Vampires (Customized Lore)?

[ehbowen]

For the story series I'm working on now, which I'm wanting to make suitable for YA but not in-your-face condescending kid stuff, I'm using a cabal of vampires as the puppet masters pulling the strings of the otherwise-faceless Deep State. I'm wanting to throw in a few digressions from traditional lore to suit the "rules" of my overarching supernatural framework, so I'm requesting critique on how this works and also some pointers if I've overlooked anything really important (I am NOT an expert on the topic of vampires or associated occult topics!).

• First, in my mythos, vampires do need to feed on human blood (more correctly, human life force) at regular intervals, generally once a month...but they CAN be sated, at least for a while, by an outstanding, elegant dinner featuring very rare beef, raw oysters, and other animal/marine proteins very close to the original life source.
  • I establish this with my character Delroy (servant to the king), a homeless dropout from a hotel and restaurant management college program, who is recruited (unknowingly) by the faceless 'Bill,' who intends for him to be that month's victim...but, instead, he does such a fabulous job setting up a seven-course meal with rare ribeye and other such delicacies that the vampires would rather save him for later. After "Bill" attempts to recruit the wrong kind of down-and-outer (a prostitute who screams out "Sweet Jesus, help me!"), the vampires feast on him and then call Delroy in to take his place.
• I am postulating that sunlight is not immediately fatal to one of these vampires, but that they avoid it because it is uncomfortable and weakens them, and they cannot use any supernatural abilities while in full, bright light.
• So far (the story is still in draft), I have not fully come down on whether these beings should or should not be visible in mirrors...because, to my way of thinking, if they're not visible in mirrors, they should not be visible to any other optics (such as smart phones, camera lenses, and film). Still thinking about the unintended consequences here before I commit one way or the other.
• One important postulate: While I do have these vampires able to "turn" normal humans, in order to slow down the 'chain reaction' to a more plausible level I'm postulating, first, that there are an even 100 years of 'recovery time' needed after a turning for either the original or the new vampire to turn another, and that there was an organized push by Heaven to destroy the vampires which nearly succeeded back in the early 16th century. However, with the changing of the rules surrounding the Protestant reformation, one vampire survived the purge, and so she started the Turning process again, very slowly and carefully, resulting in two vampires at the close of the 17th century, four at the close of the 18th, eight at the close of the 19th, and sixteen at the close of the 20th century. Now, it's about time to recruit a few more....
• As far as supernatural abilities, I'm thinking limited shapeshifting between pre-selected forms (say, humanoid, bat, wolf, shark), invisibility and intangibility, minor telekinesis (up to ~40 lbs of force, continuously, without wearisome effort), teleportation between previously visited and well-known sites where their presence is officially permitted, preternaturally sensitive hearing, vision, and smell...anything notable (in the existing mythos) that I'm leaving out?
• I do plan to keep the restriction on any particular vampire being unable to enter a personal space (home, apartment, private office, hotel room) without explicit permission from someone legitimately authorized to grant it.

Any suggestions or other brainstorming from regulars here?

 

[TheCrystallineEntity]

There's the whole 'obsessive counting' thing, which is usually played for laughs in more modern vampire works. Carmilla turns into a giant shadowy panther instead of a bat or wolf. There's also Dracula's rather creepy 'wall crawling' ability that he uses a couple times in the novel.
A chef for vampires sounds fun.

Also, this rather amusing part of Carpe Jugulum [which is how I first learned quite a lot about vampire lore, and I highly recommend it, as it's both a hilarious parody of horror and one of the best ruminations on faith and evil I've ever read]:
"All along the Ramtops may be found the belief that any apparently innocent tool, be it hammer or saw, will seek blood if left unused for more than three years. In Ghat they believe in vampire watermelons, although folklore is silent about what they believe about vampire watermelons."

