G. P. Taylor, Vampire Hunter

A posting at Bookshelves of Doom made me look again at the intellectual peregrinations of G. P. Taylor. In 2005 he told the BBC about how concerns about children being attracted to the occult prompted him to write and publish Shadowmancer for children:

“If it wasn’t true that books like Harry Potter, Philip Pullman’s work, Buffy the Vampire Slayer weren’t leading children to the occult, why did the Pagan federation appoint a youth officer to deal with all the inquires from children who wanted to become witches? . . . look in the Buffy books or in some other witch books out at the moment and some of it is genuine stuff…”

For his British audience Taylor rejected the idea that he wrote “to promote the Christian agenda.” However, in 2007 he offered the American public an open letter that claimed:

The reason why I wrote the book and all the others in the series was because of one man and the damage that his books were likely to do to the Christian Church.

I dissected the discrepancies in that letter back here.

Already, however, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series was becoming a huge hit, with the Breaking Dawn volume winning a 2008 British Book Award. So what did Taylor do? As he just told the BBC:

“I was going to a lot of schools, I was seeing what kids were writing, and I just thought this is what children want to read,” he said. “So I wrote a book about vampires which was very dark and scary and realistic…”

So much for worries about Buffy! Within a span of ten months in 2010-11 Taylor published three volumes of the Vampyre Labyrinth series.

In October 2010, in the midst of his marketing campaign, Taylor told the Yorkshire Post that he was “having to keep the details of a nationwide school tour secret, for fear of lobbying from Evangelical Christians”:

“I am about to embark on a school tour and talk to 20,000 children. . . . I am concerned that there is a real threat that some people may start lobbying bookshops and schools to stop children buying the book. . . . The book has recently earned the title ‘the most terrifying children’s book ever written’. Many people are saying that it is far too frightening and that children should be warned before opening the pages.”

In fact, a search for the phrase “most terrifying children’s book ever written” doesn’t produce a single Google hit independent of this article. But that complaint about “a real threat” from religious zealots gained Taylor a little press in the UK. (He had made similar claims of “an insidious hate campaign” four years before, except then the undocumented threat was supposedly from anti-religious zealots.)

A year and a half later, and the latest voice to join the chorus against the Vampyre Labyrinth books is—oh, come on, you saw this coming!—G. P. Taylor. In his recent BBC conversation he declared:

“I wrote the Vampyre Labyrinth, it came out, I hadn’t really read it when I wrote the book, and people who were reading it and reviewing it were saying this is the most frightening thing that has ever been written for kids,” said Taylor. ”I have changed my mind: I think children’s literature has gone too far.”

So G. P. Taylor has now come out against a book that he himself wrote. But didn’t really read. Because it went too far. Or so he’s been told. And he’s happy to use the radio to proclaim his own book as “the most frightening thing that has ever been written for kids.” While also positioning himself as a proponent of traditional values.

Batting for the Cycle

What comes after trilogy?

Christopher Paolini and Random House originally announced his Inheritance books as a trilogy, but writing Brisingr revealed plot threads and vowels that needed to go somewhere. The trilogy therefore became a four-book “cycle,” which will conclude this year. Unless he has more ideas.

For Diana Wynne Jones, the Dalemark books are a “quartet” while other series are open-ended. For Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time grew into the “Time Quartet,” though some critics have used the term “tetralogy.”

And for Stephenie Meyer, Twilight just seems to be a “series.” That has the non-specificity of “cycle” without even the implication of a closed circle.

Zombies from Mars?

From Alessandra Stanley’s New York Times review of The Walking Dead TV series:

All it really takes to outrun a zombie is a car. Also, a bullet to the head will stop one cold. And that may explain why so many men prefer zombies to vampires: zombie stories pivot on men’s two favorite things: fast cars and guns. Better yet, zombies almost never talk.

Vampires, especially of late, are mostly a female obsession. Works like “Twilight” and “True Blood” suggest that the best way to defeat a vampire is to make him fall so in love that he resists the urge to bite. And that’s a powerful, if naïve, female fantasy: a mate so besotted he gives up his most primal cravings for the woman he loves.

