Gaunt dead that cannot die

"One hundred years of vampire cinema: opera capes and neck-nuzzling, glowing beauties and monster-kid wish-fulfilment. Gone! The whole lot swallowed up by this eerie bacchanal of sex and death."

That's Alec Worley on Substack, talking about Robert Eggers' 2024 remake of Nosferatu. Personally I found the movie disappointing after Eggers' previous work (especially The Lighthouse and The Northman) and would have spent my time better re-watching Werner Herzog's version or F W Murnau's 1922 original -- both so much eerier. (Spoiler-free review here if you're interested.)

My own preference is for the unglamorous and grave-cold variety of vampire, not the kind that snarls and growls and prowls like a big cat. It's a taste that may have been formed originally by Gerald W Page's short story "Thirst", which swept away my childhood notions of the vampire, acquired from reading Dracula when I was 10 years old*, and gave my teen self an unplugged, proto-punk take on the myth. Mr Page was kind enough to find the time to correspond with aspiring writers like me, so he may have discussed his reasons for wanting to break the mold. When I have time I shall go through his letters (which of course I have kept these fifty-three years) to see what he had to say about the story.

Later in my teens I was inspired by Gryphon's song "The Unquiet Grave" -- not specifically vampiric, admittedly, but chilling all the same with lines like this:

"My lips they are as cold as clay, my breath smells earthy strong,
And if you kiss my cold grey lips, your days they won't be long."

Robert Dale, with his deep knowledge of British folklore, encouraged this predilection with his very chilling depiction of Pyron the reaper, a vampire in the Brymstone campaign. Oliver Johnson a few decades later gave us another feral vampire in his Lightbringers game. This is from the game write-up:

"A pitiful mewling cry came from a thorn thicket to the south of the clearing. It sounded like a small child in distress or perhaps a snared bird. A narrow crawl way snaked deep into the thorns towards the sound. Nafaj squirmed into the tunnel. The thorns snagged cruelly at his clothing and skin. When he was several yards into the thicket, he saw a boyish white face staring back at him down the darkened tunnel of thorns. Though he had steeled himself for such an encounter, his will deserted him as the creature started whispering its blandishments. To his horror he found himself crawling forward. Soon he was next to the vampire. All its limbs had been ripped off; it was but a torso and a head.  The vampire drank Nafaj’s blood and instructed him to return later that night.

"Nafaj emerged from the thicket. The setting sun causing him discomfort, he had thrown the hood of his cloak over his head, but none of the others thought to question why this was. He was carrying a dead bird and explained the noise had been its dying song. The others were eager to be gone from the accursed place, but the marquis’ horse was suddenly lame and this caused a delay. Darkness fell, a temporary camp was made and watches held throughout the night."

The natural habitat of these revenants isn't a Victorian drawing room, nor even a Gothic castle. They are the dead who won't stay quiet, clawing their way up out of the dirt of the graveyard and crawling along ditches and over country lanes because enough of a spark of consciousness remains that they are jealous of the living and want to steal their warmth and lifeblood.

Such walking-corpse vampires can still have uncanny powers, like Gerwin in the Jewelspider scenario "Death Is Only The Beginning" who is able to hide himself from mortal sight after dark, though I prefer them to be nothing more than bloodless cadavers with a raging thirst, like the thing that visits you in your sleep in Workshop of the Gods:

‘Wake up!’

‘My friend... I dreamt a beautiful vampire was about to drink my blood.’

‘Beautiful?’ cries your companion in a voice thick with horror. ‘It is a monster. See!’

You look where he’s pointing and in a split-second you’re on your feet, heart pounding with adrenaline. Because only the vampire’s appearance was a dream. The rest is all too real. You see the vampire now as she really is – not a pale and beautiful woman, but a rotted corpse with maggots writhing in her pock-marked cheeks and lustreless eyes that leak brown slime. Clammy strips of dead flesh hang from her bones. The room is filled with the stench of decay.

She lurches forward, swollen grey fingers reaching for you, her lipless teeth clacking eagerly.

Sleep tight!

* To be fair to Mr Stoker, the Count is not intended to be a typical vampire. His wives and Lucy Westenra present as chillingly inhuman, nearly mindless vessels of simple appetite.

Not so black and white

I've just done an interview for the Exeter University student newspaper, Exeposé, in which I talk about interactive fiction, games, comics and future projects.

The main focus is my recent reworking of Frankenstein as a (sort of) gamebook. That's still available in the App Store but, if iOS isn't the apple of your eye, it's not long now before we'll be releasing the epub3 and Kindle versions. These have been coded by Spirit Entertainment, the developers of the new FL apps.

Here is the moment when the monster, having spent a whole year hidden in an outhouse adjoining the home of the De Lacy family, tries out the clothing he has made himself in preparation for finally meeting them:

You hang around the border of the woods at daybreak until you see a man with a scythe walking on the far side of the field. He is a long way off. Stepping out from the trees, you raise your hand in greeting. 

And he waves back. He waves. A simple gesture that men make to each other every day. It means more to you than anything you can remember. Your heart is pounding in elation as you turn back into the enveloping comfort of the woods.

