Ardeur: 14 Writers on the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Series

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  When Anita’s government created the special federal marshal position, it gave badges to all vampire executioners with sufficient years of experience and firearm skills. That’s a problem. “For some of us it was more like giving a badge to a bunch of bounty hunters with license to kill,” explains Anita in Blood Noir. Anita also discloses in Incubus Dreams that some of those newly minted federal marshals use their badge and the carte blanche provided by the death warrants to justify torture.

  Our democratic system ultimately rests on the public’s trust of those in power, a trust that the Constitution purchased by setting up a system premised on the idea that although individual segments of the government may be untrustworthy, the three branches possess sufficient checks and balances on each other to keep each separate branch on the straight and narrow. In Anita’s words in The Harlequin, “When the police go bad, they aren’t the police anymore… . [They are] criminals”—and the Constitution expects them to be arrested and treated as such. The Constitution’s regulations governing the criminal justice system are designed to keep the general public from losing faith in the police and the prosecutors. Individual officers may go bad, but the police department and the district attorney’s office as collective entities will remain worthy of the public’s trust.

  In The Harlequin, Malcolm confronts Anita about her decision in Incubus Dreams to carry out a warrant by invading his church and executing one of his parishioners. He makes the point that there are no warrants of execution for humans:

  Anita: The death penalty still exists, Malcolm.

  Malcolm: After a trial, and years of appeals, if you are human. Anita: What do you want from me, Malcolm?

  Malcolm: I want justice.

  Anita: The law isn’t about justice, Malcolm. It’s about the law.

  An insightful, if disturbing, statement. The foundation of the law, the Constitution, declares that the best method of achieving justice is to follow the procedures established in that document. No law enacted in violation of those foundation principles, even one purporting to do justice, can truly be law. No law enacted in violation of those foundation principles should be respected or followed. Officials have a duty to ask whether the laws they are charged with enforcing are in compliance with the Constitution. Even the military, the ultimate bastion of unquestioning obedience, requires its soldiers to recognize and refuse to follow an illegal order. Ask Lieutenant William Calley about My Lai or Adolf Eichmann about the Holocaust; both learned that “just following orders” was not an acceptable defense.

  Just following orders is also not an acceptable argument for Anita Blake, federally licensed vampire executioner. Every time Anita executes a warrant (and a thus a vampire), she violates the Constitution. Without legal sanction, an execution is nothing more than murder. The public’s faith in the government depends on the government complying with the Constitution and its individual rights protections. The Constitution itself allows the government to tweak the rules, to adapt the contours of the Constitutional guarantees, but the government is not entitled to disregard them all together. And that’s what Anita’s government did when it licensed vampire executioners.

  Anita herself has a fundamental sense of right and wrong. Indeed, much of the conflict in the series derives from Anita’s struggles with her own moral code, with the recognition not only that shades of gray exist, but that there may be many more of them than she is comfortable admitting. But while Anita does rely on her own internal sense of justice, she also relies on the guiding hand of the law, and she takes refuge in the protections of the legal system.

  Anita recognizes the dilemma licensed vampire executioners pose, even if she shies away from examining it too closely. In The Harlequin, Anita gives us some insight into her discomfort:

  I’d been grandfathered in like most of the vampire executioners… . The idea was making us federal marshals was the quickest way to grant us the ability to cross state lines and to control us more. Crossing state lines and having a badge was great; I wasn’t sure how controlled we were.

  Anita is also clearly uncomfortable with the power placed in her hands:

  Anita: I cleared Avery. Legally, I didn’t have to.

  Malcolm: No, you could have shot him dead, found out your mistake later and suffered nothing under the law.

  Anita: I did not write this law, Malcolm, I just carry it out.

  Malcolm: And that justifies slaughtering us?

  Anita doesn’t respond, but does reveal her internal struggle to the reader:

  I was going to leave this argument alone because I’d begun to not like that part of my job. I didn’t think vampires were monsters anymore; it made killing them harder. And it made executing them when they couldn’t fight back monstrous, with me as the monster.

  In a sense, a parallel exists between law enforcement efforts to capture and contain a serial killer and efforts to capture and contain vampires. As with a serial killer, the consequences of failing to capture and contain a criminal vampire are extremely serious; indeed, people will die. But the consequences of violating the Constitution are worse. The system must remain intact. To repeat Anita’s words, “The law isn’t about justice … it’s about the law.” The U.S. Constitution is the supreme law of the land. Tossing out the entire trial process for vampires accused of crimes is an effort to “do justice” at the expense of the law. And that is exactly the type of “justice” the Constitution seeks to curtail. The Founding Fathers firmly believed that true justice is achieved only when the law prevails. They inscribed procedures in the Constitution as part of a deliberate attempt to check those who would act in the name of justice; the procedures reflect a deliberate lack of trust in the judgment of any one person. Before a citizen can be deprived of his or her liberty, several people must pass judgment, and the defendant has a right to be heard and to refute the charges. Vampires are legal citizens in Anita’s world, and killing one is the ultimate deprivation of liberty. Summary executions, in the name of protecting society, are the ultimate violation of the Constitution, the bulwark standing between an accused and a mob of vigilantes.