Vampires are imbued with romance. Zombies are not. (Zombies are from Mars, vampires are from Venus.)

I’d like to dismiss this dichotomy as specious, but then I think about the writers behind the trends.

The Walking Dead is based on a comics series by a male writer, Robert Kirkman. It builds on the modern zombie mythology established by Night of the Living Dead, scripted by John A. Russo and George A. Romero. More recent stories based on the same mythology came from Alex Garland (28 Days Later), Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead), and Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (Zombieland). Even Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which supposedly bridges the gender gap, comes from a male writer, Seth Grahame-Smith.

The modern vampire, erotic and (unlike Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula) morally conflicted, was made popular by Ann Rice, a female novelist. The Twilight movies are based on books by Stephenie Meyer, the True Blood TV series on novels by Charlaine Harris.

Historicizing and Problematizing Twilight

Nancy Reagin, professor of History and Women’s & Gender Studies at Pace University, has issued a call for proposals for a collection on “History and the Twilight Series.” Her CFP:

We are currently accepting proposals for essays to be included in an edited collection with the working title of “Twilight and History,” to be published by Blackwell Publishing in June, 2010. We’re looking for essays that historicize Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, examining individual characters or aspects of the series against a historical backdrop, or analyzing how popular historical understandings inform the series.

The collection is aimed at a broader audience than is the case for many scholarly collections, and seeks to make visible or problematize the use of historical contexts or events within the series. We welcome work from historians or those in cognate disciplines, including gender studies, Native American studies, religious studies, or cultural studies.

I hope the finished book will explain the value of its contributors' attempts to "problematize" in "cognate disciplines." Otherwise, it's not going to reach that "broader audience." (Remember when we enjoyed that sort of jargon in It's Always Fair Weather? Me neither.)

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• masculine honor and gender roles in Edward’s world and Bella’s
• more than a generation gap: marriage and courtship in Edward’s youth
• Twilight werewolves and werewolves in historical legend
• essays that examine Jacob, Emily, Leah, Sam and their people against the history of the Quileutes and Northwest Pacific native cultures
• Carlisle and witchcraft persecutions in Early Modern England
• Alice Cullen and the (mis)treatment of the insane in 19th century America
• The Amazon coven and South American native cultures
• The Cullens and European vampire folklore
• the Volturi, art patronage, and politics in Italian history

This collection will be published by Blackwell Publishers, which will pay contributors an honorarium of $350.

Please email a 500-word proposal, a one-page c.v., and contact information to Nancy Reagin by July 10, 2009. Notification of accepted proposals will be made by July 15, 2009. Chapter drafts of approximately 5,000 words will be due by Sept. 15, 2009.

Proposals should be in .doc or .rtf form, and should include the author's name and contact information.

Twilight Goes Academic

Melissa Click, Jennifer Stevens Aubrey, and Lissa Behm-Morawitz are soliciting proposals for chapters of 6000 to 8000 words to go into a book tentatively titled Bitten by Twilight: Youth Culture, Media, and the Twilight Saga.

Their call for papers says:

The editors seek essays that explore Stephenie Meyer's wildly popular Twilight series. We are particularly interested in essays that explore the cultural significance of the Twilight phenomenon and its impact on youth culture.

The collection will feature scholarly work from a diversity of theoretical and methodological perspectives, including: analyses of the series' messages, production and marketing processes, and audiences. We welcome work from a wide variety of disciplines, including: communication, sociology, cultural studies, psychology, religious studies, and gender studies.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Representations of gender, race, class and sexuality
• Religion, morality, and values
• Feminist and anti-feminist themes in Twilight
• Intended and unintended audiences
• Fans and anti-fans
• Genre and vampire/werewolf folklore
• Relationship models (romantic, friendship, and familial)
• Space and place in Twilight
• Celebrity culture and Stephenie Meyer, Robert Pattinson, and Kristen Stewart
• Translation of the series for the screen
• The Twilight franchise

This collection will be proposed to Peter Lang's "Mediated Youth" series.

