#catholic vampire story

[atlantic-riona]

Though I Walk Through the Valley

Written for @inklings-challenge 2024. A Catholic college student and a vampire take a trip to the Underworld. Shenanigans ensue. There are four parts.

I. A Visitor of the Vampiric Variety

I opened the door to find Malachy standing on the steps, one hand raised to knock. He looked about as surprised to see me as I was him, and after a few moments spent staring blankly at each other—vague remnants of thoughts regarding grocery lists and the possibility of afternoon naps still floating about my mind, Lord only knows what was circling his—he pulled himself together to give me a strained imitation of his usual annoying smirk. “Fancy a trip to Hell?”

I slammed the door in his face.

Honestly, upon later reflection, I should have left it like that. I still had no intention of getting mixed up in his world, even if Isa—well. My best friend and I were cautiously on speaking terms now, but the argument we’d had loomed forbiddingly in the background of every interaction, even though by silent, mutual agreement we didn’t acknowledge it.

But curiosity got the better of me, and I opened the door again, just a crack. “What.”

In the twilight shadows of evening, his slightly ominous expression would have sent shivers down any onlooker’s spine. Here in the warm afternoon sun, it merely looked out of place. “There’s a problem.”

“Yes, it’s called an irritating vampire refusing to get off my doorstep,” I retorted. “Was there something new, or…?”

“The Circle,” he said simply, and my blood ran cold.

“Goodbye,” I said, and shut the door firmly. I could hear him calling me through the door about needing my help, but I ignored this. And when I heard the windows rattling, I picked up my spray bottle, helpfully labeled “HOLY WATER,” and pointed it meaningfully (label side facing the window) in his general direction. He got the hint. At least I assumed he did, because the windows stopped rattling soon after.

Still, just in case, I went around the house, double-checking that all the windows and doors had crosses nailed above them, or rosaries wrapped around their handles. Call me paranoid, but I’d seen a lot of movies, and I was taking no chances.

I didn’t see Malachy for three days. And good riddance, said I. So when he showed up at my doorstep, looking inordinately pleased with himself, I certainly was not pleased myself.

I leaned against the door, which was open just a crack, and said clearly, “Go away.”

“Lili, you’ll want to hear this,” he said, grinning. Somehow he’d recovered his equanimity in the past three days, and I didn’t think it was for any reason I’d like.

The grin annoyed me. I pointed at the miniscule amount of space between the door and its frame, and said, “You see this? It’s about how much interest I have in whatever you’re about to say. And it’s only open so you can hear me tell you to go away, which means realistically my interest is much lower.” I had briefly considered shouting at him through the closed door, but regretfully had set that plan aside. I didn’t want him trying to crawl through the windows again.

“It’s about Isa,” he said. 

Through the opening, I gave him the old stinkeye.

He laughed. “Charming as ever, I see.”

“Did Isa send you?” I asked coldly, and not without a little pointedness.

His composure slipped a fraction. “No,” he admitted after a long minute. “I’m here without her knowing.”

I knew I’d regret this, but I still unhooked the chain and pulled it all the way open. “What is it, then?”

I had forgotten the secondary reason for keeping the door mostly closed, but it quickly sprang to mind when Theresa’s excited shriek from the living room deafened me. “Is that Malachy?”

“No,” I yelled back. “Go do your homework!”

But it was a fruitless endeavor to tell your little sister to do something as dull as solving for x when there was a live, breathing—well, dead and unbreathing—vampire at the front door, and it was doubly fruitless when said little sister had been obsessed with all things supernatural (especially the fanged variety) for years. Theresa came sprinting out of the living room, vaulting an armchair in her enthusiasm and skidding to a stop in her pink-and-white polka-dotted socks. “Malachy!” she cried happily. “Come in, come in, I have so many questions!” She’d already nabbed a clipboard from somewhere and was now squinting through her glasses to locate a pen.

As the point I wanted to make was already moot—namely, that inviting vampires into your house traditionally never ended well—I settled for giving Malachy a stare of loathing as I removed the cross hanging over the door, before stepping out of his way. He, in turn, gave me a brilliant smile, one that prominently displayed his sharp white teeth, before stepping inside.

He clearly thought Theresa was cute, but easily brushed aside, since immediately after greeting her with amusement, he turned to me, as if to continue our earlier conversation. How quickly he’d forgotten! I didn’t feel motivated to disabuse him of his misunderstanding, so I merely settled back, arms crossed, to watch the show.

“You remember how we found out that Isa’s condition is because she’s a descendant of—” he began, but broke off with a startled look when Theresa briskly pinched his arm through the leather jacket he was wearing. “What the hell?”

“Language!” I hissed.

Theresa ignored the both of us, scribbling something down on her clipboard. “So you’ve got pain receptors,” she said, clicking her tongue thoughtfully. “Which means your brain is capable of receiving and translating signals, even though it’s technically not alive, according to my research. Or is it alive? Does the blood you consume reanimate your life systems? Is that why you need to constantly replenish it?” She looked up inquiringly through the bright pink frames of her glasses at Malachy, who stared at her.

