Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture ed. by Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger (review)

594 LETTERS IN CANADA 1997 novel/prose-poem which was the source of the film, and his feelings about his collaborators on the film such as McDonald and the film's 'stars.' (Of these, only Callum Keith Rennie is readily recognizable to most current Logo viewers thanks to his role on 'Due South.') The book's suspenseful rhythm is conditioned by the slowly recurring reports from funding agencies like the Ontario Film Development Corporation and Telefilm, by the agonizingly intense rewrites, by casting sessions in Toronto and Vancouver, and, on a still more personal note, by Baker's confrontation with expectant parenthood. In the later pages, Baker at intervals enticingly hints at the shocking nature of the new ending of the film proposed by the lead actor, the outrageous Hugh Dillon. Of course, Baker's book delivers a profile of a screenwriter in full creative angst. Just as he increasingly finds himself departing from the original Michael Turner material, so he must observe others try to modify his own ideas through the Toronto writing, the Vancouver filming, and the eventual editingstages. Thathe and Turner accept these modifications with both gratitude and forgiveness suggests their full understanding of the writer's role in film production. Baker demonstrates as well a good sense of humour as he contemplates a sincere suggestion that the screenplay be rewritten with the Logos turned into an all-girls' band! At another point he gleefully invents fake punk song titles for the phony recording history of the band. Also memorable is his account of the stunned reaction of a straitlaced farmer's family in lawn chairs watching a sequence being shot on their property. Hard Core Road-Show proves not only how essential a good writer was to the success of Hard Core Logo but also how fortunate the film's producers and director were to have had the perceptive, modest and engaging Noel S. Baker along to record the whole tempestuous ride. (c.o.E. TOLTON) Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger, editors. Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contempora1y Culture University of Pennsylvania Press. xiv, 264. us$36.50 In August 1998, Toro;nto hosted Convergence IV, a gathering of Internetrelated goth fans who frequent such computer news groups as alt.vampires. tremere, alt.gothic.imperia, and alt.gothic.culture Gust to name a few). The healthypresence ofvampire-related activities like abat-hike through a local park, and of pseudonyms like Lady Alucard among the registered attendees, indicates that popular interest in vampirism is still strong, if not at the level of the early 1990s. Mass culture interest may have dropped since the release of the films Bram Stoker's Dracula and Interview with the Vampire, but as Convergence IV and the anthology Blood Read indicate, the vampire is a mainstay in popular culture. Gordon and Hollinger's collection of HUMANITIES 595 essays demonstrates that the vampire itself is a figure of multiple meanings and interpretations in late twentieth-century culture. The collection, containing contributions from academics and novelists, highlights the varieties of interpretation the vampire has carried in the past hundred years, presenting an open-ended series of essays that ultimately rejects any one essentializing view of vampirism and its role in the popular imagination . The canon of contemporary vampire fictions is fairly well established, and Blood Read focuses on a few major 'texts.' The 1987 film The Lost Boys is the subject of two, often contradictory, essays, Nicola Nixon's 'When Hollywood Sucks, or, Hungry Girls, Lost Boys, and Vampirism in the Age of Reagan,' and Rob Latham's 'Consuming Youth: The Lost Boys Cruise Mallworld.' Both essays start with the role of 'consumption' in 198os vampire fictions; Nixon's argument about the reiteration in these fictions of conservative patriarchal values and reimposition of the 'good' nuclear family works through the varieties and demands of consumption as a metaphor on more levels than Latham's, and indeed adumbrates some of the problems in vampire texts in general: with the 'domestication' (a word used by more than one contributor to the volume) of the vampire, the figure itself is left as a kind of super-consumer, a preternaturally glamorous drainer of ordinary humans. The...