People interested in contributing should email a 250-word proposal, short bibliography, brief author's bio, and contact information to Melissa Click by 10 Apr 2009. The editors plan to notify contributors of acceptances by 15 May, and first drafts of chapters will be due in early fall 2009.

(I note that all the titles in the series published by Peter Lang are about girls, despite the more inclusive series title and description. Would this book change that pattern? Probably not.)

Dawn Returns?

Publishers Weekly's reported on unusually heavy reader disappointment in Breaking Dawn, Stephenie Meyer's latest installment in her Twilight series last week. Other popular series have reached crucial turning-points without such a reaction.

Gail Gauthier has interesting comments on what readers should and shouldn't have expected from the Twilight books. Her description of the heroine's domesticization makes me think of Natasha at the end of War and Peace, or Jo March becoming a mother and surrogate mother in the sequels to Little Women. However, Meyer's description of the actual process of becoming a mother in Breaking Dawn seems, by all accounts, to be horribly off-putting.

Like Roger Sutton, I was struck by the fan movement to return read books for refunds, or at least store credit. That brought up some interesting issues on the nexus of literary tastes and ethics, as PW reported:

In one heavily trafficked thread entitled “Unhappy with Breaking Dawn? Don’t burn it--RETURN it!,” commenters debated whether returning the book was a valid way to express unhappiness with the book.

“Technically, reading a book and returning it is theft of knowledge,” read one post, while the original commenter, a former bookstore employee, wrote, “I don’t advocate making a habit of buying new books, reading them, and returning them. But once in a while... I do think mass returns are a useful form of consumer protest.”

Another poster recounted, anecdotally, returning the book at Borders: “They took back my book with no problem. Got into a discussion with the cashier about how I was the 15th (!!!) person to bring my book back today.”

Oren Teicher, COO of the American Booksellers Association, said that there is no official ABA policy governing book returns by customers. “I can tell you that it’s certainly my experience that most stores will absolutely accept returns provided the books are in good condition,” he said, adding that independent booksellers are more interested in preserving longterm relationships with their customers than quibbling over a return.

Regarding books returned because a customer was displeased with it, Teicher said he thought some independent booksellers would be receptive to accepting such a return if they had recommended the book to the customer, though he noted, “I believe there was not a lot of handselling going on Friday night.”

In other words, readers knew what sort of writing they were getting when they paid for it.

I ponder how this sort of reader response might play out in the future. What will happen to protest returns as books migrate toward a digital format, with more people downloading titles instead of buying hard copies? In that case, all we'll be buying, really, is the intellectual content. There would be no physical way to give that back, or ensure we don't secretly continue to enjoy it. Would publishers and booksellers still offer full refunds to keep their potential customers happy enough to buy someone else's book instead? Or should authors in a download age get the benefit of non-returnable sales?

What American Fantasies Say about American Indians

Yesterday I described how three American fantasy novels published over the last fifteen years have, in somewhat different ways, linked Native Americans and magical races. Those books are:

• City of Light, City of Dark, by Avi and Brian Floca
  
• Summerland, by Michael Chabon
• Twilight and its sequels, by Stephenie Meyer

The latter two books include young Americans of indigenous descent among their secondary protagonists. (The first includes a young Latino character as a primary protagonist, and we can discuss how much indigenous ancestry is part of the Latin American heritage.)

Naturally, since those books are fantasies, the Native American characters are caught up in magical experiences along with those of European or other ancestries. However, it strikes me as notable that these books don't just link individuals to secret knowledge, powers, or experience. They link entire groups.

The Quileute in Twilight have made a pact with neighboring vampires, and many of them turn out to be werewolves. The mythical Kurbs in City of Light, City of Dark have, as a whole, sold Manhattan to European settlers. Summerland includes an individual young protagonist of Salish descent, but in this respect I'm thinking of the Indian-like ferrishers, an entire race of magical little people.

Furthermore, while all fantasies have to be governed by rules, these books seem to go further than most in presenting their conflicts as based on age-old agreements or treaties. The Kurbs require a yearly tribute. Summerland involves contracts around baseball games. In Twilight, as I wrote above, there's a "treaty" between the Quileute and the vampires. Evidently, the thought on Native Americans brings up the thought of such age-old contracts.

