Blood Ties

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In a world where families fracture and mutate into new configurations, where parents desert children and grown children drift hundreds of miles away and never telephone, Rice and her acolytes offer tales of powerful and -- especially -- lasting relationships. The one trait that all the new fictional vampires share is longevity (if not outright immortality), and it's no coincidence that perhaps the most popular horror TV series of all time was "Dark Shadows," a vampire soap opera. The endless lives of vampires proved ideal for the complex intrigue, tortured regrets, and buried secrets -- the sheer historical bulk -- of that genre, a genre about families. But the no-budget, videotaped milieu of Barnabas Collins lacked the loopy grandeur of Rice's books (where special effects and wardrobe cost nothing). In the trilogy-ridden universe of modern vampire fiction, the stories span centuries, the locations ooze glamour and the fate of the world often hangs in the balance. These are sagas, in truth, our oldest and most compelling form of story-telling, the thundering biographies of tribes. Not surprisingly, the popular role-playing game that influences most vampire discussion groups on the Internet, White Wolf's "Vampire: The Masquerade," revolves around an array of vampire clans. In Tanith Lee's strangely static series of novels, the Blood Opera Sequence, the vampiric Scarabae family have almost entirely thrown over blood-drinking for the sake of sitting around the mansion ruminating on their ancestry.

The old saying observes that you can't choose your relatives, but vampires beat the system. According to convention, they can "turn" a favored human by offering their own blood for consumption, engendering a brand new vampire, selecting their own children. Vampire fiction depicts this mingling of fluids as an erotic swoon, and the ecstasy is more than merely sexual; it's procreative. How do you form a blood tie with someone who isn't your actual kin? Vampires know how.

Therein lies the appeal of vampire fiction for gays and lesbians, who struggle all their lives with the same dilemma. The secret heart of the genre, however, is adolescent. The alienation, the tormented brooding on identity, the obsession with style and taste, the melodramatic posturing, the intense emotional attachments, the fetishization of youth combined with elaborate world-weariness, all so common in these novels, speak to the teenage yearning to escape our family of origin and find a new, better kind of belonging. No one captures this better than novelist Poppy Z. Brite, whose books throb with so much raw, aching adolescent desire that it's ultimately impossible to hold their florid romanticism against them (Rice, by contrast, has long since gone right over the top).

The polymorphous perversity, aestheticism, outlaw attitude and ritualism characteristic of contemporary vampire fiction appeal to a wide range of people seeking to define themselves as part of something that's separate from mainstream culture. (What's surprising is how many people see themselves this way.) These books assure them that loyalties forged on the fringes can be as fierce, if not fiercer, than those created in traditional ways. In that, the modern vampire is truly Dracula's descendent. The Count was, after all, a Balkan, and under that spotless white shirtfront and smooth satin cummerbund beats the heart of a savage clansman. The lure of the vampire is a tribal thing, a thing we all understand.

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