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(Huffington Post) It is not possible to write an unrealistic novel. I give up. No matter how peculiar your invention, reality inevitably sprints past you, cackling. I thought I was conjuring something nicely absurd for my YA heroine, Arabella, when I gave her a mother with academic expertise in the mating habits of vampire bats. This was only a few years ago. Milrose Munce and the Den of Professional Help came out in 2007. At that time I'm fairly sure that academics devoted to vampires were thin on the ground. By the end of this decade, I suspect it will be hard to find an academic who doesn't specialize in vampires.
Vampire science is already poaching some of the best. The woman who teaches vampires at Harvard is a serious scholar of Romantic English literature. Now, Lord Byron did in fact invoke the undead in "The Giaour," one of his wildly popular longer poems; he also wrote an aborted vampire novel, "The Burial: A Fragment." But don't kid yourself: it's still a huge and weird notional leap to go from Byron Studies to Vampire Studies. Swimming the Hellespont with a club foot is life-altering and disorienting, no doubt; but you still don't expect to be handed your towel in Transylvania.
Blame Bella. You know: the lip-biter who gets thigh-bitten. Bella Swan, despite her famed awkwardness, has seduced not simply a hot emo dead guy who sparkles when topless; not simply every teenager on Team Either Dude; not simply the guy who plays the stripped sparkler in real life; but also, apparently, some of the world's leading scholars.
Professor Sue Schopf's course in vampire literature treads a careful critical line. She is aware that her subject matter is not entirely of the highest literary merit. Yes, a tiny handful of vampire narratives are rightly considered classics. But they are outnumbered. Big time. It is in fact like the traditional zombie plot, in which only three people in the known universe are undrooling humans, and everyone else is just a bit less impressive. So this course requires her to teach novels that are not really on the same level as Bram Stoker's Dracula, or John Ajvide Lindqvist's Let the Right One In. These writers have no illusions about their own mortality. Since deathless is out of the question, their prose errs on the side of deadly. This prof, however, refuses to look down her nose, even at the least elegant material. (Say, a book featuring masochistic vampire groupies: "fang bangers.") She's besotted with all of it.
An unabashed cheerleader for Team Edward, Prof. Schopf has made a running joke of accidentally interrupting slide shows with images of Robert Pattinson. "How did that get in there?" You'll never see her wince or sneer. Her course is a celebration: It's all good. The student with the highest mark in the class wins a truly ace Twilight umbrella.
My girlfriend was gunning for the umbrella, but she missed a quiz, so it's not likely she'll come in first. In general, she likes to make a point of outperforming her classmates, because it curbs their attitude. My girlfriend, you see, is pursuing an ultra-cheap Harvard degree over the Internet, via the venerable Harvard Extension program, and some of the people paying $47,000 a year to attend the bricks-and-mortar version of the university get a bit snotty about this. Read full story at Huffington Post...
