FANTABULOUS FRIDAYS A-Z: V FOR VAMPIRE WITH ANNE ROONEY

Scribble City Central's thirty-ninth Fantabulous Friday comes from Anne Rooney.  Anne has written literally hundreds of books for children and young adults on a myriad subjects, ranging from physics through grim, gross and grisly facts about the human body to picture books about monsters.  She is also a mine of information on all sorts of esoteric subjects, an expert on Arthurian myth and a Royal Literary Fellow as well as a reviewer and journalist for the New Humanist. If I need to know about, say, hagfish vomit, I go to Anne first!

Her most recent series of books mixes an ancient vampire lord with a bunch of YouTube Generation Y teens. These short novels (written for kids who want good YA stories, but may not be particularly competent readers) start with the discovery of a body in a forest (spiked with a tent peg, naturally), and follow the lives of the six teenagers as they are drawn into the world of a centuries-old vampire lord. Some of the settings are suitably glamorous - New York, Paris - and others more unusual - Kosovo.  Each book focuses on a different character, but all have one thing in common - an authentic teen voice and a gripping, page-turning story.  If you know a reluctant young reader, I'd definitely recommend taking a look at these for them. Anne is a mistress of the art of research, and naturally, the world of the undead is now at her fingertips.  She has no fear of them, she maintains, and trust me when I say she'll tell you everything you ever wanted to know about

V for Vampires

Bloodsucking Dead 'Uns

AR:

They grind the land like corn;
Knowing no mercy.
They rage against mankind;
They spill men’s blood like rain,
Devouring their flesh and sucking their veins.

Babylonian incantation against vampires

Everyone knows what a vampire is, right?

Vampire by Munch

Spiky teeth, sleeps in a grave by day, rampages in a cloak by night, sporadically sucking blood from hapless victims and changing into a bat to fly up to high windows where unwary lovelies wait with bared necks. Aversion to garlic, crucifixes, stakes through the heart and frazzling sunlight. But is it true?

Hammer Horror has a lot to answer for; Bram Stoker a little more. But vampires didn’t start with Dracula, just as rubbish school dinners didn’t start with Jamie Oliver. We were scraping out tapioca into the pig-bin in the sixties, and vampires were sucking the blood out of the hapless in Mesopotamia.
The first ‘modern’ vampire story is John Polidori’s The Vampyr, started at the same horror-fest in 1816 as Frankenstein. But it was Stoker’s Dracula that propelled vampires into the limelight and secured their tenure in cinema history.

Stoker is sometimes accused of playing fast and loose with vampire culture, but he did do a great deal of research – so his deviations were informed choices. He travelled around eastern Europe interviewing the type of old peasants sitting in haunted pubs who later became extras by the dozen in vampire movies. His notebooks, recording the vampire-lore he discovered, have been published in a facsimile volume; a newly-discovered extra notebook is due to be published next year by Robson Press.

Page of Bram Stoker's Notes

But what about the pre-Jamie Oliver – sorry, Polidori – vampire?
The dead rising again to annoy the living and suck their blood get everywhere and always have done. The quotation at the top is taken from a Babylonian stone tablet about 4,000 years old, part of an incantation against vampires. The Greeks and Romans had their versions of vampires, too, and cultures from Japan to South America have their own versions of blood-suckers.

In Ghana, the asanbosam hangs from hooked feet in a tree waiting for passing victims.

The fully-fledged, familiar, European vampire is a native of the Slavic and Balkan states. One of the earliest ‘proper’ vampire legends tells of an Istrian peasant called Giure Grando who died in 1656. Instead of lying peacefully in his grave and rotting away like a good, dead peasant, he took to roaming around his village sucking blood from people and sexually harassing his own widow. The villagers drove a stake through his body, but that wasn’t sufficient discouragement and the aggro didn’t stop until he had been beheaded.