“Er—yes. I do need blood to…operate, as it were.” For the first time in my memory, he seemed discomfited.

Theresa nodded. “Right, blood’s very important to staying alive and operational, but it’s not really the only thing you need. How about oxygen? Do you need to breathe?”

He blinked at her, and then at me. Like I was going to rescue him from his flailing. I was enjoying myself too much. “To speak, mostly. And habit. I don’t actually require it.”

“Interesting.” Theresa scribbled something furiously on the clipboard, elbowing me when I tried to peer over her shoulder at what she’d written. “Then I wonder how you’re accomplishing cellular respiration. Of course, blood transports oxygen, so I thought that might be why vampires needed it, but if you don’t need to breathe, then how are you getting that oxygen? And how are your organs functioning? Or are they functioning? Are they rotting inside you right now?” She took a step forward, as if to start looking, and Malachy actually backed up a step.

“There will be no autopsies in this house,” I said loudly, “especially if you’ll be finding rotting organs. I just cleaned the carpets.”

“My organs are not rotting!”

“Didn’t ask, don’t care, they probably are, but that’s your problem, not mine.”

“They are not—”

“I have a scalpel, we could check,” Theresa piped up, beaming. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about your regeneration and healing capabilities, anyway.”

We both looked at her.

“How old is she?” Malachy asked me in an undertone.

“She’s turning twelve on Friday,” I said, not bothering to keep my voice down. “And speaking of, Theresa, if you want a party Friday afternoon, you’d better finish your homework ahead of time. You can bother Malachy afterwards.” I’d probably pay her to do it, if he was overstaying his welcome.

She gave me a pleading look. “Just a couple more questions?”

Behind her, Malachy was shaking his head no. I bestowed a beautiful smile on him, and told her, “Of course! You can have three.”

Theresa was physically incapable of sticking to three pre-planned questions. I let her herd him into the living room, talking at the speed that only middle-schoolers could achieve, and went into the kitchen to grab some supplies.

I came back out to find Malachy eyeing Theresa warily as she industriously wrote out calculations on her clipboard. He was sitting on one of the armchairs—the one that happened to be farthest from any doors or windows, I noticed. Coincidentally, these were all covered in crosses.

“Homework,” I said firmly, and she sent me a pleading look, but I shook my head at her, and she sighed. Collecting all of her things, she dragged herself out of the living room. As I set the vase down on the end table. I could hear her sadly thumping her way upstairs and into her room.

Malachy nodded at me, which was probably the closest I’d ever get to a “thank you” from him. Then he sniffed the air, and frowned over at the end table by the couch. “Is that…?”

I arranged the garlic flowers in the vase to display their purple petals a little more prominently. “Just testing out some questions of my own. Say, if I spilled some beans just now”—I had, there were a few on the floor by the couch—“would you feel compelled to clean them up?”

He had been regarding the garlic flowers with narrowed eyes, but turned away from his contemplation long enough to give me a scornful look. “I’m not a jiāngshī, am I?”

That piqued my curiosity. “There are different types of vampires?”

Malachy laughed. “As many as there are legends about them. Hollywood doesn’t have a copyright on the supernatural world, you know.”

“Great,” I muttered. So not everything I knew about vampires would apply to every one. Lovely. Guess I’d better start stocking beans in my purse alongside garlic and rosaries.

“That’s not really important right now,” he said, and I stared at the carpet. Normally Malachy never passed up the chance to mock my understanding of the supernatural world—if he was doing so now, the world must be ending soon. And I didn’t want any part in the trouble he’d probably brought with him, but on the other hand—Isa.

Just because my best friend had started dating a vampire—and been drawn further and further into a world that seemed bent on killing her—didn’t mean I wouldn’t do everything in my power to help her.

And right now, she wasn’t doing too well. Apparently, one of her direct ancestors had been attacked by a very powerful vampire, one who’d been thought to have perished ages ago. But now he’d resurfaced, and Isa was experiencing side effects from it. Odd dreams and lethargy being the least of them.

That was my understanding of the issue. The Circle had other ideas. 

“What’s the problem?”

“You remember the Circle,” he said, and I grimaced. Yeah, I remembered them—the organization of witches that basically wanted to run the supernatural world, and the ones who’d taken issue with some of my critiques of said world. It was kind of hard to forget, since Isa and I had fought over her decision to work with them, among other things. The fight had culminated in some fairly harsh things being said on both sides—but I didn’t like to think about that.

Suffice to say, I disliked the Circle and the feeling was mutual.

“What about them?” I said, as neutrally as I could manage.

“They have a lead on Isa’s condition,” he said, “but it involves a trip to the Underworld.”

After a polite pause, in which I gave him ample time to crack a smile at his joke, I reluctantly concluded that he was being serious. “Underworld? As in Hades and the three Fates? Hercules?” I’d really only ever seen the Disney movie.

