Leavenworth, Maria Lindgren and Malin Isaksson. Fanged Fan Fiction: Variations on Twilight, True Blood, and The Vampire Diaries.

Coker, Catherine

Leavenworth, Maria Lindgren and Malin Isaksson. Fanged Fan Fiction: Variations on Twilight, True Blood, and The Vampire Diaries. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2013. 228 pp. Paperback. ISBN 978-0-7864 7044-0. $40.00.

The field of fan studies, a complicated arena that primarily draws on cultural and media studies, may be reaching a new point in its evolution. After over twenty years of scholarship, the question that is now being asked is not "why do fans do what they do?" but "how do they do what they do?" Leavenworth and Isaksson's book-length study of fan fiction based on the Twilight, True Blood, and The Vampire Diaries franchises (each of which began as novels that were then translated to screen) examines fan narratives through the methodology of literary critique rather than sociological investigation. Though careful to provide a disclaimer that they "retain a critical distance to the texts" they examine and "are not active in any of the fandoms" they study, the authors provide nuanced and edifying readings of the texts they explore (9). They are also careful to note that they are presenting selected texts upon which their arguments are built and which are not necessarily applicable to specific types of fandoms. While to some this may seem to be stating the obvious, in this case it is refreshing since some of the earliest studies were vulnerable to making encompassing (and often, incorrect) statements regarding their subjects.

Fanged Fan Fiction is structured as five numbered chapters plus an introduction, interlude, and conclusion. The introduction covers the nature of transformative texts as well as some of the associated terminology. For readers not already versed in fan studies, this section is particularly helpful as it provides a brief overview of previous scholarship and situates this book within that framework. The first two chapters, "Single White Females and Sympathetic Vampires: The Canons" and "Vampiric Presumption: Archives, Genres, and Fans' Negotiations of Rules," then go on to examine the roles of both the series and certain fan texts to illustrate these points. Of particular emphasis is the contention that fan texts can provide resistant readings of source texts, a point that has been used in many other studies as well. The third chapter, "The Archive of New Stories" thus consciously selects and discusses stories whose purpose are not subversive but are still transformative, providing a discussion of fan fiction as "archontic" (13) literature--that is, texts that are neither derivative nor subordinate, but rather that expand a textual world. Reading fan fiction from this perspective allows for discussions of fan texts as literature themselves.

The brief "Interlude: The Normal Discussion" is placed halfway through the text and explains the tonal and theoretical shift of the rest of the volume, which dissects ideas of the "normal" in sexuality and in teratology (a word that means "the study of physiological abnormalities" but is applied here as simply "the study of monsters"). The vampire as Other in literature generally and in the selected texts specifically is oriented to explore themes of transgression, both morally and sexually. Here and elsewhere in the book the authors draw successfully on decades of scholarship to discuss the literary vampire, especially with regard to topics of contemporary anxiety such as the sexuality of teenage girls (whether aggressive or chaste) and homosexual desires.

Chapter four, "Canon-Transgressive Lemony Goodness: Sexual Norms and Undead Desires," examines stories that make use of sexually explicit narratives to emphasize and explore non-heteronormative romances. While "slash" and gay romances have received a great deal of scholarly attention over the years, studies of other sexually transgressive fictions have been more sparse. This chapter particularly discusses BDSM themes in fan fictions; here one might note that E. L. James's runaway bestsellers, Fifty Shades of Grey and its sequels, were themselves a thinly veiled revision of Twilight fan fiction. While those books and their popularity is briefly discussed, there is a lack of attention to the particular trend toward openly publishing such fan fictions professionally, which I find disappointing. In chapter five, "Something Wicked This Way Comes: Ethics, Monstrosity and Issues of the Soul," analysis turns toward discussions of morality and Otherness in fan fictions. The vampire as "Other" is a traditional way of reading the figure in literature and film; fan authors draw upon aspects of this long history to enrich their interpretations of these characters, often creating darker and more threatening renderings of them. The conclusion, "The Vampire Archived and Re-Fanged," briefly ties together the argument for reading fan fictions as part of a larger "archives" of textual work, all of which may be augmented by acknowledging their common intertextuality.

A particular strength of the book is its acknowledgement of how laden the term "fan studies" can be; in some cases, the most interesting aspect of a fandom is its critics. At one point Leavenworth and Isaksson note that, "there is an intimate relationship between the fan and the canon which is not always one of admiration" (44). All too often the impulse for non-fans is to assume that fans adore the media of their choice wholeheartedly and without critique, whereas this is seldom the case. Fans can often be the most pointed (and even brutal) in their criticisms; likewise, media savvy authors and auteurs have in recent years made a point of listening to and acknowledging their fans in creative ways, as with the writers and producers of the show Supernatural, documented extensively by Katherine Larson and Lynn Zubernis.

An additional strength of the book is that the authors have knowledge of both the print and film texts that they reference. Too often, particularly with popular franchises, the adaptation process is not considered by scholars--even when there are substantial changes between the print and film versions as with True Blood and The Vampire Diaries and to a lesser extent, Twilight. In each of these cases, the textual shifts merit deep consideration, and the authors note these briefly, particularly attending to how these shifts have also been utilized in fan texts.

A topic I would have liked to have seen discussed in this book, however briefly, would have been the use of the vampire trope in fan fictions where vampires are not part of the canon; for example, some discussion of stories set in the Star Trek universe where one or more characters is a vampire or vampire hunter who have been interesting. The trope is widespread among a multitude of fandoms and is fairly easy to come across in a variety of web and printed archives; "vampire au" is even a searchable tag within Archive of Our Own and provides hundreds of hits at Fanfiction.net. This is a minor quibble, however, and the authors' own arguments will hopefully encourage other scholars to examine fan texts within the broader context of archontic literature.

Overall, the book is a valuable addition to studies of both the literary vampire and of fan texts. The scholarship referenced in both areas is comfortably up-to-date while also acknowledging older landmarks in the field. Some arguments are so cogent and compelling that I wish the study had been more broadly defined, for I fear the volume may be overlooked by those fan scholars who are not interested specifically in vampire literature, and overlooked by scholars of vampire studies who are not interested in fan fictions. The interstitial nature of the texts examined is thus both the book's greatest strength and its greatest weakness.