This is, as many of Terry Pratchett's 'that's too ridiculous to be true'--isms, actual Slavic folklore:
From the Vampire: A New History [by Nick Groom]: "A rod for tethering sheaves of wheat, for example, would turn vampire if kept for more than three years, while pumpkins and watermelons took only ten days to animate into shuddering, murmuring vampires; a pumpkin kept after Christmas will also become a vampire. Fortunately, the potential for injury from an undead squash is not that great, and so, we learn, ‘people are not very afraid of this kind of vampire’."

Something to consider is that Dracula as a classic monster breaks the mold somewhat: rather than being a tragic figure overwhelmed by circumstances beyond his control, everything he does is by choice. This doesn't often get examined as much as I think it could be.
Another often overlooked factor is that both Carmilla and Dracula [as well as other vampires to varying degrees] are inexorably queer-coded, with all of the messiness of their predatory natures and, in the case of Dracula, the subtext of Bram Stoker's pain-filled infatuation with Lord Byron. [Plus his sexism, xenophobia, and fears of England being overtaken by immigrants, which is a whole other kettle of bats.]

Anyway, I digress. Perhaps the most important thing to ask is, 'what do I want to accomplish most with my portrayal of vampires' and 'what themes do I want to explore?'
If you're not aiming for a comedic tone and want to amplify the horror, a simple yet effective way is to add an atmosphere of dread. The main characters knowing that the vampires could be anywhere, or leaving traces of their presence while remaining unseen. For body horror, the fact that vampires with wings on their backs technically have two sets of arms is a good place to start, along with the usual potential for shapeshifting-related horror.

As a side note, I do have a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to a sex worker being yet another victim, but I don't know the whole context of how your world works, and maybe you're intending to make a point with it.

 

[RoccO]

It is sounding like a good place to have a school of vampires. Housing, in a boarding school for different shapeshifters, sounds like a really neat idea, where the school is reserved for vampires, and perhaps the hundred years of recovery time for the turning. There are a lot of theories for vampires that become apparent in the telling of the story, with the alterations fitting in with the plot. If you have a vampire change into a bat, then you would not reasonably have it feed on a bat. So too, if the vampire ate human food, then it could possibly occupy human sleep patterns.

A court or kingdom of vampires might fit the bill as well. There are more intrigues to a round table of vampires. They have their secrecy to uphold, plus the factions to maintain after an immortality of intrigue. It has been done before, the school and the kingdom, but combining them may see you through. What is the situation with the humans, are they welcoming the vampires in the light of day, are the vampires choosing animal blood, or a lavish meal?

 

[A. E. Lowan]

Keep your lore consistent. Yes, it's going to make you go back over and over again to adjust. That keeps you on your t

We have vampires. They're fairly non-traditional. For starters, they're not undead, "Just different." They're immortal, until they very much aren't. In the Books of Binding, everything has an expiration date.

Our vampires can breed. Male vampires need a certain degree of personal umph to make a dhampyr, but by and large most males retain their fertility with the Change, because biology is unfair. It's a very rare female vampire who can go into a heat and carry a baby to term. They're called Queens, and in all the world there are only 36. They have a motto is Universae Stamus "We Stand Together." Yes, that is the correct Latin. Yes, it really was that much of a pain to figure out the grammar, because the idea of women banding together for mutual protection and benefit isn't much of a thing in Rome. Fortunately, we've got some great connections, and it took two women to suss it out.

This is the whole cloth.

 

[A. E. Lowan]

For the story series I'm working on now, which I'm wanting to make suitable for YA but not in-your-face condescending kid stuff, I'm using a cabal of vampires as the puppet masters pulling the strings of the otherwise-faceless Deep State.

• As far as supernatural abilities, I'm thinking limited shapeshifting between pre-selected forms (say, humanoid, bat, wolf, shark), invisibility and intangibility, minor telekinesis (up to ~40 lbs of force, continuously, without wearisome effort), teleportation between previously visited and well-known sites where their presence is officially permitted, preternaturally sensitive hearing, vision, and smell...anything notable (in the existing mythos) that I'm leaving out?
• I do plan to keep the restriction on any particular vampire being unable to enter a personal space (home, apartment, private office, hotel room) without explicit permission from someone legitimately authorized to grant it.

