For this week’s cover package about vampires (on stands today!), we chatted with writer Neil Gaiman about how vamps have changed through the years, what they stand for and why they should go away. For more on vampires, including our picks for the top 20 greatest vampires of all time, pick up this week’s issue of EW.
EW: How have vampires gone from being monsters to anti-heroes? For example, in contemporary pop culture, we’ve seen vamps make that move from horror flick fear agents to misunderstood social outcasts.
NG: I think mostly what it has to do with is what vampires get to represent. Dracula was a great novel of sexual seduction, full of repeated sexual seduction and rape and sex. So it makes complete sense that your solid Victorian vampires were fundamentally evil. And you can have that nice big stake hammered through them as a way of putting them to rest. After that, I think the next big, huge, cultural, “somebody’s just written a vampire story” is probably Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot. Steve basically wanted to do Dracula again, only in a small town in Maine. At that point you got vampires still sort of representing the “other.” Then Anne Rice wrote Interview with the Vampire, which as a teenager I thought was a rather drippy book. I have to say as a teenager who loved vampire fiction and wanted vampire fiction, I thought they all sort of sat around being miserable.
But I think then the thing that changed everything and that gave vampire fiction a new lease on life and death was AIDS, because you hit the early ‘80s, and suddenly you have something in the blood that is an exchange of blood that kills and is altogether fundamentally about sex. And vampirism essentially came out of the closet as a metaphor for the act of love that kills. Stephen King once said, using the Erica Jung quote, that vampirism is the ultimate zipless f—. And then a sort of continuous transmutation, you had Lost Boys, which is essentially vampirism as wish fulfillment. Finally, of course there’s Sesame Street, which I think may well have created the sympathetic vampire for the world in Count. READ FULL STORY »
About three years ago, EW commissioned New York forensic artist Stephen Mancusi — a guy who’s done deliberately aged likenesses of everyone from JonBenet Ramsey to Marilyn Monroe — to use his professional techniques to render what reclusive author Thomas Pynchon might look like now. His drawing was based on Pynchon’s 1955 high school yearbook photo, one of the last known snapshots of the Gravity’s Rainbow scribe, and accompanied Ken Tucker’s grade-A review of the then 69-year-old writer’s
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Amulet Books today announced details of the fourth book in Jeff Kinney’s hit illustrated kids’ series about supposedly lame middle-schooler Greg Heffley. The new book, Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days, is due in stores Oct. 12 with a first printing of 3 million copies. Since the publication of the original Diary of a Wimpy Kid in 2007, more than 20 million copies of the series are in print in the U.S. The third book, The Last Straw, was released in January of this year. “I didn’t want my fans to have to wait a year for a new book,” Kinney said in a statement. “I’m very excited about Dog Days, because it takes Greg out of the school setting for the first time. It’s been a lot of fun to write about the Heffley summer vacation.”