  The job of vampire executioner turns the entire U.S. criminal justice system on its head. It tosses out law in an effort to replace it with justice and restricts the number of people who have a say in defining what constitutes justice. It tries the system, finds it wanting, and abandons it altogether for vampires. And the thought of a United States without its criminal justice system scares me. Even more than vampires.

  Melissa L. Tatum is the Associate Director of the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program at the University of Arizona’s James E. Rogers College of Law. Much of her teaching and scholarship focuses on the intersection of minority groups, individual rights, and the criminal justice system. She is also the author of several short stories published by Yard Dog Press.

  The vampire as a racial metaphor has been something people have traced in my books from the beginning, but it was not on purpose from my point of view. The vampire represents the other, but that is a lot more than just race. As a Wiccan I can tell you that religion divides you from the mainstream, and will make people look at you as very other. I wasn’t Wiccan at the beginning of the series though, so that wasn’t what I was thinking at the time.

  One of the things Mikhail Lyubansky puts at my door is the lack of non-white characters in my books. Since I get a lot of Hispanic fans loving the fact that Anita is half-Hispanic, I could argue that, but that she looks white seems to be his point. That I can’t argue with. I find it interesting that he leaves out Jamil, who is African American and one of the main dominants of the local werewolf pack, and Shang-Da, who is Chinese, the other main bodyguard and dominant. Would he argue that they are subservient to their Ulfric, their Wolf King Richard? Maybe, but that he leaves them out entirely is interesting. One thing I decided early on but have never had on stage was that just as the gene that gives you sickle cell anemia, which is more prevalent in the African American population, turns out to also h
elp fight malaria, I’d decided that it would be cool if it also meant people with sickle cell couldn’t “catch” vampirism. It is a cool idea, but I’ve never managed to get it on stage.

  I have debated on whetherto share the real reason that there are not more African American or dark-skinned vampires in my books. I can’t decide if it’s politically correct to say it here. The truth is that all vampires are paler as vampires than they were as live people, thus someone of African American descent would be paler. But how pale? I was pretty sure that if I had characters that wereAfricanAmericanbutpaledthemalloutthatI’dbeaccused of trying to literally white-wash them. Was I over-thinking it? Maybe, but at the beginning of the series I was very aware that I was white bread as far as I knew, and didn’t have any experience here to draw on. I was in my early twenties and I just couldn’t figure out a way to ask the question of someone without sounding stupid, or racist, or both. I’m actually planning to grab that particular politically correct dilemma by the horns soon, but because of my own uncertainty early in the series we have a shortage of non-white vampires.

  —Laurell

  Are the Fangs Real?

  Vampires as Racial Metaphor in the Anita Blake Novels

  by Mikhail Lyubansky, Ph.D.

  They’re physically powerful and capable of unusual speed. They’re sexually seductive, in a forbidden sort of way, and dangerous—even the well-mannered, law-abiding ones are, at their core, perilous. They may look human, but they’re not. They’re monsters, ever ready to prey and feed on human fears, if not their lives. Vampires? Of course. But vampires have never been just vampires. As vampire literature expert Elizabeth Miller 3 points out, “the vampire always embodies the contemporary threat.” Sure, the Anita Blake novels can be read as light, escapist fiction, but intended or not, the vampires within represent a umber of marginalized groups that are perceived as a threat by mainstream society, particularly immigrants and racial minorities. This essay brings this racial metaphor to the foreground.

  It All Starts with Dracula

  It doesn’t, of course, 4 but Dracula is the most famous vampire of all. More than 200 films have been made featuring the Count, and the estimate of films that reference Dracula is in the 600s. And that’s just film. The Anita Blake series is part of an entire genre of vampire novels (all undoubtedly influenced by Dracula) that now numbers more than a thousand. Perhaps not quite the way the good Count intended, but Dracula did indeed sire an entire universe.

  Stoker’s novel was itself part of a literary movement called “invasion literature,” a genre that included more than 400 books, many bestsellers, in the period from 1871 to 1914. Invasion literature was driven by anxiety about hypothetical invasions by foreigners (H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds is the prototypical and best known work), an anxiety that Stoker deliberately (pardon the pun) stoked with his tale of Dracula, who polluted the English bloodline both literally and metaphorically. Indeed, what distinguished Dracula from his vampire predecessors is that his attacks involved not only the possibility of death but the actual loss of one’s identity, in particular one’s racial identity. As John Stevenson observed in “A Vampire in the Mirror: The Sexuality of Dracula,” blood is not just food, semen, and a means to eternal life, but also a “crucial metaphor” for racial identity. Dracula’s threat, Stevenson argues, is not mere miscegenation (the mixing of blood) but deracination, for Dracula’s sexual partners become pure vampires, with loyalties to Dracula, not Britain.