Any suggestions or other brainstorming from regulars here?

Going to beat up on this section for a bit. Knowing the force in terms of pound per is great. Good thinks. Most of your readers are going to read it, acknowledge they should have studied more in Physics, and carry on.

You want to shoot for something more descriptive. We don't say our vampires can move at speeds in excess of 100mph, or our therian shapeshifters can hit something for pounds per square inch. We say the two dueling vampires move faster than the human eye can track, or that wolf can rip the door off a police cruiser and knock it up on one pair of wheels, and rip flesh from bone without dropping their triple shot caramel machiatto.

Still accurate, they can say the same thing with different languages, but one's going to make the reader scan past, and the other's going to make them glance through the curtains to check on their hybrid.

 

[RoccO]

We say the two dueling vampires move faster than the human eye can track, or that wolf can rip the door off a police cruiser and knock it up on one pair of wheels, and rip flesh from bone without dropping their triple shot caramel machiatto.

A motorcycle riding heroine is great. I say that vampires grow old and decay, nobly rotting in some elderitch gentlemen club, having something to do with climate change. A night under the moon will do more for the lycan than you might think, and a swim in the swamp is sure to do more for the bunyip than compound interest.

To do some elementary physics you require numbers, and I have not got my glasses on, but we all know you just switch the denominator. Vehicles also do not belong in a carpathian setting. I imagine sports grounds, green with dew, and misty for an early morning training session, not to mention the evil wood across the road.

 

[ehbowen]

There's the whole 'obsessive counting' thing, which is usually played for laughs in more modern vampire works. Carmilla turns into a giant shadowy panther instead of a bat or wolf. There's also Dracula's rather creepy 'wall crawling' ability that he uses a couple times in the novel.
A chef for vampires sounds fun.

Well, this all plays with my conceit that the two opposing sides "behind the scenes" (likely more than two, although that's what they distill down to in the end) have each been trying to place supernatural power into this world for some time. The 'vampires' represent the big nasty's push, back in the late middle ages, while my "Powers That Be" protagonists represent a much more recent push on the part of heaven.

The 'chef' is a cornered human who has seen these guys at work, up close, and is terrified of what could happen to him. As a kind of redemptive arc, I'm toying with the idea that he ought to come to realize just how much power HE has over THEM.

Also, this rather amusing part of Carpe Jugulum [which is how I first learned quite a lot about vampire lore, and I highly recommend it, as it's both a hilarious parody of horror and one of the best ruminations on faith and evil I've ever read]:
"All along the Ramtops may be found the belief that any apparently innocent tool, be it hammer or saw, will seek blood if left unused for more than three years. In Ghat they believe in vampire watermelons, although folklore is silent about what they believe about vampire watermelons."

This is, as many of Terry Pratchett's 'that's too ridiculous to be true'--isms, actual Slavic folklore:
From the Vampire: A New History [by Nick Groom]: "A rod for tethering sheaves of wheat, for example, would turn vampire if kept for more than three years, while pumpkins and watermelons took only ten days to animate into shuddering, murmuring vampires; a pumpkin kept after Christmas will also become a vampire. Fortunately, the potential for injury from an undead squash is not that great, and so, we learn, ‘people are not very afraid of this kind of vampire’."

Something to consider is that Dracula as a classic monster breaks the mold somewhat: rather than being a tragic figure overwhelmed by circumstances beyond his control, everything he does is by choice. This doesn't often get examined as much as I think it could be.
Another often overlooked factor is that both Carmilla and Dracula [as well as other vampires to varying degrees] are inexorably queer-coded, with all of the messiness of their predatory natures and, in the case of Dracula, the subtext of Bram Stoker's pain-filled infatuation with Lord Byron. [Plus his sexism, xenophobia, and fears of England being overtaken by immigrants, which is a whole other kettle of bats.]

I'm trying to keep this suitable for YA, and in a Christian context, so I'm going to downplay the sexual aspects. But, yes, I acknowledge where you come from, there.