The real trouble with vampires began with outbreaks in East Prussia in 1710 and 1721. Then there were epidemics in 1725-30 (Hungary), 1725-32 (Austrian Serbia), 1750 (East Prussia), 1755 (Silesia), 1756 (Wallachia), and Russia (1772). The best contemporary source is Dom Calmet’s treatise on vampirism, Traité sur les Apparitions des esprits et sur les vampires ou les revenans de Hongrie, de Moravie etc, 1749 (that’s the second edition). He collected all the vampire-lore he could find, and though he took a rather sceptical view, he reported it objectively. Voltaire seemed less sceptical, writing in his Dictionnaire philosophique (1764):

“These vampires were corpses, who went out of their graves at night to suck the blood of the living, either at their throats or stomachs, after which they returned to their cemeteries. The persons so sucked waned, grew pale, and fell into consumption; while the sucking corpses grew fat, got rosy, and enjoyed an excellent appetite. It was in Poland, Hungary, Silesia, Moravia, Austria, and Lorraine, that the dead made this good cheer.”

As Voltaire notes, the Habsburg empire was particularly susceptible to problematic vampires. In 1755 Empress Marie Thérèse of Austro-Hungary (mother of Marie Antoinette) commissioned her court doctor - Gerard van Swieten - to investigate. He travelled around Europe collecting reports of vampirism and eventually reported back that vampires didn’t exist.

“All the fuss doesn't come from anything else than a vain fear, a superstitious credulity, a dark and eventful imagination, simplicity and ignorance among the people.”
Abhandlung des Daseyns der Gespenster, 1768

Marie Thérèse passed a law to stop people immolating dead bodies to prevent them becoming vampires. In the backstory of Vampire Dawn, van Swieten is himself a vampire and is acting in self-interest when he makes that report.

So, how do you identify a vampire? Holes appearing in the earth above a grave is a good sign that there might be a vampire beneath. And in some places a horse won’t cross the grave of a vampire. If you dig up the grave, and the occupant is uncorrupted, possibly healthy looking and with blood around the mouth, or even ruddy-faced and bloated with blood, you probably do have a vampire problem.

If you’ve caught the vampire napping, it’s a fairly easy procedure. Staking through the heart is usually effective, preferably with ash (Russia and the Baltic states) or hawthorn (Serbia) or even oak (Silesia). Other methods include beheading, burning or, in the case of particularly persistent vampires, dismembering the corpse or removing the heart, burning it and mixing the ashes with water to feed to the vampire’s ailing victims.

Of course, prevention is better than cure, and areas plagued by vampires have a good set of preventive measures to stop the vampire coming back in the first place. If you find yourself in the position of having to bury someone you suspect might come back as a vampire, you can try any of these measures: cut off the head and put it between the feet; put a lemon in the proto-vampire’s mouth; lay a branch of hawthorn or wild rose over the corpse’s chest; bury the suspect with garlic or religious objects (such as a crucifix, rosary or holy water); spike or pin the suspect’s body or clothes to the ground; drive steel or iron needles into the heart; put hawthorn in the wannabe-vampire’s socks; shoot a bullet through the coffin; put pieces of steel over the ears and eyes, in the mouth and between the fingers; bury the body upside-down – or burn the body instead of burying it in the first place. Severing the tendons behind the knees also stops a vampire rising, presumably because it’s physically incapable of getting anywhere, and putting a sickle on the chest means the vampire will burst during transformation - as it swells, it impales itself.

Assuming you forgot to do any of that, or arrive in an area where the locals are lax in their vampire-prevention procedures, how can you deter a vampire? (You don’t have to get rid of it, you just have to dissuade it from picking on you personally.)

In some places, vampires are deterred by a mirror above the door, facing outwards. They can’t enter a house unless invited – but thereafter they can come and go as they please, so be careful who you let in. They can’t cross running water, and are deterred by seeds or sand on the ground or roof (because they are compelled to count the grains). Don’t fall into the trap of assuming you can just run around until daylight – the deadliness of sunlight to vampires is a modern innovation. The black/red cape is recent, too, dating from Hamilton Deane’s depiction of Dracula in 1924, so don’t depend on sartorial details for vampire-identification purposes.

