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Blame it on Buffy. When the pint-sized slayer punched her way into popular consciousness, she spawned a generation of me-toos. Now we have the Twilight movies and the True Blood series. While teens have embraced vampires on the big screen and television in a huge way, it is in the literary medium that the trend has really exploded.
Teens from earlier decades relied on Bram Stoker’s Dracula or the Anne Rice novels for their requisite dose of blood, but teens today are spoiled for choice, with a plethora of vampire titles on offer.
The top ten bestseller list for teenagers, compiled by Harper Collins in February this year has five titles that are connected to vampires. Three of the Vampire Diaries books are in the top ten, as also a collection of short stories based on the theme Prom Nights from Hell. And let us not forget that much before the movies, a cult following had already emerged around the Twilight books.
So how have vampires in print captured the adolescent imagination so successfully? Twilight buff and Class 12 student Sukanya K.C. says, “I certainly didn’t have a vampire fixation before I read the books. But a paragraph into it and I was totally hooked. I guess the chemistry between Bella and Edward had a lot to do with it.” Other readers like 19-year-old Pallavi Sinha claim to be “vampire purists”. “I refuse to read the Twilight novels, because so many of the facts about vampires are just wrong. But I’ve read Dracula and at one point of time the ambition of my life was to be a vampire,” she says.
Online forums and discussion boards teem with suggestions for why vampires occupy the space they do in the teen mind. The reasons offered include the emphasis on forbidden love, coming to terms with being different, finding friends and maintaining your own identity. Incidentally, most vampire novels chronicle the ups and downs of high school life — sharpened by the element of the unknown and possibly dangerous.
Experts say that the increased fixation with vampires may have something to do with the need to escape into fantasy, away from increasingly complex and yet, mundane lives. The Lord of the Rings films became popular when the world was beginning to reel under the effects of terrorism. The triumph of good over evil was a message the world needed to hear at the time. And while fantasy and escape have been recurrent themes in children’s literature, it is a sign of our times that the theme has overtaken literature for young adults as well.
Rohini Nair
The Asian Age
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