Actually, in the mythos I'm building, the original 16th century survivor, along with three turned in the 17th and 18th centuries, migrated from Transylvania to Great Britain, and there had some secondhand, incidental contact with Bram Stoker before moving, as a clan, to the United States.

Anyway, I digress. Perhaps the most important thing to ask is, 'what do I want to accomplish most with my portrayal of vampires' and 'what themes do I want to explore?'
If you're not aiming for a comedic tone and want to amplify the horror, a simple yet effective way is to add an atmosphere of dread. The main characters knowing that the vampires could be anywhere, or leaving traces of their presence while remaining unseen. For body horror, the fact that vampires with wings on their backs technically have two sets of arms is a good place to start, along with the usual potential for shapeshifting-related horror.

In this story arc, they are the (largely) unseen puppeteers behind the faceless "Deep State," a melange of ambitious and avaricial up-and-comers largely in Federal bureaucracies, but also with a mix from journalistic channels, major corporations, etc. The vampires pull the strings, but their faceless and interchangeable "flunkies," "minions," and "Directors" do the actual dirty work. They're intentionally nameless to emphasize the fact that they can be replaced at the drop of a hat, and frequently are.

The "Deep State" were the ones who whisked my MMC protagonist's father, a CIA officer, off to a black site prison in the Middle East when he was about to blow the whistle on all the laws which were being broken to one of the few honest Congressmen with power on the oversight committee. They assassinated the Congressman (although they made it look like an accident...car crash), but they didn't get Kevin, or his mother Pam. Kevin has an eidetic memory and has read every document which his dad collected...and Pam is a former Marine.

As a side note, I do have a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to a sex worker being yet another victim, but I don't know the whole context of how your world works, and maybe you're intending to make a point with it.

I'm intending to make that a first-and-last thing. It's only mentioned once, and obliquely, as the cause of the demise of Delroy's predecessor "Bill." Delroy has decided that, rather than the down-and-outers, he should focus on those who really want to be an integral part of the Deep State....

One should be careful what one asks for.

 

[ehbowen]

It is sounding like a good place to have a school of vampires. Housing, in a boarding school for different shapeshifters, sounds like a really neat idea, where the school is reserved for vampires, and perhaps the hundred years of recovery time for the turning. There are a lot of theories for vampires that become apparent in the telling of the story, with the alterations fitting in with the plot. If you have a vampire change into a bat, then you would not reasonably have it feed on a bat. So too, if the vampire ate human food, then it could possibly occupy human sleep patterns.

Not in this work, but in a different albeit related story thread I've toyed with the idea of establishing a "Hagworts-adjacent" (TM, smile!) school for young selectees which Heaven wants to train. Could be fun, although I'm not spending much time with it just yet.

A court or kingdom of vampires might fit the bill as well. There are more intrigues to a round table of vampires. They have their secrecy to uphold, plus the factions to maintain after an immortality of intrigue. It has been done before, the school and the kingdom, but combining them may see you through. What is the situation with the humans, are they welcoming the vampires in the light of day, are the vampires choosing animal blood, or a lavish meal?

The vampires in this story only come together for a formal life-force feeding once a month, normally. However, there can be "targets of opportunity." So far, a single victim is enough to sate their appetites for the next month...but, when their numbers double again, in a few years, probably not.

The vampires in this story function as behind-the-scenes antagonists. They're major stockholders of private equity firms, control blocks of stocks with the big defense contractors, run insurance companies and hospitals which take full advantage of each other (at the expense of the patients)...you know, nice guys. [/sarc]

If I may, a quick snippet:

---

Another month.

Another meeting.

He sighed.

After twenty years, Delroy was embarrassingly good at this. He’d figured out, some time back, whom he was actually working for and what he was doing. And he loathed himself for it.

Not that he dared breathe a word of this to anyone. Anyone. But Delroy was, at the present moment, the most indispensable member of the Deep State.
It began twenty years back. He was a college dropout, in those years after 9/11, and hadn’t been able to find work. Half of a Hotel and Restaurant Management degree wasn’t very marketable, and New York was a high cost-of-living area. He’d been sleeping under a bridge when the man he knew only as ‘Bill’ found him.

