It’s my pleasure to introduce the republication of two novels by Nancy Baker, The Night Inside and its sequel, Blood and Chrysanthemums. Both were printed originally in the early nineties. As I recall, that was when editors and other knowledgeable people in publishing were saying, “The vampire vein is played out, it’s been saturated, it’s done.”
Just as they’re always saying, about horror fiction in general and vampire stories in particular. So far, they have always been wrong. Vampires going extinct? They’re not even slowing down! As of this writing, we’ve got pop culture sports vampires in high school all over TV and YA fiction, a Dracula TV series about the count’s efforts to become a steampunk entrepreneur in 19th century London, a boy band called “Vampire Weekend,” vampire “romance” novels coming out of our ears, and many other fangish manifestations.
For those with a streak of dark romanticism—with or without the other side of that coin, a streak of savagery that never sees the light of day except on the printed page or the movie screen—there is nothing as delicious as a dip in the warm and apparently boundless sea of fictional blood and those who take it for their sustenance.
However, that doesn’t mean that readers are such bloody wantons that all it takes to get our pulses pounding is a flash of fang.
For this reader, the particular sub-vein of vampire tales that I don’t read any more is the fictional power struggle within large, complicated vampire societies, secret or open. These societies are modelled on modern notions of feudal authoritarianism, or Freud’s primal horde (both of which tend to produce the brutish structures of the criminal gang), or the nasty-minded hierarchies of Gothicky pop celebs and their worlds of sex, drugs, and drearily unoriginal music (yes, there is good Gothic music, but it’s hard to find; personally, I’m partial to any group with the guts to include a skilled theremin player—at least they make an effort).
None of this sort of world-building takes any imagination. The author can just parcel out titles and territories and oaths of loyalty and hierarchical ambitions among more or less interchangeable vampire characters, and off you go.
Why, they’re just like us at our most childish, but older, more suave, and numbingly dull. Vampire Lineages, Houses, chapters, lodges, battalions, parties, clans, etc. find their plots in a constant jostling for advantage, which to me wears pretty thin pretty fast. I’ve had enough of vampire politics (mostly ruthless infighting with no thought for the population at large) just by living through the past three decades of American history.
So for me, at any rate, the pleasure of vampire stories isn’t politics but evocations of intimacy—the close-in, deeply imagined, mindfully emotional relationships that a writer must stretch herself to create for her semi-supernatural protagonists. I enjoy good stories about individual monsters caught up in and absorbed by their own murkily undead state. What’s the point of being a vampire in a world full of the creatures that you used to be like but upon whom you now prey, if you never give serious thought to what that means—to the staggering psychological displacement from the short, warm, busy life of a human being to a vampiric existence of sharply narrowed concerns but infinitely extended time horizons.
In these two books of Nancy Baker’s you will find just such a story, in the form of a very close study of individual vampires fighting for balance in a chaotic existence that cycles erratically between bestial appetite, coupled with augmented strength, and the tenuous connection to what remains of their original humanity. There is no “vampire society” here. The author places her characters in a situation where vampires are extremely few and far between; the only social structures that matter are human ones, within which they must somehow lead their outsider lives.
The tight focus on character is complemented by a firm grounding of the narratives in Canadian geography—Toronto and Banff, grittily realized to ground the fantastic doings of vampire protagonists in a fresh, realistically evoked setting of Canadian town and city life.
The Night Inside presents us with a young teacher ripped from her ordinary life and thrown into the ongoing battle between a captured vampire and a gang that uses him for exploitative purposes, with even more nefarious ends in mind. The complex relationship that grows between Ardeth and the vampire Rozokov, their dangerous escape and counterattack, is set against Ardeth’s continued entanglement with humans—like her sister, whose closeness with Ardeth is troubled by the normal frictions of sibling-hood.
It’s worth noting that one of the pleasures of these books is the inclusion of significant female characters who are not the dimensionless evil brides of Dracula but persons in their own right: the Nisei medical tech Lisa Takara, Eleanor the librarian, Sara who sings with a band, and others.