“Hades, Annwn, Hel, Yomi, Elysium—whatever name you call it by, yes. There’s a key there that might help in a ritual, apparently. Something about using a key from the land of the dead to break the connection between her blood and the vampire’s. Sometime in the next week, the Circle—and Isa—are going to try to summon this key. I’d really rather avoid the risks of Isa attracting the kinds of beings that populate the Underworld, and so I’m proposing to nip in and retrieve it before this becomes a mess of drastic proportions.”

I crossed my arms and resisted the urge to curl up on the couch. It wasn’t that cold, even for October. “Okay. So what do you need me for?”

He gave me a long look. “You’ve heard of Orpheus?”

I shook my head. 

“The state of education is shameful, these days,” he muttered. “To cut a long story short—Orpheus was a musician whose wife died. He traveled to the Underworld to ask for her life back. He got it, but at a price. On the way up, if he turned to look back at her, she’d be lost to him forever. Three guesses as to how the story ends.”

“With the redemptive power of love and faith leading to a happy ending?” I said defiantly.

“Wrong. He looks back just once, and no more wife. She was sent back to the underworld forever. Then he died.”

“Of grief?”

“No, actually, he got ripped apart by a group of madwomen later in his life. For disrespecting the gods, I believe. But I digress.”

I slouched back, the soft cushion of the couch dipping under my weight. “That’s a terrible story.”

“The point is, that you must have heard of any number of stories where human champions descend underground to a supernatural world. Alice in Wonderland? Labyrinth?” He caught my surprised look at the casual references to modern fiction and arched an eyebrow. “I’ve lived a long while. You fill up the time somehow, and television’s everywhere now.”

I tried to imagine Malachy sitting in front of the TV, watching as the cartoon Alice in her poofy blue dress spoke to Tweedledee and Tweedledum, and couldn’t quite manage it. For one, where’d he get the TV from? It’s not like he had a house—would the cable guys set one up in a crypt?

Did he even live in a crypt? When he wasn’t crashing on Isa’s couch, I mean.

“The point is that getting to the Underworld’s not so bad, dangers and guardians notwithstanding. In some cases, it’s disturbingly easy to do so. It’s getting out that’s the problem. See, you need someone who…well. Can withstand temptation. Strong moral character, and all that.”

“…” said I, staring at him.

He rolled his eyes. “Some people would take that as a compliment.”

“Wow, the undead creature of the night that makes it a habit to drain people of all their blood thinks I have strong moral character because I—tell him that what he does is wrong? Amazing. I’m truly astounded you managed to find one person to fit your criteria with that level of moral understanding.”

Then again, it was a world that apparently thought vampires were sexy precisely because of the undead blood-drinking thing, so maybe he had something there. Case in point: every time I went to the internet to research supernatural creatures, I had to wade through pages of supernatural romance shows, books, art, what-have-you, before I ever got to what might be considered even slightly academic. If not practical—somehow I doubted that the researchers at Harvard had ever had to deal with the problem of a vampire inviting himself over to tea once a week. I declined to share this thought with him, however.

He arched an eyebrow at me. “Well? Will you do it?”

“What kind of temptation are we talking about here?” I was reluctant to commit, even though I knew in the end I’d do it.

“Any and all.”

Helpful.

Actually, I’d share that thought with him. “Helpful,” I said. “Elaborate?”

Malachy gave me a thin-lipped smile. “Death’s more attractive than you might think. And if not that, then fear.”

“Of…?”

“The unknown? Being left behind? Of it all being a trick? Remember, Orpheus turned around.”

I narrowed my eyes. “And the chances of getting out?”

He gave me his most charming smile. “I have every confidence in your talents, Lili.”

I arched an eyebrow of my own.

“Being the most stubborn, uptight, Miss-Morally-Righteous woman I’ve ever had the misfortune to meet in death,” he said, still smiling. “Also, you know, very strong belief. And you know how important that is, when it comes to my world.”

I did. Crosses, as far as I understood, hurt vampires—at least the kind I was familiar with—because (depending on what belief one subscribed to) they symbolized the resurrection of the dead, which vampires couldn’t partake in due to their unnatural state, or the power of God, or Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross. Explanations varied. 

While crosses and other holy objects (Christian, so far as I had experienced—jury was still out on other religions, though with Malachy’s reveal of different kinds of vampires, now I wondered) all had the ability to make vampires flinch back, it was the item holder’s faith that gave it real power. And it wasn’t just faith in the item, but what it represented.

Months ago, Malachy had seen me keep back a vampire with nothing more than the Sign of the Cross and two popsicle sticks held in a cross shape. So I suppose to him, that was a sign—no pun intended—of my strong faith.

I wasn’t so sure about that. Somehow, I didn’t think that being able to hold back creatures of the night was more faith-filled than, say, volunteering my time at a soup kitchen, or helping old ladies cross the street, or any number of good works that I could be doing instead of coming home at the end of a day filled with classes and multiple shifts, collapsing on my bed, and promptly passing out, repeat ad nauseam.

