I have a friend who is obsessed with the Twilight franchise. To be honest, I was surprised. Not that a series of popular novels could be popular, or anything, but rather, I was thrown by the fact that it’s about vampires. I mean, what’s left to say about vampires?

Of course, it’s not really about vampires as such. Deep down, it’s about other stuff. (For further information about what Twilight’s themes and semiotic significance, we refer curious readers to the Internet.) The thing is, for me, it represents a lesson re-learned. Once upon a time an English Lit teacher of mine tried very hard to explain the process of deep-reading to her give-me-a-grade-and-get-me-out-of-here students by repeating the phrase, “A book isn’t just about what it’s about!” Which is why we’ll have vampire stories for as long as human beings are interested in talking to one another.

Vampires might be creatures of legend with a back-catalog of material that rivals Western culture’s other big bad nasties, but to the modern author they are literary tools in that they often serve a specific purpose. When a writer picks up a vampire and applies it to his or her writing, it’s not arbitrary. It’s like a carpenter picking up a hammer to drive in a nail.

This might explain why vampire tales are so common, even though we seem to perpetually be nearing a saturation point. If authors keep feeling the need to pull the ol’ bloodsuckers out of the toolbox again and again, and if their readers seem to have an insatiable appetite (or should that be an unquenchable thirst?) for same, there must be something going on here. Even if it’s not rational, I’d like to think that there’s a bit more to it than the perception of a money-making opportunity for hacks on one side, and a breathless declaration that vampires are just cool on the other. Maybe there are some stories that you can’t tell without them.

If the big innovation of the Twilight series is in its conflation of sexual abstinence and blood-sucking, then maybe using vampires is just the easiest way to tell this particular kind of story. Now, I’m not here to piss on anyone’s fandom, or to psychoanalyze its adherents, but:

What happens when we make the (just barely qualifies as) subtext into text, what you’d wind up with is a story of attraction and denial. You don’t need immortal, demon-spawn to tell that story. You could just as easily write about mortal beings with lusty-parts aflame who manage to keep their bits off each other.

This might be an interesting story without all of the fantastical trappings, but it  would contradict the American Sociological Narrative in a pretty big way, because you’d have a super-horny girl throwing herself at a guy who’s really attracted to her, but somehow manages to keep himself from getting physical, and that’s not supposed to happen. We’re not that far removed from the days of “hysterical paroxysm” after all.

The notion of females as sexual gatekeepers is pervasive enough that the non-vampire version of the tale would still be seen as utter fantasy. So it had to have vampires. Their inherent  distance from reality makes the rest more acceptable to an otherwise resistant mind. (My acquaintance, incidentally, rejected the non-vampire version of the Twilight theme because Edward is “too perfect” to be merely human.)

I may not like the books (or the movie, or paraphernalia), but I can concede that it makes sense for a pop writer to tell her story the way she did.

Another interesting aspect of vampires in fiction is their prevalence in amateur works. Actually, no. That’s not quite right. Because, for the most part (in my experience, but someone more widely read can correct me here), amateurs writing about vampires seem primarily interested in power-fantasies of some kind. I’ve read a more than a few stories that were not much besides paeans to the awesomeness of vampirism. The nerd-pire beats the baddies so handily in these tales that the word “conflict” hardly seems appropriate to describe the action.

Often as not, I think the instant writing-off of amateur fiction as wish-fulfillment is a mistake. Then again, some of this stuff can get pretty daydreamy. I’ve yet to come up with a serviceable test to separate the power-fantasy from genuine literary attempt, but the author’s willingness to contradict the well-established powers and weaknesses of a vampire might be a guide. Stories in which the vampire protagonist is revealed to be immune to sunlight, wooden stakes, decapitation, holy water, garlic, and so on, often read as though they should be titled, “When I become a vampire, I’m going to be soooo cool.”

In the  end though, we’ll probably be stuck with vampires for a very long time — which is fine, seeing as how they’re so useful. If  you’ve got a story to tell, but can’t figure out a way to tell it, you might then consider the vampire.  But remember:  good carpenters carry more than hammers in their toolboxes.