It's October and Halloween Time.

 

Today, I began my October reading journey. I have planned to read Dracula, three chapters a session a day, stop, reflect, and then write my thoughts in these small black, dotted paged notebooks. Before I began the book, I read some critical essays on the publication and history of Dracula. I suppose that makes my Dracula journey ten  sessions instead of nine. It's ideal to spend at least two weeks (14 days) on a book like this, instead of 14 hours. It gives the reader those spaces creatives like Shelley and Brian Molko talked about, time to reflect and think and experience the wonder of reading.

There were times in university when I did not have this privilege.

Recently I've been reading great writers' essays on writing, and many of those books speak to the privilege and necessity of reading. Some of these authors were very clear, in their own way of course, that you look to your time, your needs, and your personal pleasures when reading. So I asked myself, due the vision crisis I faced last year, what books were important to me and why. October seemed like the perfect time to read a couple of Gothic books, vampire books in specific, two books, written very differently, with two kinds of vampires, and essentially different themes, though both are definitely hallmarked Gothic fiction.

My children would be surprised that I did not choose The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice, which is usually read every other year in the Halloween season. I believe The  Vampire Lestat is Anne Rice's finest piece of fiction, the story of the young, restless, and shallow French aristocratic boy who became a perfectly Romantic and soul-searching vampire after enduring a bad beginning. If you have not read the novel, you probably don't understand why I called Lestat a boy. Well, he was barely 20, emotionally about 12, could not read at first, had no occupation, was neglected by his family, and failed at every attempt to grow up. Then out of nowhere, he was made a vampire by someone who didn't even explain to him what was happening. Bad beginning. There was a streak of conduct disorder in this boy, resentment toward his father and brothers, toward his own personal failures and boredom. He loved his mother, who was not fit to breed children, much less one as sensitive and needy as Lestat. His childhood Anne Rice understood well, and this is what drove Lestat through several versions of himself. The need to understand the world, the drive to share, the hope to love. One of my favorite scenes in this novel is when Lestat literally has a panic attack when he realizes he can die, and if he dies, he won't even know it. It was dramatic irony and sort of funny. The Vampire Lestat is really a coming of age novel. The fact that no one who writes scripts for either TV or film understands this is bewildering to me. Also utterly disappointing.

So the second book I chose is The Quick by Lauren Owen, a book I love. It is a book steeped in the Gothic tradition of the late 19th century, a perfect companion to Dracula, the story of a young woman in search of her lost brother who has fallen in with a terrible lot of vampires. The novel really sizzles when the author takes it to the streets of London and the reader meets all sorts of characters who are now vampires. One of them is so inspiring, because it's my favorite idea, one I wrote years before I read the novel. A young girl who is a vampire. It is not Anne Rice's kind of chilld vampire at all, more like my idea of what it would be like for a child to be immortal, wild, free, determined, and hungry all the time.

Until next time....