But there wasn’t really any point to having a theological debate with this particular vampire about anything, much less Matthew 7:21-23.

“All right,” I said, “I’ll do it.”

That really should have been the end of it. I told him I didn’t have a day off until Saturday, two days from then (and conveniently for me, the day after Theresa’s birthday party, because there was no way I was planning, hosting, and then cleaning up a party for middle-schoolers after literally going to Hades). We set a time, he told me what to bring, and that was that.

Only it wasn’t.

Because Friday afternoon was when the school called to tell me Theresa went missing.

The first thing I did was—well. Panic, to be frank. This wasn’t the first time Theresa had gotten in trouble, and since the last time it had happened, it had involved a vampire of the non-Malachy variety—that is to say, not reasonable in any way and really rather bloodthirsty—I felt I was a little justified in doing so. Then, of course, I searched the house, called the school back, did all the normal things to check if her disappearance was due to something, well, normal.

Then, and only then, I called Isa.

The phone rang, and rang, and then—click!

My hopes were dashed when the voice I heard was the pre-recorded kind. I left a message, and then for good measure, texted her—though Isa had a flip phone, so I didn’t have real hopes of her texting back. And then I immediately called again. And again.

The other line connected, and I breathed a sigh of relief. “Isa. I know it’s not a great time, but—”

“She walks through the long dread valley of night,

hand-in-hand with the hunter and his queen.

She sleeps under snow, she sleeps under ice—

and she fades away from the springtime green.”

The voice on the other end was soft—almost mechanical in its recitation. Yet there was something mesmerizing in the quiet rhythm of the words, hardly discernable through the crackling of the poor connection. As soon as the last word was spoken, the voice started over from the beginning. I don’t know how long I stood there, listening to the strange voice.

In fact, I was still listening, transfixed, when I sensed something behind me.

I whipped around, one of the kitchen knives in hand, to find Malachy regarding me with a raised eyebrow. Without lowering the knife, I lifted the phone away from my ear. I could still hear the voice tinnily in the background. “What was the last thing I said to you when you were over here on Monday?”

“It was Thursday, and I believe it was the equivalent of, ‘go back to whatever hell you spawned from,’ only the politer equivalent due to attentive young ears,” he said, but his heart wasn’t in the banter. “Have you heard from Isa?”

Damn. So it was really him. With trembling fingers, I put the knife back in the block. “No. I’ve been calling. Listen to this.”

Without the usual malicious pleasure I would have taken in doing so, I shoved the phone up next to his ear. 

He listened to it a few times, ended the call, and scrubbed at his face, which was looking a little paler than usual. For a corpse, at any rate. “She’s missing.”

“So’s Theresa,” I said, feeling cold. I put the phone away, reluctant to even look at it. It was strange to have something so obviously supernatural happen over such a modern device as the phone. “What do you think is going on?”

“I found out that the Circle was ahead of schedule and carried out their ritual at midnight. Apparently, they lost track of Isa at noon today.” He said this in a way that indicated to me that someone in the Circle had been left very unhappy when he discovered this. “When did your sister go missing?”

“I don’t know the exact time, but the school called me around one.”

“Not promising.”

“Do you think—”

“—it’s related? Probably. At least, you’d better hope, because I only know a potential method to track Isa, not your little tagalong.”

“Oh, God,” I said. “Where do you think—?”

“Better grab your jacket,” he said. “Looks like we’re making an early start on our road trip to Hell.”

[ash-eats-film]

Okay fuck it I'm sharing my OCs and y'all have to deal with it.

(art by @suddenly-frankenstein) This is Father Elias D'Arcy, a Catholic priest who was forcibly turned into a vampire in the 1800s as a cruel joke by one of the excommunicated parishioners of the church he was raised in and eventually chosen to preside over. After he's turned, the church fears his power too much to cast him out, choosing instead to hide him and move him from church to church across the country whenever the parishioners grow too close to discovering what he is or when he fucks up majorly and they have to do a quick coverup.

(art by @suddenly-frankenstein) This is Jacob McCarthy, one of the deacons of a church Elias presides over in the mid 1950s. He's gone his whole life convincing himself he can be straight, marries a girl he grew up in the church with, has a couple kids, ya know the heteronormative works. The oldest of four and the only son, he was expected to carry on the family legacy, take over his father's law practice, and overall be the perfect representation of a good Catholic. Then he met Elias.

(art by @suddenly-frankenstein) It was love at first sight for both of them, forever changing the course of their lives, and for the next few years, they have a passionate and loving affair. It's the happiest either of them is in their entire lives. Jacob finds out about Elias' vampiric nature and loves him despite it, and even admires him more for holding to his faith despite what he's become when others would've turned their back on their faith and blamed God for allowing it to happen. But of course...ya know something is gonna go wrong.