The time-honoured way of becoming a vampire is to be bitten by one. But that’s not the only way. Slavic tradition tells that if an animal jumps over the corpse – especially a cat or dog – the corpse was in danger of returning in one form or another. A deadly wound not treated with boiling water could also turn someone to a vampire. In Russia, witches and people who rejected the Russian Orthodox Church could become vampires after death.

Romania is really vampire-central. It is, of course, the home of Dracula, and the area around the Carpathian mountains is supposedly crawling with vampires. (Although the original Dracula, Vlad Tepes (Vlad the Impaler) was ruler of Romania, he had no link with vampirism before the twentieth century; Stoker took his name just because it sounded good.)

Such is the enthusiasm of the Romanians for vampires that according to ethnologist Tatomir Vukanović they even fear vampire fruit, vegetables and inanimate objects such as farm implements and chairs. Any object left outside on the night of the full moon is susceptible to becoming a vampire.

“The belief in vampires of plant origin occurs among [Gypsies] who belong to the Mosl[em] faith in [Kosovo-Metohija]. According to them there are only two plants which are regarded as likely to turn into vampires: pumpkins of every kind and water-melons. And the change takes place when they are 'fighting one another.' In Podrima and Prizrenski Podgor they consider this transformation occurs if these ground fruit have been kept for more than ten days: then the gathered pumpkins stir all by themselves and make a sound like 'brrrl, brrrl, brrrl!' and begin to shake themselves. It is also believed that sometimes a trace of blood can be seen on the pumpkin, and the [Gypsies] then say it has become a vampire. These pumpkins and melons go round the houses, stables, and rooms at night, all by themselves, and do harm to people. But it is thought that they cannot do great damage to folk, so people are not very afraid of this kind of vampire....    The[y] … destroy pumpkins and melons which have become vampires ... by plunging them into a pot of boiling water, which is then poured away, the ground fruit being afterwards scrubbed by a broom and then thrown away, and the broom burned."    —Tatomir Vukanović, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, 1957-60

(By the way, it has been suggested that some peasant decided to wind up the poor ethnologist and none of this is true.)

But vampires are all dead and buried now, right? Not necessarily. In 1892. Mercy Brown, the so-called Rhode Island vampire, was exhumed two months after death, her heart was cut out and burned and the ashes fed to her brother Edwin after her father became convinced she was draining his life. The meal of ashes-of-sister did him no good, and Edwin died two months later.

There was supposedly a nest of vampires living in Highgate Cemetery in London in the 1970s, and according to the Romanian Antena 1 TV station, villagers on the slopes of the Carpathian mountains dug a corpse from the graveyard, drove a stake through its heart, burnt the remains of the heart, mixed the ashes with water from the local well and drank it - in 2004.

When my editor at Ransom asked me to write a vampire series, I didn’t really want to fill it with supernatural spiky-toothed eternals. Which rather begs the question of why I agreed to write about vampires at all – but I wanted to see what I could with it that didn’t involve anything impossible. I went to see a professor of epidemiology at Oxford University and we came up with a plausible disease (prion-based) that could account for all the bits of vampirism I wanted to use. The result was vampires who are freaked out by religious symbols, have obsessive arithmomania (so count small things), need blood and live ten times as long as non-vampires.

Then I went about populating the world with vampires, which was great fun. I ransacked history for useful people – amongst my vampires are Louis Pasteur, Joseph Guillotin, and a very famous dead(?) singer. My older vampires have pointy teeth because they filed them for convenience. The new vampires can’t be told apart from non-vampires. They struggle with the problems of being a vampire – blood-lust is kept under control most of the time with dietary supplements, but how do you deal with not ageing, with what you are going to do with your life for the next 700 years, and with inevitable ennui of living with the same partner for hundreds of years? And what does living so long do to your character?

Vampire Dawn is a series of six short novels and a handbook for new vampires, called Blood-sucking for Beginners. I took all the traditional vampire lore, working from Calmet’s treatise, Stoker’s notebooks and some nineteenth and early twentieth century academic texts on vampirism, and dealt with all of it. But they don’t shrivel at dawn, they do have reflections and they don’t glitter in sunlight. I love my vampires – even the evil ones. And I don’t think they are going to lie down and die after one series.

