Clements, Susannah. The Vampire Defanged, How the Embodiment of Evil Became a Romantic Hero.

Coker, Catherine

Clements, Susannah. The Vampire Defanged, How the Embodiment of Evil Became a Romantic Hero. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2011. 199 pp. Paperback. ISBN 978-1-58743-289-7. $14.99.

Susannah Clements's The Vampire Defanged is promisingly billed as a study of the vampire figure in popular culture, with the back cover stating that her work will help readers "make Christian sense of this particular obsession." Unfortunately, the book succeeds in neither of these aims as it is less a thorough academic or theological analysis and more a loose series of essays unevenly bound together through the common topic of the vampire in popular culture.

The works selected for discussion vary immensely both in format (novel, film, television), genre (action, horror, romance), and level of scrutiny applied. Ostensibly about the reconfiguration of the vampiric hero, the volume is really a slender apologetica for reading popular secular literature.

Published by Brazos Press, which aims according to its Web site to foster "the renewal of classical, orthodox Christianity," The Vampire Defanged consists of eight chapters, including a short introduction called "Why Vampires Matter," and a separate brief conclusion. After the introduction, the analysis moves on to eponymous chapters on Bram Stoker's Dracula, Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charlaine Harris's Southern Vampire Mysteries and Alan Ball's True Blood, and Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga. Chapters 7 and 8, "Vampire Sinners" and "Vampire Saviors" respectively, discuss several more works, including Laurel K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series, the Blade and Underworld film franchises, and television shows such as Forever Knight and Kindred: The Embraced. Each essay discusses the selected work in light of a moral or ethical issue, ostensibly through the lens of generic Christian morality. For example, the chapter on Harris and True Blood focuses on sexuality, ultimately concluding that even though Sookie has multiple pre-marital sexual partners, since she herself identifies as a Christian and attends church, she still has values that make her a good person. The brief conclusion is followed by a "Timeline of Referenced Vampire Texts" and then a bibliography and notes. The bibliography points to the scholarly shortcomings of the work, as it consists overwhelmingly of primary source material, i.e., Stoker, Whedon, etc. This is particularly problematic because there are many academic studies of the vampire available; although the pieces referenced are each worthwhile, for a book-length study to list as many secondary works as primary sources is very disappointing.

In her introduction, Clements writes that vampires are a popular phenomenon with which Christians have been hesitant to engage beyond trivialization or demonization, and to some extent, the author clearly sees herself as rescuing vampire literature for Christian readers. "God has called Christians to use thoughtful discernment and informed judgment in assessing the world around us," she proclaims, "and this study is prompted by that purpose" (7-8). Unfortunately, Clements, who is identified as an associate professor and chair of the Department of Language and Literature at Regent University in Virginia, seems to have no theological background aside from employment at a Christian college. Bible quotations throughout the text are scarce, and no other theological works are referenced. It is a puzzle that Lilith, popularly known as a proto-Semitic vampiric figure though scholars debate her origins and placement in Biblical texts, is left out completely. In some sections, Clements also discusses "pagan" elements in the texts, but makes no effort to distinguish classical paganism from contemporary paganism or to note that the portrayal of pagans in film and popular culture is quite different from both historical and contemporary practice.

Further, when Clements repeatedly references the part the vampire has played in "the Western tradition," one expects at least a nod to some texts prior to 1816 (the publication date of Coleridge's "Christabel," which does get a passing mention), but none are present. Instead, the majority of the book functions much more as a partial survey of popular vampires of the past thirty years, with a token section on Stoker's Dracula that pays almost as much attention to its cinematic adaptations as it does to the original text, before skipping straight to Anne Rice's vampire novels published in the mid-1970s through the 1990s. Thus, other notable literary vampires, such as Rymer's Varney the Vampire, Le Fanu's Carmilla, and Polidori's "The Vampyre," are either skimmed over or left out completely. Similarly, although she acknowledges that "cultures as far-ranging as Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Indian, Chinese, Egyptian, and pre-Columbian have their own versions" of the vampire myth, she neither discusses the mythological context for these figures nor how their existence affects our own popular conception of the vampire (2-3).