(art by @suddenly-frankenstein) Elias starts to neglect his hunger, finding himself drawn closer to his humanity again because of Jacob. Jacob gives him a little of his own blood every now and then, but never too much that it's harmful to him. Until one night Elias hasn't fed in a few days, and in the throes of passion he takes too much, putting Jacob on the brink of death. In his final moments, Elias begs Jacob to let him turn him, but Jacob refuses, knowing it would mean never seeing his family again and having to live as one of the walking damned. But he forgives Elias for what's happened to him, and even as he lays dying, only smiles and tells him he's happy to have experienced true love even if it led to his death. He dies in Elias' arms, leaving him alone and empty in his painful eternity once again, forced to flee in the middle of the night.

(art by @sarahp_draws on Instagram) As the years go by, Elias is haunted by Jacob's death, on occasion believing he sees the actual ghost of his lover, wishing only to join him and having no heart in his faith anymore. He only stays with the church because it's the only life he ever knew for nearly 200 years and he promised Jacob on his death bed he would continue in his servitude. In the era of the Satanic panic, he's moved to a church with another priest with sinful thoughts of his own, Elias only wanting to help the young man who sees demons and hears voices with a sexual fascination for the divine. But when he discovers Elias' true nature, he betrays him, outing him to the parish and claiming he was attacked. In the early hours of the morning, they find Elias before the church can help him escape, dragging him down the steps of the church and into the light of the morning where he's reduced to ashes, and in a way, finally free.

(art by @jalattes)

That's just a quick summary about them, if y'all would be interested in hearing more, I'd be more than happy to share. I literally love them both so much and have thought WAY too much about their back stories and their story together I needed somewhere to put this.

[mostlyvoid-partiallyflowers]

The most recent episode of Interview with a Vampire let's us see Lestat's side of the story and see how it compares to Louis' accounting of their relationship. As a result, it reaffirms just how unreliable of a narrator Louis is, but it also further illuminates elements of his character that the director and writers have been playing with since the beginning of the show.

There's this part in the episode where Lestat turns to Louis and apologizes and it's framed with Lestat turned to Louis on one side and Claudia on his other side. They're the angel and devil on Louis' shoulders, but who is the angel and who is the devil? And as my friend said, Armand and Daniel are placed into that same dynamic with Louis later on. We are being asked to decide who to trust, who's telling the truth, who's the good guy, but the fact of unreliability robs us of that decision.

This whole story is about Louis, he's the protagonist, though not the narrator, and he is constantly being pulled in two directions, no matter when or where he is in his story. He's a mind split in two, divided by nature and circumstance. He's vampire and human, owner and owned, father and child, angel and devil. He's both telling the story and being told the story. His history is a story he tells himself, and as we've seen, sometimes that story is not whole.

Louis is the angel who saved Claudia from the fire but he's also the devil who sentenced her to an life of endless torment, the adult trapped in the body of a child. He's the angel who rescued Lestat from his grief and also the devil who abandoned him, who couldn't love him, could only kill and leave him.

He's pulled in two directions, internally and externally at all times and so it's no wonder that he feels the need to confess, first to the priest, then Daniel, and then Daniel again.

He's desperate to be heard, a Black man with power in Jim Crow America who's controlled by his position as someone with a seat at the table but one who will never be considered equal. He doesn't belong to the Black community or the white community, he can't. He acts as a go-between, a bridge, one who is pushed and pulled until he can't take it anymore. He's a fledgling child to an undead father, he's a young queer man discovering his sexual identity with an infinitely experienced partner. He's confessing because he wants to be absolved, that human part of him that was raised Catholic, that child who believed, he wants to be saved. He wants to be seen.

Louis wants to attain a forever life that is morally pure, but he can't. He's been soiled by sin, by "the devil," as he calls Lestat, and he can never be clean again. Deep down, I think he knows this, but he can't stop trying to repent. He tries to self-flagellate by staying with Lestat and then tries to repent by killing him, but can't actually follow through. He follows Claudia to Europe to try and assuage his guilt. He sets himself on fire, attempts to burn himself at the stake, to purify his body, rid himself of the dark gift.

Louis is a man endlessly trying to account for the pain he has caused and he ultimately fails, over and over again, because he can't get rid of what he is. A monster. He's an endlessly hungry monster. He's hungry for love, for respect, for power, for forgiveness, for death. He's a hole that can never be filled. He can never truly acquire any of those things because he will always be punishing himself for wanting and needing them in the first place. He will never truly believe he deserves them and as a result, can't accept them if they are ever offered. He can never be absolved for he has damned himself by accepting the dark gift and thus has tainted himself past the point of saving.

[arcadianambivalence]

Started reading The Vampire Armand to help me understand the backstory for a fic I've been planning.

I knew what was coming. I'd read the summary. I was warned by so many fans, but still...this is one of the saddest fucking works of fiction I've read in a long time...and I'm only on chapter three.

