Blood sucking creatures

My reading over the last several days has consisted of vampire lore and theory. It's been productive, and even impressed one of my daughters who had trouble believing that I was actually studying vampires.

You might remember my question last month about what constitutes a vampire and the excellent responses I got. I was asking the question because I have a conference paper to deliver next month on vampires and posthumans. The argument I will be making is that essentially their similarities outweigh their differences and that vampires haven't cornered the market on the biological need for blood in order to reproduce.

I'm still working through the argument, which I now realize is going to be far more complex than a 15 minute conference presentation is really designed to handle. I suspect I'll end up with a seminar length paper that will have to be chopped in half to make it work.

One of the books I read - Blood Obsessions - makes an interesting argument that the serial killer and the vampire perform similar literary functions. The repetitive nature of the vampire's continuous need to feed and the serial killer's continuous need to kill are cyclical in nature and represent the Freudian 'compulsion to repeat'. Usually I'm not big on Freudian theory, at least as it is applied to literature, but I do find the argument that the serial killer and the vampire are figures performing similar functions quite compelling. I would suggest that instead of Freud's compulsion to repeat though, that the compelling nature of the two figures lies in their unhuman activities. Not only do both undertake activities not considered human(e), but they both also represent the threat that any human might become one of them - either through the bite, or through trauma, bad genes, atavism, or whatever other reason one might use to explain the production of serial killers.

Not that I'll be talking serial killers in the paper, but posthumans do tend to embody a similar threat to the human - that any human might become one of them and that they are unhuman in their activities. In that way, the posthuman challenges the vampire on its own turf, threatening to become the monster-du-jour and displace the vampire from that position.

Or at least that's the argument.

Not that you really wanted to know, but I need to start writing out the argument to work it out - as you can tell, it's pretty sketchy at this point.