  This perceived racial threat to Britain is the subject of Stephen Arata’s “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization,” in which he describes vampirism as “a colonization of the body” and “the biological and political annihilation of the weaker race by the stronger.” At a time when British global influence was waning, unrest in its colonies rising, and concerns about the morality of imperialism increasing, Dracula, according to Arata, represented “deep rooted anxieties and fears” of reverse colonization, of civilized Britain “overcome by the forces of barbarism” in the form of immigration from Eastern Europe.5

  But there was yet another perceived racial menace in nineteenth century England: the Semitic threat. Unlike the “barbaric” East Europeans, at the end of the nineteenth century, European Jews were relatively literate and overrepresented among the bourgeois class. They were nonetheless resented, distrusted, and disliked, perceived as the racial other, an “alien” nation even within their own native England. Dracula embodied this threat, too. As Judith Halberstam observed in Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and Technology of Monsters, Dracula “exhibits all the stereotyping of nineteenth-century anti-Semitism” including anti-Semitic physiognomy such as a hooked nose, pointed ears, and claw-like hands, not to mention blood (a measure of racial status and purity) and money, both central features of anti-Semitism. Thus, Dracula is a hybrid of the racial other—the barbaric immigrant from without and the alien Jew within. As such, he posed a double threat to British nationalism and to British women in particular. In Halberstam’s words, “he is a monster versatile enough to represent fears about race, nation, and sexuality, a monster who combines in one body fears of the foreign and the perverse.”

  The American Vampire

  By the 1950s, the United States had replaced Britain as a superpower, and the threat of immigration and Semitic hegemony had given way to the racial threat posed by “negroes.” Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend6 integrates this new political landscape into the vampire mythology, with Black Americans, as Kathy Davis Paterson puts it in “Echoes of Dracula,” taking on the role of the metaphorical “monstrous Other that threatens the dominant society … from within.”

  The plot of I Am Legend consists of a solitary man of English-German stock, Robert Neville, trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world in which a terrible plague has turned the rest of humanity into vampires. The vampires have no obvious racial markers, but Neville consistently associates them with blackness. For example, he describes the vampires as “something black and of the night” and despairs that “the black bastards had beaten him.” But Matheson’s use of vampires to discuss race goes far beyond these relatively subtle racial labels. Like Stoker’s Dracula, his vampires provide a window into the racial dynamics of the time. Neville’s alcohol-induced internal dialogue is telling in this respect and as such is worth a close examination:

  Friends, I come before you to discuss the vampire: a minority element if there ever was one, and there was one.

  But to concision: I will sketch out the basis for my thesis … : Vampires are prejudiced against.

  The keynote of minority prejudice is this: They are loathed because they are feared… .

  At one time … the vampire’s power was great, the fear of him tremendous. He was anathema and still remains anathema.

  Society hates him without ration.

  But are his needs any more shocking than the needs of other animals and men? Are his deeds more outrageous than the deeds of the parent who drained the spirit from his child? …

  Really, now, search your soul; lovie—is the vampire so bad? All he does is drink blood.

  Why, then, this unkind prejudice, this thoughtless bias? Why cannot the vampire live where he chooses? Why must he seek out hiding places where none can find him out? Why do you wish him destroyed?

  Ah, see, you have turned the poor guileless innocent into a haunted animal. He has no means of support, no measures for proper education, he has not the voting franchise. No wonder he is compelled to seek out a predatory nocturnal existence.

  Robert Neville grunted a surly grunt. Sure, sure, he thought, but would you let your sister marry one?

  In this relatively brief passage, Matheson quickly establishes the parallel to Blacks (a minority element) and then accurately represents the racial climate of the time period, in which Blacks were “prejudiced against,” “loathed because they were feared,” and irrationally hated. But Matheson takes the metaphor even further. He notes that the vampires (Blacks) cannot
live where they choose (legalized segregation under Jim Crow), must avoid the mainstream community in order to survive (lest a White person make a false accusation), and lack the means to both education and political efficacy. Neville, like many White people of the 1950s, cannot but be aware of the injustice, and there is a part of him that questions its necessity. One gets the sense that he usually keeps such feelings at arm’s length, as one must to go along with an unjust system, but on this occasion the whiskey allows him to actually contemplate the system’s fairness, to not only recognize the injustice but to attribute the undesirable behavior (a predatory nocturnal existence) of the “minority element” to the injustice of the system rather than to an inherently evil and uncivilized nature. It’s a perspective that none of Dracula’s hunters could have ever considered and was remarkable even for its day. But it’s a fleeting sentiment, one clearly produced by the whiskey, and Neville quickly dismisses it with a question reflecting an anti-miscegenation ideology that was characteristic of both late nineteenth century England and mid-twentieth century United States.

  Jean-Claude et al.

  The vampires that populate the Anita Blake universe are direct descendants of Dracula and the rest of the vampire lore. This is established in the first book, Guilty Pleasures, when we are first introduced to Jean-Claude, who “looked like how a vampire was supposed to look,” as well as by occasional references to Dracula himself, as when, in her showdown with the master vampire Nikolaos, Anita remarks, “all we need is the theme from Dracula, Prince of Darkness, and we’ll be all set.” However, just as the sociopolitical landscape changed significantly from Dracula’s time to the time of I Am Legend, by the time Anita Blake gets into the vampire hunting business, the sociopolitical Zeitgeist had undergone another substantial shift.