The overall thesis of the book is that the vampire has been secularized in the past century, and through this secularization has become humanized and even heroic. Clements reinforces this through a reading of Dracula that emphasizes the necessity of a Christian worldview in explicating the characterization of the vampire. However, she skims over the multiplicity of possible Christian worldviews even in a text in which the Protestant Harker considers the gift of a Roman Catholic crucifix idolatrous, although he is, of course, quite glad to have it later. She also conflates contemporary Christianity repeatedly throughout her theological discussions of texts. For example, she states that "Every week in the sacrament of the Eucharist, the Lord's Supper, Christians symbolically eat of Christ's body and drink of his blood as a sign and seal of their union with him" (25). While many Christian sects do partake of this ritual, just as many do not.

Clements's insistence on referring to Christianity as a single cohesive body and ideology is one of the many weaknesses of this text. This is most handily witnessed in the chapters on Anne Rice's novels and on the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In both cases, she attempts to discuss dichotomous worldviews of Christianity and paganism within the texts. This proves problematic when discussing historical elements in Rice's work because Clements fails to supply the relevant historical background. Describing Rice's created vampire mythology in The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned, which creates a fictitious gloss on the religions of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Britain, she states that "Vampire history is connected to ancient pagan religions, clearly distinguished from the Christian world," which results in a "relativistic worldview" for the vampires themselves (43). It would make sense here to have at least a brief overview of the genuine religions referenced and how they differ from Rice's imaginings.

Similarly, the discussion of neo-pagan elements in Buffy the Vampire Slayer describes the fictitious world's view of Wicca (in which ceremonial magick invokes the aid of supernatural forces) and the characters' acceptance of this path, but makes no attempt to discuss this same religion in the real world. Considering that real Wiccans have criticized the show for conflating their beliefs with fantasy, the omission is disappointing.

Similarly, Clements doesn't even touch on the depiction of Wiccans in Charlaine Harris's Southern Vampire Mysteries-novels that treat neo-pagans just as problematically as Buffy does. Instead, she focuses on the depiction of Sookie Stackhouse as an explicit Christian as well as on the books' discussion of fundamentalist Christianity through the fictional Fellowship of the Sun. She then briefly touches on the HBO series True Blood, loosely adapted from the novels, saying that "In many ways, it stays true to the books-using most of the same characters and characterizations and a number of the same plot elements," a statement that is almost painfully inaccurate (97). Series creator Alan Ball took a great number of liberties with both the plots and characters of the books, particularly after season 1. Season 2, which is explicitly about the excess of belief in both fundamentalist Christianity (through the evangelical Steven Newlin, played by Steve Newlin) and fictionalized Greek paganism (the maenad Maryann, played by Michelle Forbes, waiting for the god Dionysus) is only briefly analyzed before Clements concludes that in Harris's world the vampire has no "genuine theological significance" (102).

The discussion of Meyer's Twilight Saga, the final chapter-length analysis of a single text, is also puzzling. Though correctly stating that "spirituality and religion are not genuinely explored in the books," Clements cites only a single article discussing spirituality in the texts when in fact there is a growing body of work on this same subject (104). She, again, neither discusses the fictionalized mythology of the Quileute Native Americans, nor attempts to reference their native beliefs. Since there has been published work on the problems of this quasi-adaptation, even a single reference would have been worthwhile.

The final chapters briefly discuss several additional popular vampires, before she ultimately concludes that the secularized vampire "has lost its spiritual potency" and thus "much of its metaphorical power.... If Christians can understand the vampire better, we can discuss, create, and inspire a respiritualized figure of the vampire," which "can help return the vampire tradition to the power it once had" (164). Unfortunately, this conclusion only inspires more questions for the reader: For instance, why should the vampire be respiritualized? Does it even make sense for a popular secular literature to be adopted by Christianity?

Ultimately, this particular volume is of most use to a general audience hoping to learn that reading about vampires is okay, not an academic looking for serious analysis. For the former audience, this is an ideal volume; for the latter, there is a wide range of material available on the topic. In particular, Williamson's The Lure of the Vampire is an interesting study not just on the vampiric figure but its audience, a topic very much in line with the vampire's popular transformation. For the more general audience, any of the popular "companion" volumes to Rice, Buffy, Harris, et al. available would do.