Monday, August 16, 2010

The Vampires Of: Ginjer Buchanan

Ace/Roc Editor-in-Chief Ginjer Buchanan knows vampires. She’s edited some of the most famous vampire writers: Charlaine Harris, Laurell K. Hamilton, P.N. Elrod and many more. So Buzzy Multimedia couldn’t resist asking about her take on everybody’s favorite supernatural creature.

Buzzy: You’ve said that a good vampire story always sells. Why is that so?
Ginjer Buchanan: I think there is a perennial fascination with vampires. I think the nature of that fascination has changed as the nature of vampire fiction has changed. You can trace it from Dracula-and I know that Bram Stoker didn’t invent vampires-where the attraction was the forbidden sexuality, to Anne Rice, where the vampire actually became the angst-ridden bad boy hero, to the current instance in paranormal, where the vampire is very much that, and the love object but no longer a matter of forbidden sexuality in quite the same way. We don’t live in Victorian times, anymore. I think that’s the real reason for it. He is…the vampire is-and it’s almost always a he, although in some vampire fiction it’s the other way around-the guy in the black leather jacket, to a certain extent. If he’s not outright bad-which I don’t think he is much anymore; that’s a trope of horror fiction-he’s certainly ambiguous or tortured or angst-ridden or fill in the blank, and those are stories that have appeal to readers. So the trick is to find a new and interesting way to talk about the relationship between the normal, as it were, and the paranormal.

read on

0 comments: