The literary incarnation of the vampire has changed significantly over the last few years. Gone is the eerie, long shadow casting creeping of Max Scheck’s portrayal of Nosferatu, lost is the sophisticated charm and bloodlust evoked by greats such as Bela Lagosi and Christopher Lee to such great effect. It seems the current public image of the vampire is as a brooding, pouting, sparkling entity with a scare factor of zero.
vampire, magickbazaar.com
There are exceptions to the rule of course. Brian Lumley’s Necroscope series are wonderfully crafted novels on the genre, and still rank amongst my favourite books to read. The problem right now, is that the modern day vampire just isn’t scary anymore.
Because of the oversaturated nature of the genre and the current image about what a vampire should be, I was cautious about tacking the subject (much in the same way I’m reluctant to write about one of those dreaded things beginning with the letter Z right now). I wanted to be sure that if I were to write about them, I wanted to do it right. I wanted to portray them in a way that showed them as the monsters I remembered when I was making my first foray into the horror world. For a long time, I didn’t have a story where I could do this, and so it had sat at the back of my mind gathering dust where many of my other half-baked ideas wait patiently to be dusted off and put to paper when quite by accident, the idea came to me.
packaged human foot, eliteja com
I was out shopping with my wife, and it was one of those days where it was just too busy. There were too many people, too much noise. Frankly, I didn’t want to be there. As I was pushing my trolley and running the gauntlet of screaming kids and eager shoppers, I happened to glance into the meat fridges as I passed. I saw the packaged and wrapped cuts of meat and had a bizarre image of the fridge also containing human limbs packaged in the same way.
asssorted meat at a butcher shop, www.dreamstime.com
Wouldn’t it be funny if there was a supermarket that traded in human meat? I asked myself as I waited for the person in front of me to move along so I could get to the sausages. Straight on the heels of my initial thought came the one that sealed the deal and made me pull that idea from that dusty shelf: What if the supermarket was run by vampires?
Just like that, my self-pitying, unwanted shopping trip had transformed into a research mission, and as quick as we could get out of there I went home and started to write.
I won’t lie. I was incredibly apprehensive about tackling the vampire mythology. I wanted to do justice to it, but without going overboard as far as overloading with too much gore. I wanted to drag these creatures into the real world. I wanted to ask myself how could such creatures exist, and if so, what would they do?
foodservice truck at loading dock, wikipedia
I had read an article at the time of writing about human trafficking, and saw an image of huge 18-wheeler trucks backing into the loading bays of these vampire-run supermarkets and offloading their human cargo, ready to be slaughtered, packaged and sold to other vampires. It was a strong image and pretty much all I had to work with when I sat down to write. I wanted my vampires to have plausibility, a place in the real world that is far away from both the dusty castles and black cloaks of the early inception of the modern vampire, and also the Twilight style versions of the creatures that have replaced danger with romance. I wanted mine to be visceral; I wanted them to be animalistic but intelligent, almost an evolution of modern day man who had found a way to sustain their kind by hiding in plain sight.
human flesh, sgforums.com
A chain of vampire-run supermarkets that trade in human delicacies seemed like too much of a good idea to ignore, and so the story of Meat was born. The Nicu family, the vampire family who run Grueber’s in the story, makes no apologies for what they are or what they do. They mock the folklore and stories told by humans about garlic and stakes through the heart, and go on to explain that rather than supernatural origins, they are creatures of evolution, an offshoot of modern man given a different genetic code that makes them impervious to age, illness, or disease. They possess the traits of the vampire as we know it, but rather like a cult, their eating of human flesh and drinking of blood is a religious think, a way of life passed down through centuries that is deeply ingrained into their society which exists in secret alongside our own.
vampire, pixabay
To sell this idea in the story, I wanted to have a cast of human characters from all walks of life who would be very real, each with their own problems and issues that they would be forced to face during the course of their ordeal. I tend to believe that there are no completely good or bad people. No black or white, but shades of grey in which we all exist. Of course, that also raises another idea that although the vampire is cruel through necessity, humans are often cruel just because they want to be. I thought that was a nice theme to run through the story, and really wanted to keep the reader guessing as to whom the bigger monster was.
When this blog goes live, Meat will be almost a year old. I really like the story, and reviews generally seem to agree. My intention was to present my idea of what a vampire should be, and to that end I hope I have succeeded. Will it please everyone? Probably not. Like everything, it’s a subjective thing to tackle. But as a story trying to do something a little bit different with the genre, I’m really proud of it, and hope it encourages other authors to delve back into the mythology of the vampire and write about them in a time before they had lost their dangerous element.
Thank you for reading this post, and also huge thanks to Lisa for reviewing the book and offering me this opportunity to write a guest post. I really appreciate it. To keep up with information on me and my work, you can find me via my official website at http://www.michaelbrayauthor.com or on my Facebook page athttp://www.facebook.com/michaelbrayauthor.
Note: This article was originally published on December 14, 2013 on The News in Books.
Amazon Link: Meat: Uncut
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Hi Michael, I love your story concept! The few vampires I have written are the scary as heck, bloodthirsty type. I really implemented that in my latest. A few of those scenes were very disturbing to write.
To this day, the scariest book I remember reading is Stephen King’s “Salem’s Lot”, and those vamps were NOT at all the sparkly, romantic type. That’s how I envision vampires–not guys you’d want to take home to mama, but creatures you’d want to avoid at all costs 🙂