SCC:  Anne! You are a genius.  I thought I knew a lot about vampires, but there's stuff in your piece that's new to me. I really do hope the Vampire Dawners aren't going to lie down and die - there's so much well... life... in them. I'm sure people will be referring back to this post for a very long time, so thank you!

You can buy Anne's first Vampire Dawn book HERE

Next week: Curtis Jobling, master of shapeshifters introduces a variety of W for Weres.  See you then.

Mythic Friday Interview: Number 17 - Anne Rooney

It's not often I feel that my words are redundant on this blog--but I pretty much do today.  Anne Rooney is a woman of many talents, an author of books on every subject from Einstein to Volcano, Cambridge Lector of the Royal Literary Fund (which makes her scarily intelligent) and an ace website designer. In addition to all this, Anne has a very unique and useful blog called Stroppy Author's Guide to Publishing.  I take the liberty of quoting from its 'mission statement' here--it will give you a flavour of why Anne also makes me laugh a lot.  "So - now you're a writer. You've got your book deal and drunk the champagne. Congratulations. What next? Is this book going to be a one-off or just your first? If the former, don’t worry your pretty little head over things like repro, margins, PLR, bogits, bungs and e-ink...." I've never had dealings with a bogit or a bung myself, but it's comforting to know there's a bogit 'n' bung expert on hand should I ever need one. However, none of these things are why I feel redundant (I know you were wondering). That comes down to the fact that the Amazing Anne, cornucopia of arcane knowledge that she is, even knows about hagfish vomit. No. I'm not joking. How can anything I have to say now compete with that? A woman who knows about hagfish vomit trumps pretty much anything I can muster in the way of a follow-on, really, so I'll shut up quite soon and let her get on with answering my Mythic questions. 

I've talked to Anne at length on the subject of myths (of course she knows about myths as well), and I think you'll find her answers below witty, erudite and incredibly informative. She's certainly taught me several things I didn't know.  As for what she terms her 'bio bit'--all I will say is that it contains eagles, skewers and kebabs.  I just hope no one chokes on their morning coffee, that's all. Welcome to Scribble City Central, Anne, and over to you forthwith. Thanks so much for visiting (but not so much for making me spit shortcake crumbs all over my keyboard).

1. Do you think that the retelling of myths is important or relevant for the children of today? Why should they care about some “dry old stories” which come from ancient or forgotten cultures they might never even have heard of?
‘Why the hell is that half-naked guy holding a head covered in snakes? What was that artist ON?’
‘Look at those old men leching after the bint! Are they paedos, or what?’
So goes a visit to an art gallery if you’re never heard of Perseus and Medusa, or of Susanna and the Elders. The myths of ancient societies run like a seam of gold through all of European culture. Our own heritage is a closed book if we don’t know them.

If you want to go to a fancy dress party painted all blue, it’s cooler to go as Krishna than a smurf. I got to paint one of Big Bint’s friends all green when he and his girlfriend went to a party as Isis and Osiris. If they hadn’t known their myths, it might have been the Jolly Green Giant or Green Cross Code man – a sad and shameful waste of face paint that would have been.

But more than that, the myths of all cultures speak to us about our common humanity. That we are captivated by the stories of the Aztecs, the ancient Japanese and the Inuits, as well as by the tales that form our own heritage, is testament to the enduring same-ness of human beings. We might have an iPad and central heating, but we’d still readily tear the world apart when betrayed by a friend or dumped by a lover – nothing changes.

Storytelling forges a bond between people across all times and places, and it can undermine narrow political propaganda. How we can think people of the past, or of ‘enemy’ states, are so very different from us if their stories tell of the same human emotions and motivations as we feel ourselves? Stories that have survived have done so because they say something that is true for all time. They are not ‘dry’ stories though there may be dry tellings of them.

All ages find their own ways of retelling traditional stories – oral storytelling, painting, drama, written tales, films, animation... What about Jim Henson’s muppetising of the Greek myths in The Storyteller? (Perseus and Medusa on YouTube is HERE) Or Marcia Williams’ comic-book versions of the Illiad and the Odyssey?