[simsdaughters]

We have a dire lack of good occult/goth cc for children 😔

[louisetaylor]

hmmm...lestat just broke into the church...he punched through a guy's head, how romantic..."I can free you of this life of shame..." yeah right lestat, do it by force and he will resent you for decades as I know he will...

ok now louis is drinking from him and I kind of wish he was drinking from lestat's neck, somewhere more intimate than his wrist...or it would be nice if lestat held him while he drank...oh well

[izengard]

Sincerely I just can't get behind the new "Interview with a Vampire" show because of Anne Rice. I loved her books for years (as a teen in the late 90s and early 2000s) and then I started getting into fanfiction.. and the fact she was so against it put me off.

I'm now 40 and frankly I just can't wrap my head around the fact that Anne Rice used to get her legal team to take down fanfics.

So if I found a really good one, I had the risk of never finding it again because of her.

[charmingradiobelle]

I remember back in elementary school my friends and I would play pretend and we’d be characters from whatever show or movie we were into, and I once suggested we be Mario characters (I was Toadette) and I don’t remember exactly what the plot was but I’m 90% sure it was the most bizarre game we ever played

[monsieurenjlolras]

The reason Bella and Edwards relationship dynamic doesn't work as a vampire romance is because they're louis and lestat but she's lestat

[ash-eats-film]

Seeing there's actual interest in my OCs Jacob and Elias means a lot because these guys are currently consuming my whole creative mind. 🥹😭

I'm currently working on wiki page style summaries for both of them which I will post on here when I'm done for those who wanna see!!!

[winters-tales]

Yo, Beg My Forgiveness sounds awesome. What's that about?

Thank you! It's a little bit of blasphemy from an ex-Catholic.

So, I like my vampire stories. I like how far they go back into various myths and legends and folklores, I like the different takes on them, I like it all.

Beg My Forgiveness is the idea that the first vampire is Lazarus, after the miracle of Jesus raising him from the dead didn't quiiiite work.

Because sure, God is infallible and all-powerful etc etc... but Jesus was still just a man, and humans are not infallible, no matter how much divine power they have.

Did you know that with the story of Lazarus, Jesus specifically waited until he knew Lazarus was dead, specifically waiting until the traditional period of waiting with the body (iirc it was 3 days) was over and the body was prepared, before he even started the return journey back? He deliberately waited until there would be absolutely no doubt at all that Lazarus had died, before he went to go and bring him back. This man was supposedly his friend.

What would that do to someone? To know that your friend had let you die just to... what? To prove himself, when he's already done that a thousand times over? How much pain was Lazarus in when he died?

How much pain would he be in, knowing that his death was down to one person's choice?

TL;DR: it's mostly just me finding new ways to spite my Catholic upbringing. Or work through the religious trauma.

[lady-starkiller]

obsessed with the Missing in every line of dialogue in “interview with the vampire”…like you know there is Something Else lurking and it’s seeping through the pages!

[myfanfictiongarden]

Just one more thing to add: ep2 proved that Sister Agatha is the most badass there is.

[mayhemchicken-varneyposting]

in Varney the Vampire, there is approximately 1 female lead per story setting, but discounting all the little vignettes there are 2 main ones (Clara Crofton and Flora Bannerworth). clara dies in her section, but flora lives, begging the question...

in dracula there is a cowboy and the female lead lives. in nosferatu there is no cowboy and the female lead dies. ergo, the existence of a cowboy is highly important for the survival of the female lead in a gothic vampire story.

[vampthropologist]

I love having anthropological knowledge on hand. I just set up the basis for two separate fictional religions, and the sects that would sprout from them.

[heliza24]

Consent and Abuse in The Vampire Chronicles (and how it explains things like Daniel and Louis's disappearances)

TW: discussions of abuse, sexual abuse and rape, and CSA throughout this meta.

I’ve now read the first six Vampire Chronicles books, and I want to talk about the role that consent, or more importantly, the lack thereof, plays in the morality the books espouse. When I was a few books in, I discovered this post by @diasdelasombra, which uses excerpts from several scholarly texts to create a schema that helps us understand who Anne Rice considered a “worthy” victim of abuse. To summarize, the characters that Anne favors and who are featured in the narrative were violated against their will, but don’t whine about their misfortune. Instead they extend grace and forgiveness to their abuser. (Think of David or Lestat) The characters who are portrayed as conniving, wicked, or who are punished by the narrative are those who don’t adequately protest their assault, or who harbor anger or plans of revenge towards their abuser (think of Claudia).

When I say abuse here, I am specifically talking about sexual abuse and rape, but also being turned into a vampire against your will. Being bitten by a vampire is obviously sexually coded, and being transformed into a fledgling vampire nonconsensually is a metaphor for a rape. So I’m going to spend this meta talking about nonconsensual turnings interchangeably with rape.