The job sounded like an agreeable challenge. He’d been told that he needed to cater and provide refreshments for a meeting of high-level executives. While Delroy had botched the financial and administrative side of his major, he’d done an excellent job in culinary and catering. And the budget he’d been given was fit for royalty. He’d been tempted to ‘skim’ some of it, but instead decided to pour all of it into the setting and the victuals. Maybe they’d invite him back?

He knew of a private dining room in the basement of an old-line gentlemen’s club, and booked it. Dim lighting, rich wood paneling, ample kitchen facilities, and a well-stocked wine cellar on premises. Even better, the ventilation system was designed to allow for a charcoal brazier to be set up, right there on the dining room floor. A friend he remembered from college decorated the room in warm earth tones…browns, burnt orange, red. He engaged a junior cook from the club as a sous-chef, along with a pair of waiters. For a menu, he’d specified a starter course of raw Chesapeake Bay oysters with a tomato relish, a soup course of beef Consommé Olga with sea scallops, a fish course of grilled swordfish with shallots, pearl onions, and red bell pepper strips, and a main course of aged USDA-prime rib-eye steaks, cooked to order by himself right there on the charcoal brazier. Almost every one of the sixteen attendees—fourteen men, two women—wanted their steak very rare, with one going so far as to say he wanted his ‘blue.’ Delroy obliged.

The only bombshell of the evening was the salad course, brought out after the cherry-lime swirl sorbet, with a choice of his own garlic vinaigrette dressing or a commercial off-the-shelf Thousand Island dressing which he’d picked up on impulse at the last minute. There was a gasp when the salads were brought out, and one of the women shrieked. He’d quickly realized that his dressing was a failure and brought out the jug of Kraft; this cooled the incipient panic and composures recovered quickly. And when he brought out the final course of Red Velvet cheesecake, with fresh raspberries and strawberry compote, all was forgiven. In the after-dinner conversation, as the attendees mixed and mingled, he overheard more than a couple of them say, “We really need to bring this one back.”

The lady who had shrieked, earlier, came up to him afterward and said, “That was just about perfect. I really think we need to bring you back again, sometime. The only thing was that garlic dressing. I…we really don’t like garlic. Keep that in mind.”

Delroy promised that he would…but it made him think. And then she added, with an unnaturally toothy smile. “Other than that, best meal I’ve had in centuries.”

It was now twenty years. The nature of this ‘deal’ became clear three months after he’d first been called. It seemed that Bill sometimes recruited homeless and those down on their luck, but more often tended to pick prostitutes. Apparently one of them, as the meeting progressed, screamed out something to the effect of, “Sweet Jesus in Heaven, help me!” While he never learned exactly what happened in the ensuing minutes, he did know that Bill disappeared shortly thereafter, never to be seen again, and Delroy was recruited to take his position.

Anyhow. Now he had another meeting to manage. While occasionally they still called him to cater things personally—which constantly left him fretting as to how to outdo his former performances—most of the time they preferred fresh meat, and simply called upon him to orchestrate the arrangements. He’d decided that prostitutes and the like were just too random, and now concentrated on up-and-comers who wanted to be part of the Deep State. After all, wasn’t youth suicide epidemic? How convenient.

 

[RoccO]

I was waiting for Delroy to discover he was a vampire. The food adds flavour to the work, though I did not think you could use so many descriptives, it could be burnt out. If you were interested, you could do a travel book, biography type deal, dealing with the cooks journey, till he discovers he is a vampire. The faceless Bill could act as a progenitor, and they could take a trip around the Carpathian Mountains.

The idea that Delroy is not a vampire yet might be the direction this is heading, but Bill being a vampire might be the secret the book is keeping. If you were to include the dealings with the down-and-outers, then it may end up being more like a soup kitchen, but the pathway you should take is removing Delroy from the position of 3rd person and adding Bill to 1st.