Salon.com MobileThe spirit of the Vampire Slayer lives on in the kickass young heroines of urban fantasy fiction
Seventeen years ago a high school cheerleader in Southern California learned that she was the one girl of her generation chosen to stop the spread of evil -- namely, by slaying vampires. The cinematic incarnation of Buffy Summers wasn't a notable success, but when she returned five years later, this time to the small screen, a cult classic was born.
Though it's been off the air for six years now, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" lives on, in the theses of hundreds of culture studies grad students, in a series of comic books by creator Joss Whedon, in persistent rumors that some or all of the TV show's cast members may unite for a film (with or without Whedon), in seemingly countless spinoff novels, and of course, in fan fiction. But Buffy persists in other, less obvious ways, as well.
Whedon's original idea, to take "the little blonde girl who goes into a dark alley and gets killed in every horror movie" and make her the hero of the story, mutated into a remarkably flexible and inventive way to portray the terrors of adolescence. The supernatural elements of the stories provided Buffy and her friends with more than just monsters to kill; they served as metaphors for everyday identity crises and social anxieties, most famously when Buffy and her boyfriend, the redeemed vampire Angel, consummate their love, whereupon a gypsy curse renders him suddenly cruel and hateful.
This hybrid of teen angst and pulp adventure may not have made for the kind of mass-market success demanded by network television, but it was too yummy to simply subside into a cultural footnote. The spirit of Buffy Summers is perpetuated not just in official "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" media, but also in a thriving genre of popular fiction, usually labeled "urban fantasy," in which young female protagonists get to battle monsters and demons while working through the conundrums of early adulthood -- which often amount to the same thing. If you don't feel like schlepping to the comics store for the latest sliver of Buffy (or you don't like negotiating the ick factor in Whedon's current series, "Dollhouse") you can satisfy those cravings by getting to know Rachel Morgan, Mercy Thompson or Anita Blake.
Or, for that matter, Sookie Stackhouse. HBO's "True Blood," based on the Southern Vampire books by Charlaine Harris, may have underwhelmed critics initially, but it's proven itself to be highly addictive, like many urban fantasy series. The first episode of the show's second season was HBO's highest-rated single episode since the finale of "The Sopranos." At a time when, except for a handful of shows like "Lost," TV has begun to back away from imaginative serialized dramas, urban fantasy novels make for a tasty substitute. More and more often, on nights when my brain is just too weary for Ian McEwan but not soft enough to settle for "The Mentalist," I find myself switching off the set and nestling into the sofa with a page turner about a girl who reminds me of nothing so much as the savior of Sunnydale High.
"Urban fantasy" may seem a peculiar label for the Sookie Stackhouse novels, which are set in the small town of Bon Temps, La. In fact, the label is contested, since the term "urban fantasy" (meaning fantasies set in the contemporary world) was first applied to the work of such writers as Neil Gaiman and John Crowley, whose aspirations are more literary. Sometimes these Buffyesque novels are called "paranormal romances" after a subset of the romance genre that specializes in human heroines finding true love in the arms of supernatural beings, usually vampires, à la the hugely popular Twilight Saga.
But the genre breaks several of the core tenets of romance fiction, most notably by eschewing the conventional "happily ever after" ending and depicting romantic relationships as uncertain and ambiguous. Bookstores manifest this genre confusion by shelving the books haphazardly, in their romance, science fiction or horror sections, none of which is a perfect fit. With that caveat, since a better label has yet to present itself, we'll stick with "urban fantasy."
Most fans would agree that one of the genre's pioneers was Laurell K. Hamilton, whose Anita Blake series began even before Buffy's television incarnation, with the novel "Guilty Pleasures," published in 1993. Anita is an animator-for-hire, licensed to temporarily raise the dead so that they can be questioned by the living on matters both legal and personal. In essence, she's a private detective of the hard-boiled school, but operating in a version of the contemporary world in which creatures from folklore -- vampires, werewolves and more -- have been uneasily integrated into human society. The early Anita Blake novels are dark and grisly, shadowed by Anita's ambivalent relationship to her own capacity for violence and her fear of becoming "one of the monsters." She's isolated and angry, like many a noir protagonist, with no real love life to speak of. She lavishes far more attention on the finer points of concealed weaponry (at any given moment she's packing a couple of guns and four or five blades) than on the charms of any of the men around her.
If, like me, you approached Hamilton's series haphazardly, reading the first book and then inadvertently skipping ahead to, say, Book 14, "Danse Macabre," you'll be in for a shock. The Anita who hunkered down every night with a collection of stuffed penguins in a poignant effort to cling to the last shred of her innocence in "Guilty Pleasures" had been transformed into an erotic ringmaster. She's sleeping with seven different men, often several at a go, with the occasional one-shot tryst on the side. Hamilton offers an elaborate rationale for this erotic explosion; it involves a communicable "metaphysical" infection Anita contracted from her main vampire squeeze, Jean-Claude, but I confess that I've never been able to make much sense of it.
This change led to consternation among some of Hamilton's longtime fans, who insistently voice their dismay on the Amazon reader reviews for each book. "Orgy after orgy," complains one reviewer of "Danse Macabre," "[Anita] is naked for nearly the whole book. For someone who started out so shy and modest in the first book, she has certainly gone hog wild." The outcry occasionally provokes a grumpy response from Hamilton, who accuses her critics of resisting "uncomfortable" material. In truth, there's far less sex in the later Anita Blake books than there is talking about sex and about Hamilton's byzantine and unfathomable explanations for why Anita has to have it with so many men when she supposedly doesn't really want to. Still, I sympathize with the fans' exasperation. Despite their objections, the most recent Anita Blake novel, the 17th, "Skin Trade," zoomed instantly to the No. 1 spot on Publishers Weekly's bestseller list.
Even if the Anita Blake refuseniks are, as Hamilton maintains, merely a "minority," the fuss over Anita's personal life exemplifies a perennial argument in urban fantasy: the ratio of crime to sex, or more broadly, of mystery to relationships. In a posting in the Publishers Weekly blog Genreville, novelist John Levitt explained that he regards his own books as urban fantasy, as opposed to Hamilton's and Harris', which he considers paranormal romances. Grouping himself with Jim Butcher, whose Harry Dresden novels about a P.I.-wizard in Chicago were inspired by the Anita Blake series, he claims a shared "lineage" with Butcher that includes Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. The urban fantasy hero, Levitt writes, is a "troubled loner," who "has romantic hopes, but they're never the focus of the books." Harris and Hamilton, he claims, come from "the romance tradition," where "an essential element always remains about whether or not it's a good idea to do the vampire, werewolf, or both."