When I read about the dichotomy of victimhood detailed in the original post, the books suddenly shifted in my mind, and I felt like I understood Anne as a writer for the first time. I love these books and their resulting adaptations, but I do believe that Anne had many flawed beliefs, and this insistence that the only proper response to assault is complete and total forgiveness of the perpetrator is certainly one of them. I want to take the theory put forward by the original post one step further, and propose that in addition to imperfect victims, Anne also struggled to write about characters that engaged in sex/vampirism consensually. This feels very Catholic to me; you’re allowed to enjoy sex, but only if you didn’t ask for it. It’s the lust and the longing that’s sinful. It’s this discomfort with consensual desire, along with the insistence that victims must forgive their abusers, that is at the heart of many of the most frustrating aspects of the Vampire Chronicles. It also drives some of the conflict I see in the fandom, and has the potential to impact the TV adaptation in interesting ways. I talk about all of that in detail below the cut:

We can see this central belief about abuse and worthy victims easily in the characters Anne chooses to feature. Lestat, David, and Marius were all turned against their will, but crucially do not linger, protest, or whine once the act is done. Lestat is incapable of holding any kind of grudge, Marius approaches vampirism and eternity with calm stoicism, and David immediately forgives Lestat for turning him against his will.

I think this is key when we try to understand why Anne wanted to replace Louis with David as a companion for Lestat. Louis’s turning is complicated; you get the sense that he did consent to it, even as he tells Daniel that he “can’t say that [he] decided” to become a vampire. And even though he does forgive Lestat at the end of IwtV, the telling of the story in that book is filled with resentment and anger. Louis is not a perfect bastion of forgiveness by any means. Anne talked about how she wanted to move on from the grief that Louis represented and also the passivity he embodies as a character (which she classifies as uniquely feminine, which adds another dimension of meaning to who is allowed to consent to sexual acts and remain angry at abuse) but I also have to assume that she wanted to move on from his anger. Which is actually a huge disservice to Louis, Lestat, and the complexity of the narrative.

The other characters who are turned consensually are all abandoned by the narrative. Madeleine is killed, Gabrielle largely disappears after TVL, Nicki kills himself, and Daniel goes mad and is then simply forgotten.

My love of Daniel is the reason why I started stringing this theory together. Daniel is the most clear-cut case in the entire chronicles of a consenting adult who deeply desires to become a vampire. He has no reservations, no resistance. The Devil’s Minion chapter is unique in that it lingers on Daniel's love and desire. Daniel is briefly allowed to want something unabashedly that is also coded as sinful and evil. And once the consummation of his desire happens, Anne simply doesn’t know how to continue to writing him. Armand’s insistence that fledglings will come to hate their makers seems in some ways to be a result of Anne’s worldview, that desire cannot cannot endure unpunished, rather than something Armand would believe in-universe (he never hated Marius, after all). When fans rail at the way Daniel’s story seems to disappear from the page, this is what we are protesting: Daniel’s desire deserved to be shown, Daniel deserved to evolve, and Daniel’s willingness does not require rebuke.

There is of course another interpretation of the Devil’s Minion chapter, which is that it is Armand playing out his and Marius’s relationship, but this time with Armand in control. In some ways I think the Devil’s Minion chapter is the one successful attempt Anne makes to subvert the cycle of abuse. Yes, Armand is re-enacting many of the things done to him, but Daniel is happy to do this role play with him, at least for a while. While far from perfect, their relationship manages to turn abusive history into present day kink, and exist in a context of mutual care.

Armand himself is probably the most interesting edge case in terms of Anne’s dichotomy of worthy and unworthy victims. He asks to be turned into a vampire, but he’s also a child, which makes his ability to consent unclear. (Whether Anne even believed that child sexual abuse was possible at all is up for debate; she wrote a message on her “fan voice mail” that is still transcribed on her website that defends a convicted pedophile and seems to argue that 14 and 15 year olds are effectively adults and therefore cannot be abused. Yikes yikes yikes.) This kind of uncertainty seems to be reflected in the changing way Anne writes Armand throughout the series. He’s evil at first in the same way that Claudia is evil; a conniving forever child who is smart and vicious enough that what was done to him can be justified. But Anne softened on Armand after Queen of the Damned. As the series goes on, Armand comes to resemble Anne’s perfect victim more and more. He forgives Marius relatively quickly, for instance, for turning Benji and Sybelle without his consent.

For Marius (and Lestat) overcoming victim status also means becoming the abuser, the rapist, the perpetrator of the dark trick. The only way to not be trapped under the cycle of abuse is to perpetrate it. Even though it is hidden in a lot of language about love and forgiveness, this theme is ever present in the Chronicles and to me it’s where the true horror of the books lies.

We see these values begin to be applied to world building and the book’s overarching philosophy more and more as the series progresses. Akasha is the big bad in Queen of the Damned because she represents the ultimate lack of forgiveness. She is angry at all the men in the world for their collective abuses (a world view that seems to originate at least partially from the overly protective and restrictive way Enkil treats her, in my opinion) and seeks to kill them. She is an unquestioned evil, in a way that most characters aren’t in The Chronicles. And Maharet and Mekare, who are much more forgiving towards Khayman, one of the perpetrators of their own rape, are the ones able to defeat Akasha. Forgiveness and grace trumps righteous anger every time.