There are active supporting male characters as well, with goals and anxieties of their own, so that the central couple doesn’t breathe up all the oxygen in the book. The sense of ordinary life going on around them, life that must be engaged with on more levels than simply securing a meal, is solid and satisfying.
Ardeth, killed and risen as a vampire herself, is a changed person. A rush of power comes with her newfound state, and a joy in shedding her human identity’s constrictions, assumptions, and hesitations. She savours the excitement of the hunt, of a stealthy outlaw existence, and of the erotic enigma of Rozokov, who made her a vampire.
But she’s also still a person. She doesn’t just walk away from the human network that has both bound and nourished her all her life: it’s not that simple, not for most real, functional people, no matter how peculiar they’ve become. Ardeth joins Rozokov in the quest for freedom from their persecutors, but she pursues another, more complex quest too, for intimacy beyond transitory closeness to a person whose blood you want to drink.
In Blood and Chrysanthemums the story is built out from a loose end from the first book—Lisa Takara and what she knows or imagines she knows about these two strange and dangerous beings.
The sequel begins with a reconnection of the undead lovers to the natural world: Ardeth rock-climbs, Rozokov studies the stars. The couple are living in Banff, a destination for admirers of the majestic outdoors, where self-absorption is challenged by the beauty of vibrant, living nature.
On a more intimate scale, domestic discord inevitably intrudes: jealousy, possessiveness, and disagreement over where and how to live in the human world, together as a couple or alone, as solitary predators. Rozokov has long since been separated from the familiarities of the environment he was born into. Ardeth’s freshly minted shock and confusion is a vivid complement to his more world-weary familiarity with their dilemma: Can you maintain the ruthless pragmatism that ensures the survival of a predator, and also maintain the passionate and vulnerable emotional life that is the essence of the human self? How do you avoid becoming all-monster, all the time, devoted to the stratagems of the hunt and satisfied with them as your central, eternal theme-and-variations—that and nothing more, forever?
Rozokov broods. Well, he is Russian, and he’s had centuries to ruminate over the problem. Ardeth isn’t ready for brooding. She’s young, she’s full of new energy and perceptions, and she wants to find not just answers but solutions. She even tries to return to her old lives—human and vampire—in Toronto, where it all began for her. But nothing is a comfortable fit any more.
So, for company—for the intimacy that any social animal craves—they have each other, in closeness and understanding, but also in anger and mistrust: What can “faithfulness” mean to lovers who live for centuries?
This is a meditative take on vampirism, more exploratory than the first novel. The big questions aren’t scanted while the action of escape, flight, and retribution are foreground.
Big questions like: What am I supposed to do with my long, long life? What gives significance to my isolated existence, running in lonely, secretive parallel to the myriad of brief human lives around me? Do I still have a soul (and so what if I do)? Can I ever find lasting love, peace, and freedom as a bloodsucker chained by necessity to its prey; and is that what I really want?
Becoming a vampire clearly doesn’t let them off the existential hook—far from it.
The plot structure is unusual; a dreamlike quality develops as a new vampire character closes in on the central pair, with their fitful quarrels, joys, and bafflements. Fujiwara, once a Japanese lordling and now a yakuza boss, is much older than even Rozokov, and formed by a very different culture. Does he have some answers?
In Baker’s vampire tale, the melancholy found in so many supernatural protagonists isn’t, really, all that different from the underlying melancholy felt by ordinary humans who think and feel beyond the standard, socially acceptable mores of their day. That’s why it’s so rewarding for a reader to spend time with these characters while they search, through doubt and confusion, for better answers—just like the rest of us.
Finally, the biggest question must be faced: How do I deal with an endless lifetime? What Baker’s vampires come up with in answer is both moving and satisfying.
Suzy McKee Charnas
Albuquerque, New Mexico
January 6, 2014