So where was I? Oh yes, the interview was conducted by Tom Bond and Emily Lunn, Exeposé's books editors, and you can read it here. Just below the interview, there's also a review of the app (or ebook as we must soon call it) which gives a thumbs up - though here's yet another reviewer with a knee-jerk dislike of Victor Frankenstein. Where are people ingesting this dogma? The story of Frankenstein and his monster is much more interesting than simple good guy/bad guy. Victor is irresponsible, yes, and that's tackled at several points in my version, particularly in the dinner conversation with Professor Waldman. But the monster does murder three innocent people in Mary Shelley's novel - and may or may not murder up to four people in my version, depending on the level of alienation you encourage. The tragedy is that Victor and the monster destroy each other, emotionally, morally and at last literally. You want a simple good versus evil story, read Dracula.

I'm yakking away on pages 23-24, but there's plenty of other good stuff in there worth a look, including an interview with Peter Molyneux about his new company 22Cans. Curious? You will be.

Once bitten

Another never-was gamebook today. This one might have eventually been pitched to Puffin Books's gamebook editor, Marc Gascoigne and could have ended up as a Fighting Fantasy title, except that Jamie and I got sidetracked by working on a number of computer games at Eidos - for Fighting Fantasy originator Ian Livingstone, as a matter of fact, who was then Eidos's creative director, and may indeed still be.

The title of the book/game was either going to be Slurp or Thirst (the latter an hommage to horror author Gerald W Page, as explained here) and the idea was that you played a Victorian vampire lord called the Count. Casting a glance over the design overview today, the only feature of any real originality was that, instead of a power bar, you got to see your current health by the color of the images. Full strength was to be shown by vivid saturated color with strong reds, fading towards sepia monochrome as the Count went without blood. A common enough trick today (eg The Witcher) but new at the time.

The concept of player-as-villain was something Jamie and I were toying with a lot in those days. I've already discussed our gamebook proposal for Keeper of the Seven Keys, and we also had a proposal for a PC strategy game in which good fought evil, which we called Light & Dark. (Yes, Black and White was a much better title - but we came up with ours first, so there.)

Slurp would have been okay as a gamebook, but was rather too vanilla-flavored to work as a videogame. Pea-soupers, hansom cabs, gaslight - needs more, something to make it brandable and unique. A year or so in the industry stripped the scales from our eyes and we reworked it from the grave-soil up as Shadow King. But, just for those completists out there, here's the original book blurb:

Fog swirls thickly, blurring the wan gaslamps that line the narrow London streets. Underfoot, the cobblestones are slick and dark. From far away, beyond the maze of alleys that is Seven Dials, comes the muffled clatter of hansom cabs. The theatres on Shaftsbury Lane are emptying. There is a distant ring of laughter, made eerie and forlorn by the fog.

Here, among the shadows, is another world. A haunted labyrinth of thieves and opium dens, where figures lurk in the dark doorways and human life has little worth. It is a jungle of rain-streaked glass and soot-blackened brick, a jungle teeming with prey whose warm rich blood excites your senses like a drug.

A girl turns the corner, footsteps echoing off the alley walls as she hurries on her way. She glances at you as she goes past. You did not need to see her eyes to sense the fear. It is obvious from the nervous posture, the quick life-scented breath, the triphammer of her heart.

You turn to watch her, her shadow scurrying across the bleak shuttered facade of the street. There is no-one to see her fate. If you had lifeblood of your own you might feel it quicken with excitement, but your own veins are dry and dead. It is the blood of others that you crave to stir your shrivelled heart and give another night of almost-life.

The girl reaches her home - a squalid bedsit. She looks behind her as she fumbles for the key, but she does not see you. You have merged with the fog. The hunter and the jungle are one. You study your prey coldly, as if from a gulf of eons, waiting for the moment to strike.

She closes the door behind her and leans against it. Now, when she thinks she is safe -

The door is no barrier. Like mist you seep around it, taking shape again as the girl lights her lamp. From behind the dead hands seize her - hands that tamed falcons, slew a thousand Turks, played chess with Voltaire, made love to the most beautiful women of Europe. The same hands now hold your prey like a vice and the long white fangs slide into her.

The girl makes the slightest of moans and then goes limp. You stand there with her in your arms, immobile as a statue. As the life drains out of her and into you, your arid veins rush with blood. The sensation is the closest you will ever come, now, to pain or pleasure.

Too soon, there is nothing left. You let the empty carrion fall from your grasp. Your heart throbs again, vigour restored, but the bitterness and frustration are like bile within you. A parched desert washed by sudden rain, the life you gain each time is potent but short-lived. This victim was poor, too underfed to yield much sustenance. Tomorrow you must hunt again.

The door splinters inwards. You turn with a snarl. Engrossed in feeding, you did not sense their approach. There are three of them. The reek of garlic flowers surrounds them and there are lethal hawthorn stakes in their hands. The silver crucifix you sense before you see it, its deathly power is so great.

Van Helsing steps forward, pushing the crucifix towards your face. "Dracula!" he cries. "Fiend, you have slain your last victim."

The fool! Does he think himself well-armed? To challenge you now, in the dead of night, when your strength has just now freshly been renewed? Despite his bluster, you can see the terror behind his eyes.

"The blood is the life, Van Helsing. And now I will drink my fill of yours!"