Memnoch the Devil is an interesting book (even if it is not a *good* one, imo) because it spends its pages interrogating this idea of abuse and forgiveness, but blows it up to a theological scale. Memnoch’s main argument with God is that he lets humans suffer needlessly. Memnoch feels that all that is good and holy amongst humans can be found in the way we love each other and find joy in sex, art, food, and celebration. But God requires humans to suffer through disease and death, and sometimes even violence brought about by religion. When Memnoch is put in charge of hell, he makes souls worthy of heaven by working on them until they are ready to forgive God for the suffering they had to endure during life. That’s what makes you worthy of heaven: forgiveness. I find this so interesting because it almost feels like Anne is arguing with herself over philosophy and religion. Memnoch is very convincing and his belief that joy without guilt is good is given due weight by the narrative. In some ways it’s what these books are about- sensual pleasure without guilt. But on the other hand, Memnoch is the devil (if that- Lestat is never quite sure if he’s really the devil or just a malignant spirit) which means we shouldn’t trust what he says. The idea of God as the ultimate abuser— the person who puts humanity through unspeakable horrors on a wide scale, and then requires our forgiveness in order to find peace— really chimes with the way that Anne writes about abuse in the rest of the series. According to this view, the cycle of abuse is absolutely inescapable. It is decreed by the almighty, and the only way to not be completely crushed by it is to accept its omnipresence and embrace its perpetrators without anger.

This focus on forgiveness is clearly a huge part of Anne’s (and therefore the vampires’) worldview, and I of course find that pretty problematic. But I also think it hurts the reader’s ability to connect to the characters and can have the unfortunate side effect of draining the books of the conflict needed to create a propulsive plot. The vampires’ inclination to completely forgive those who have wronged them, and to not linger at all in any feelings of anger, grief, or resentment, sometimes leads to baffling situations where conflicts that loom large in one book are completely forgotten in the next. The most jarring example of this to me is Armand casually playing chess with Santino in Queen of the Damned. Santino! The vampire who kidnapped him, forced him to eat his best friend, and generally tortured him. And they simply never address this. They just start playing a casual game of chess on Night Island after Akasha has been defeated. Situations like this can make character seem like they are acting completely out of character, and it makes it hard to understand their motives. Yes, there’s the in-universe explanation that time heals all wounds and eventually vampires just live long enough that they can’t hold any grudges. But I still think it’s reasonable to assume that Armand would hesitate before casually engaging with Santino again, no matter how long has passed. This kind of automatic forgiveness also means that we skip over so many conflicts that that would be fascinating to read about. If Armand and Santino really do need to reconcile, I want to see what that looks like. I want to see Armand remember Ricardo when he looks at Santino. I want to see what David and Lestat mending their relationship after Lestat’s violation looks like. But we don’t get any of that and instead the vampires move seamlessly on to something else, which is often much less interesting than these interpersonal conflicts that Anne ignores. And because of that, I think this focus on forgiveness creates books that are less fulfilling than they could be.

I think this focus on forgiveness is also at the heart of some of the conflict I see between book readers and show-only fans. I often see book readers talking about how Armand and Louis come back to each other later in the books, that Louis forgives Armand enough to live with him again for a time. And this makes sense in a book universe that prioritizes forgiveness above all else. In fact it actually signifies positive character growth for Louis, as it means he is becoming closer to Anne’s definition of a worthy victim who can forgive those who wronged him.

Fans of the show insist that the TV version of Louis will never forgive Armand, and for all I know they might be right. The TV show has shown that it’s very capable of taking the events and themes that Anne presented and reframing them. The show is already presenting a more critical depiction of CSA, in my opinion, by doing things like eliminating the incest subtext between Louis and Claudia and making it clear that Marius groomed Armand. I also think the show does a better job of keeping emotional stakes consistent. Louis may forgive Armand, but something more substantial than time passing will have to happen to facilitate that in the TV show. So show Louis may indeed never forgive Armand, given those new parameters.

In its efforts to reframe some of Anne’s themes, I believe the television show is shifting the emphasis on forgiveness slightly. Louis’s arc over the first two seasons depends on him reaching a state of forgiveness, not for an abuser, but for himself. He extends grace to Lestat as part of this process, but I really believe that the catharsis comes from Louis embracing his own failings and his own power, and moving forward with confidence. He has not forgotten his anger or the things that were taken from him, but he has the ability to face the rest of eternity now without self-recrimination. I imagine moving forward that this is going to be a major theme of the show. No matter if you sought vampirism out or had it thrust upon you, you must learn to how to deal with its horrors and its perks. You must learn to embrace your own monstrosity and not shrink from it. And you must find a way to accept the love that those around you are willing to offer, whether or not you always perfectly deserve it. I think these are lessons that Lestat, Armand, and even Daniel have yet to learn in the television show. Those character arcs are going to fuel the show through its coming seasons, and I for one cannot wait to see it unfold.

I’m interested to hear from other readers to see if they picked up on these themes, and how they anticipate the show will adapt them. Please tell me your thoughts! And thank you for reading this far.