of the helpless who is himself not a hero. To me that defines the difference.

Angel is a show which was "spun off" from Buffy, taking Angel, a supporting character, and giving him his own show. Originally, a large sub-plot of Buffy was the torrid love affair between Buffy, whose magically imposed mission in life is to slay vampires, and Angel, a vampire cursed by gypsies who give him back his soul. So he doesn’t kill because with his soul he got back his conscience.

The curse condemns him to lose his soul, and become an evil-doing marauder again if he experiences one moment of perfect happiness. When he finally beds Buffy, that moment strips him of his soul. After a long story-arc, he gets his soul back but must leave Buffy.

This TV series, like the TV series Beauty and the Beast, is the story of lovers doomed never to be together even though they are soul mates.

The concept of soul-mate lies at the core of so many of the current crop of vampire novels which makes them Romance Genre no matter what else the novel is about.

With Buffy and Angel, the concept "soul" is clearly equated with the concept "conscience." To me, those aren’t the same thing at all, but as a lifelong sf/f reader, I can easily believe six impossible things before breakfast. So I love both these shows for the profound depths of the scripts.

Like Tanya Huff’s Henry Fitzroy (see my July ’97 column for Blood Debt), Lindsay Sands’ Lucern in Single White Vampire is a vampire who makes his living writing Romances. Unlike Fitzroy, who knows how to remain inconspicuous, Lucern has trouble with his editors who want him to make daytime tv appearances and do book signings.

Lucern is a member of a family of vampires who all seem as ensouled as anyone I know. His new editor, Kate Cleaver, pays him a personal visit in order to get him to go on tour because her new job depends on it. She has no plans to fall in love with a man who writes Romances, and no clue he is a vampire.

But she takes it in stride when she finds out. Once she’s assured she isn’t "just a meal to him," even though his thirst could burst the bounds of his control, and that he really loves her, she’s elated. But to be with him, she must be "turned." It means losing her friends and family, and leaving everything that defines her "Identity" behind. Is love worth that? Does love change your Identity?

This series, The Family Argeneau Series, is lightly humorous – a male vampire romance writer signing at a Romantic Times Convention! – and tries to stay away from the issue of Soul, but in that very avoidance, actually does address the issue of prejudice. I mean, would you want your daughter to marry a vampire?

As I have noted many times, the mixed-genre novel is now the most popular. Charlaine Harris’s humorous-romance-occult Southern Vampire Series has the right combination of deadly serious problems and "attitude" to get through them. In Dead To The World, Sookie Stackhouse who is a telepath but not (yet) a vampire, has to cope with a very powerful vampire who has had his memory magically wiped.

Now he starts to think he’s in love with her, his rescuer and earliest memory. But she’s in love with another vampire. Again soul doesn’t appear to be a main issue as it is in the Buffyverse TV shows, but Identity is. Does amnesia change the personality or bring out the truth? What is love? Can you love if your earliest memory is from last week?

Do soulless vampires rule themselves by laws? In some universes they do. Do soulless vampires enthrall humans to be their daytime eyes and ears? Do soulless vampires protect their human companions? Can you love someone you own and can dispose of any way you wish under the law? What’s the difference between love and dominance?

These are marvelous questions posed throughout Susan Sizemore’s vampire series Laws of the Blood. In this vampire-romance-action universe, as in the Laurel K. Hamilton Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series, the powerful vampire has taken an unwilling Companion who is a formidable woman in her own right. Would a vampire with a soul do that?

In both cases, the innately powerful woman falls in love with the powerful vampire and suffers through intense conflicts because the lustful emotions override her good sense. On the other hand, because of the entire situation, it would be juvenile, insane, unreasonable, unethical and maybe suicidal to break away from the relationship.

In Laws of the Blood: Companions, the woman Companion joins a secret online chat support group of other vampire companions plotting the overthrow of the Laws concerning Companions. Sizemore gives us deadpan irony that is absolutely perfect.

If you’ve read all these vampire series, and are ready to search for more good but very different vampire novels, you need Different Blood: The Vampire As Alien by Margaret L. Carter.

This is a small, slender volume with small print, and long, paragraphs. It is essentially a scholarly work, but Margaret is both scholar of vampire literature and a vampire/ werewolf/ supernatural writer whose work I review regularly. My own books have been mentioned in Different Blood – mainly Those of My Blood, the vampire romance where the vampires are aliens from outer space who have interbred with humans.

None of the novels reviewed here deal directly with the process of reading omens. However, the Romance novel is a microscopic view of one of life’s most powerful Initiations. It usually starts with the first meeting between the two who will fall in love. In that meeting, they respond strongly to one another with either attraction or repulsion. That response is a kind of omen reading. This person is going to be important to me.

And that’s the way omens work – you do not know at the time what the import will be, you take a wild guess based on context, and with time you discover if you were right. Practice improves your score.

In Romance novels, "marriage" is the much sought after Initiation. Today many Romance novel female lead characters have been divorced, and now view marriage as something to be avoided. Divorce, too, is a type of Initiation in life, as discussed in previous columns in this series.

Many Romance novels deal directly with the effects of misreading that initial omen. By studying the psychology of the characters in well written Romance novels the student of magick can learn many of the pitfalls of omen reading.

Romance novels generally end with the couple making wedding plans. But today, genre-mixing has allowed ongoing series about the couple after they are married – such as Laurie R. King’s Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series (reviewed July 2004) and Faye Kellerman’s Rina Lazarus and Peter Decker mystery series (Dec. 2003 column and back for many years) about a married couple.

Keeping in mind that vampires live centuries, and Romance often coincides with a hard Neptune transit, clearly it’s difficult to catch your vampire under the influence. Perhaps after several complete circuits of Neptune, the vampire may have learned to handle Neptune and be much harder to captivate.