2. What age were you when you came across your first myth or myths? Tell us how you felt then about the myths you first discovered. Did you love them or hate them? Did they scare you, excite you—or were you indifferent? What kind of myths were they? Greek? Norse? Native American? Celtic? Or from another culture entirely? Were they in a book you read? Or did you hear them as oral storytelling from someone else?
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t hear myths, so I don’t know which was the first. My father told me the stories of the Greek gods, and the Romans, and some of the Norse myths, and the Arthurian stories, from when I was very tiny. I wasn’t keen on the Romans. What they good for? Roads and fighting. Yawn. I liked stories with scary monsters best, and of people outwitting those more powerful than themselves. I suppose that’s what children do to their parents all the time.

When I was quite young, I was given two books of myths for Christmas: one Greek and one Egyptian. For a long time I ignored the Egyptians to frolic with the familiar Greeks, but one day I dipped a toe in the stories of the Nile and was swept away by the current. I loved the Egyptians after that, and even wanted to become an Egyptologist. I was captivated by this culture that had a green god, and a goddess who scoured the Earth for every fragment of her beloved husband’s corpse. I wanted that all-consuming passion, a spirit that would face anything, even – especially – the impossible. Orpheus’s trip to the underworld was suddenly nothing – a jaunt with a harp to play a gig to spirits, who probably weren’t too fussy, and the only trick not to look back? Amateur! I wanted to search every crevice of the globe for scraps of flesh.

3. Looking back, what is your favourite myth of all time, from any culture? And why would you choose it?
Oh, did I answer that already? No, I’m not sure. Maybe Pandora. Why wouldn’t you look in the box? Is the world not divided into people who open the box and people who don’t? Take the money/open the box. Box every time, no matter what.

See, you can’t even understand Dr Who if you don’t have the mythical background….

4. Who is the mythical hero, heroine or being you most dislike, and what made you feel that way about them?
Atalanta because she is such a WAG. She’s 100% materialistic bint: ‘Ooh, look a bauble… let me stop and pick it up.’ Well, dur! Get on with the race, airhead! And she only wanted to marry someone strong and good at running, not someone smart enough to cheat. As for Melanion – well… why did he even want the ditzy bint? He should have won and then refused to marry her, just to make the point. They make me angry. They are the Posh and Becks of the ancient world. Which proves my point in question 1, I suppose….

5. Is there a mythical beast you are particularly fond of? If so, which one?
Oh, so many! Gorgons are most certainly very cool. But then there are basilisks, which I have rather a soft spot for. Things that can kill with a glance, the femmes fatales of the myth world.

Those skeletons that spring from Hydra’s teeth are neat. Oh, and the whales that come from Sedna’s fingers as they are cut off by her father when she clings to his boat. I suppose they are an ordinary creature, but with a mythical genesis. Doesn’t that just underline the wonderfulness of real creatures, that we make up myths to explain them? I’ve long been a fan of T.H.White’s Book of Beasts which mixes mythical and real with gay abandon. I even wanted to do my PhD on its source. (My PhD supervisor wouldn’t let me because he said my insular Latin was crap, which is true, and a fair objection.)

Actually, I rather like the raven Noah sent from the ark who couldn’t be arsed and just ate the dead things. Does that count?

6. How have myths had an influence on your writing life, if at all?
How can they be disentangled from it? The only straight retelling I’ve published is a version of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, but I’m very interested in taking mythical elements and reworking them. I wrote a story a long time ago in which a boy is charged with looking after a bunch of mythical creatures and he had been left things like sunglasses and a bag. He had to work out which things could go together and which couldn’t, why he needed the sunglasses and so on. It’s out of print now (thankfully – it was probably quite bad!)

I’ve also got a collection of half-written re-workings of traditional European stories, though they’re not really myths, moved into modern settings. I’m finding it fascinating how easy it is to transpose these old stories. Bluebeard (there’s another Pandora) and Hansel and Gretel (eating your children never goes out of fashion) are so easily reworked for the modern world – as long as you situate them in Haringey where you can be sure social services will leave your characters to get on with it.