Incorporating Indian characters or traditions helps to establish a fantasy as American rather than stuck within those dominant British and other European traditions; Chabon has spoken explicitly about that goal in writing Summerland, which also includes the heroes of traditional American folklore (and fakelore), as well as a whole lot more.

In that regard, I think Native American supernatural traditions are as ripe for picking as those from other cultures. However, authors have to be aware that their readers, unfamiliar with the nuances of other cultures, might not be able to distinguish fictional traditions from real ones, or entertaining stories from sacred ones.

Most problematic to me is how these depictions of Native Americans as, in different ways, linked to the supernatural might color readers' impressions of today's Native Americans. Do American Indians really have ancient connections to magic (like Meyer's Quileute)? Are they, despite historical disfranchisement and poverty, secretly powerful and demanding (like Avi's Kurbs)? In such stories, do Native Americans end up seeming as real as the other human characters, or do they come across as a set of fairy-tale creatures (like Chabon's ferrishers)?

Native Americans in Some Recent American Fantasies

City of Light, City of Dark is a hybrid of middle-grade novel and middle-grade comic with words by Avi and art by Brian Floca. Published by Richard Jackson/Orchard in 1993, it was probably a few years ahead of the market. (Compare how the current cover art at left is divided into panels while the first edition's cover offered no hint of the comics form to be found inside.)

Summerland by Michael Chabon, published in 2002, is a doorstop children's fantasy that combines baseball, dirigibles, interdimensional travel, changelings, and a mephistophelean trickster legend into a big stew (which could have been simmered down a bit more).

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer is the novel that started the current boiling-hot series for teens, about vampires and the girls who love them too much. I haven't read it, so I'm going by what Debbie Reese has had to say.

What do these three disparate fantasies for young readers have in common? They all in different ways portray Native American nations as connected to ancient, magical races, knowledge, and/or power.

City of Light, City of Dark's prologue describes creatures named "Kurbs," who

owned an Island as well as the sky above it. . . . Years ago, when People first came to the Kurbs' Island, they wanted to build themselves a City there. First, however, they had to ask permission of the Kurbs.

Since the island is obviously Manhattan, that puts the the Kurbs in the place of the Manahatta group of Lenape who made the famous deal with Peter Minuit in 1626. Except that the Kurbs have their own dimension and remain powerful enough to demand a yearly tribute.

Summerland alludes or makes use of Native American traditions in at least four different ways. The main villain is the trickster Coyote in Southwestern Native American (and Norse) myths, and other supernatural characters come from Native American legends.

Secondary protagonist Jennifer T. Rideout and her family are Salish Indians. Yet Jennifer seems to derive much of her non-baseball-related knowledge from an ersatz Indian source, as Michael Chabon told Salon:

There's this bit about this defunct quasi-Boy Scout organization called the Braves of the Wa-He-Ta. There's this official tribe handbook that Jennifer T. is given, and it comes in handy. . . . Even though it was written by a guy named Irving Posner in Pittsburgh in 1926 or whatever.

Obviously, Chabon is here playing with how mainstream American culture has occasionally claimed the value or "authenticity" of indigenous traditions without necessarily reflecting those traditions.

Summerland also introduces a race called ferishers, which is an old European term for fairies. They're small, magical, ancient, and demanding--like those fairies. But the text also links them to the original inhabitants of the Pacific Northwest. They're described on Wikipedia as "small Indian looking people," and at Baseball Almanac as the "small American Indian-like ferishers." Reviewer Stephen E. Abbott says the ferishers live in "an alternate dimension governed by Native American mythology and the rules and regs of baseball," though that understates the elements of other mythologies in this smorgasbord.

Finally, Twilight includes characters from the Quileute people of Washington. In this fictional world, many of the Quileute, including secondary protagonist Jacob, are werewolves, and they've made an uneasy truce with nearby vampires.

I suspect folks might be able to offer other examples of recent American fantasy stories linking Native American groups and the magical world.

TOMORROW: Thoughts on the meanings of this pattern.