Baby Jenks is a ruthless sociopath who serves as an example of a twentieth-century Generation X teenage vampire who knows little of her culture’s history, especially when it utterly destroys her. She appears in The Queen of the Damned (1988).
She grows up in Gun Barrel City, Texas, hating her mother, who supports them by making homemade Christian crosses out of pink seashells to sell at the local flea market. Baby Jenks loathes how her mother makes her go to church, how her mother is kinder to strangers than to her own daughter, and how she tolerates her husband’s drinking.
By the time Baby Jenks is twelve years old, she brags to her mother about how she is not a virgin and listens to the rock music of the band Vampire Lestat. By the age of fourteen, Baby Jenks is a prostitute, addicted to heroin, and pregnant in Detroit. While she is having an abortion, the doctor accidentally severs an artery. As she lies bleeding to death, the vampire Killer enters her operating room and saves her life by turning her into a vampire. Baby Jenks and Killer become intimate companions. She joins the gang he leads, the Fang Gang, and rides a Harley-Davidson motorcycle alongside the other three members, Davis, Tim, and Russ. Baby Jenks enjoys being a vampire; she relishes her newfound abilities, improved eyesight, monstrous strength, acrobatic agility, and lightning speed.
The gang motorcycles across the United States, drinking blood and terrorizing mortals. Baby Jenks learns how to bury her victims and how to conceal her victims’ wounds by pricking her finger and dropping her vampire blood over the wound, which closes instantly, making it appear as though her victim has died from a heart attack. Whenever the Fang Gang enters a major city, Killer warns Baby Jenks to avoid coven houses, since the vampires within are older and can destroy her. But if she is ever in a big city and finds herself in trouble with an older, more powerful vampire, she can go into a vampire bar, like the kind in New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans, where it is the rule that no vampire can kill another.
The gang carries copies of the vampire Lestat’s book, but the big words are too soporific for Baby Jenks. She prefers listening to the music of the Vampire Lestat; they all do. To her, Lestat talks about things that the old, stuffier vampires will not talk about. Lestat is her idol. Even though she does not truly believe it, his music teaches her about the history of vampires, going all the way back to ancient Egypt, with Akasha and Enkil—Those Who Must Be Kept.
The Fang Gang goes to the coven house in Oklahoma City and discovers that it has been burned to the ground, with all the vampires inside completely immolated. It is the first of several completely destroyed coven houses that they see as they drive out west to San Francisco to attend the concert of the Vampire Lestat band. En route, Baby Jenks informs them that she has some business to take care of and that she will meet them south of Dallas. She drives her Harley back to her home in Gun Barrel City and kills her mother by beating her in the head with a steam iron until she stops moving. Right before her mother dies, Baby Jenks becomes strangely aware of her mother’s thoughts, of the importance of love, of how the world is beautifully interconnected by doing good and avoiding evil, and how her mother forgives her daughter for being an unabashed sociopath since birth. Baby Jenks reverentially buries her mother in the backyard, and then she weeps until her father comes home. Rushing at him, she splits his skull open with a fire ax so that he is alive yet paralyzed, then she buries him in the backyard while he is thinking about the better times of his childhood.
She goes to the rendezvous south of Dallas, but the Fang Gang is not there. The coven house on Swiss Avenue is like the one in Oklahoma City, burned to the ground, along with all of its vampire members. After finding no sign of the Fang Gang, she drives for five nights, backtracking to Saint Louis. Knowing that she is a young and weak vampire, unable to last long on her own, she goes to the coven house on Central West End in the hope of finding another vampire who will accompany her to San Francisco, but she is completely surprised to discover that this coven house is like all the others—burned to the ground. Not all the vampires inside are incinerated. One vampire remains, Laurent. Having been a member of Armand’s Children of Darkness in Paris and, when that disbanded, having joined the Théâtre des Vampires, Laurent is centuries old, though he appears to be only two years older than Baby Jenks. He reveals to her that two other members of the coven have been burned alive, that the same thing has happened to many coven houses on the East Coast, and perhaps other coven houses in Paris and Berlin have gone silent, and he knows that the only possible chance for them to escape this fate is for Baby Jenks to drive them west to Laurent’s old acquaintance, the vampire Lestat, whose peculiar ability to adapt and survive was the catalyst that changed Armand’s Children of Darkness to the Théâtre des Vampires.
Just as they leap onto Baby Jenks’s motorcycle, Laurent beholds Akasha behind them. He begs her to spare their lives, but she burns him to ash. Baby Jenks leaps off her Harley and begins to feel her body bursting into flames. As her clothes burn away from her body, and her flesh burns away from her bones, before her eyes melt, she beholds Akasha, the one Lestat mentions in his music, but Baby Jenks mistakes the ancient Queen for a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the alcove of a Catholic church.
For more perspectives on Baby Jenks’s character, read the Alphabettery entries Akasha, Armand, Children of Satan, Davis, Enkil, Fang Gang, Killer, Laurent, Lestat de Lioncourt, Russ, Those Who Must Be Kept, Tim, and The Vampire Lestat.