7. If you could choose to be the demigod child of any one mythical god or goddess, which one would it be? Which power would you like to inherit from them—and what would you do with it?

Has anyone said they want to be Christ? No, it sucks really.
I think I might be a daughter of Quezalcoatl because having a feathery serpent around would be quite awesome. As he was considered responsible for human culture I might claim creativity as my special power. Does it count? It is a god-like power, the ability to make entire worlds out of nothing, don’t you think?

More about Anne:

Five random facts about me:
1. I first sent a book to a publisher when I was about 12. It was sent back by the receivers – poor choice of publisher. That’s still happening….
2. There’s a pond in my garden with an island called Monster Island. It was named optimistically, but the only inhabitant is a terrapin called Jeffrey. Jeffrey eats fish from Waitrose, which is not very monstrous behaviour.
3. I was stung by a jellyfish in Albania. I kicked it. It stung me again. I had to be coaxed out of the sea before I kicked it again. Story of my life.
4. My favourite book as a child was Edward Gorey’s La Chauve-souris dorée. It’s about a girl who finds a dead bat.
5. I have fed kebabs to eagles in the Gobi. Beware of falling skewers if you try it.

Anne's website is HERE
Anne's blog is HERE
You can follow Anne on Twitter HERE

London Book Fair and the Author Blog Awards Party

It's been a busy couple of days for me at the London Book Fair, what with the Author Blog Awards party, meeting lovely SCBWIs and SASSIEs, signing with a new agent--oh, and doing a little volcanosquatting (more of that later). 

First, the Awards report, as promised.  Despite all your lovely votes, I didn't win.  The honours went to The Shopgirl Diaries written by Emily Benet.  I've had a look, and it's a really good blog, so I'm not feeling too bad about it!  I'll be getting a nice shiny blogbadge for being shortlisted, anyway. Here I am at the party,

where I met all sorts of twitterites and literary folk, including:

Emily Benet, winner!

and Jon Reed of Publishing Talk along with Anna Lewis and Jon Stark of Completely Novel and lots of other nice bookie people too numerous to mention. The wine flowed and the chat was chatty and I even wore my eBay Jimmy Choos (which I'd promised Sam Missingham of The Bookseller I'd bring to the party in a rash moment on Twitter). 

Here I am with one of the Jimmys in an empty LBF stand--which brings me to the matter of 'volcanosquatting'.  I'm not sure if any of you have noticed, but Iceland seems to hate us because of all that banking malarkey. So a special plume of volcanic ash was organised by the Norse Gods so that none of the foreign publishers or agents could fly through it to LBF.  This created a certain amount of empty space at the fair, (and a certain amount of Facebook and Twitter conspiracy chat among those children's authors who were going). All I will say here (for fear of being arrested after the event) is that we took the opportunity to brighten up a sad, lonely and deserted space by putting our books, posters and leaflets up in an entrepreneurial sort of way.  People liked it.  We even met some lovely student illustrators who joined us in our anarchic public-spirited activities.  Here are some of us posing in our newly acquired premises....

Culprits Entrepreneurs Kathryn Evans, Candy Gourlay and Tabitha Suzuma (and me).  Other culprits entrepreneurs (like Anne Rooney and Jackie Marchant) cleverly avoided photographic evidence of their crime clandestine activities.  

Other News from the Fair: At the end of last year I was very sad to find that Rosemary Sandberg,  my lovely agent of 10 years was retiring. However, after a long and fruitful meeting in the (scarily empty and bereft of foreign agents) International Rights Centre, I am delighted to make an Official Announcement!  Sophie Hicks of Ed Victor Ltd is going to be my new agent, and I couldn't be more delighted. She's lovely--and she immediately won huge brownie points from me by introducing me to Eoin Colfer, creator of Artemis Fowl and an extremely nice and funny man (who is obviously James Bond in disguise despite his protestations that he is 'too short' to be a glamorous international spy).

I'm going away to have a lie down now, after all that excitement.  I'll be back on Friday, bringing you a Mythic Interview from no less a luminary than Michelle Paver.  I AM lucky to be keeping such starry company these days!