Why Do We Love Vampires?

Think Tank #103

What you learn today may shock you.

I, Melissa Petrie, am a closet reader of romance novels.

*gasp!*

Phew. I’m glad I finally got that off my chest.

I decided to come clean after a conversation I had a few days ago, when I had a few too many drinks and was showing off my book collection, and followed the tour up with, “Yeah, I never actually get around to reading any of this shit. You know what I actually read? Romance novels.”

Cue the explosion sound effects, prepare for your mind to be blown. John was actually kind of annoyed that our house-guest had found this out before he did. Yes, this is what I’ve been doing, right next to him, laying on the couch looking at my phone acting just a little bit too interested.

The plot thickens.

Even during that conversation, in my tell-all state, I had enough restraint to keep one thing hidden—one thing that would’ve been too much to divulge, even for a self-professed trashy-romance reader like me.

On that fateful night, as I bared my soul about my true, um, passions, I left out the fact that I was currently about three-quarters of the way through sneak-reading the Twilight series.

Oh, the horror.

Yeah, I decided about halfway through my first Colleen Hoover book that I was going to have to write one of these things (just for fun, of course), but I soon realized that I wouldn’t just be writing any romance, I’d be writing a vampire romance. This was my genre of choice when I was twelve years old, and I figured that if I could do it then, how hard could it be now?

Of course, it was only natural that I should look to the vampire romance novel that started it all for inspiration, the one that I read in fifth grade that sparked my love of sparkly, hunky vampires before I got a little older and a little more pretentious and realized that this kind of infatuation was wrong.

Anyway, I’m not going to sit here and pretend that Twilight is high art or anything. It’s annoying at times; some of it doesn’t really make sense. It’s a dumb book for teenage girls.

And I read the whole fat f’ing series in under a week loving every single second of it. I actually lost sleep so I could sneak in a few more pages of this thing.

There’s just something about vampires. They’re sexy. They’re fun. They’re irresistible. And since I’m taking a stab (or would the term be bite?) at my own spin on this genre, I want to break down what exactly it is about vampires that elicits this sort of reaction.

Let’s start with the obvious: they’re smoking hot and they live forever.

Yeah. From a wish-fulfillment perspective, it doesn’t really get any better than this. It’s purely biological. Mating and avoiding death are the two primary drivers of our human desires, and vampire fiction distills both of these motivators into a literary form of crack cocaine.

Then there’s the forbidden aspect. Vampires are dark and mysterious. They’re strong, hardened, tortured souls. And they can’t help it. Nothing drives a woman crazy like a bad boy with a soft side. The hero in a vampire novel is brooding and strong and impossible to figure out (he has centuries of baggage, after all). And best of all, he loves you, er, I mean, the narrator of the book, consciously designed for every reader of the book to seamlessly project themselves onto.

Of course, this means the heroine in a romance novel cannot be so intimidating as to make their reader feel inferior. Vampire fiction fulfills this requirement, as well. If your heroine is a human, well, you might as well just swoon now. And if she’s a vampire, then you, humble reader, don’t have to worry about the fact that you’re not as supernaturally attractive as she is, because you’re just a measly human (for now). There’s no chance of competing, so why even draw the comparison?

So, I guess the cat (er, bat?)’s out of the bag now. I’ve read Twilight as an adult, I adored it, and I’m only a little embarrassed about it.

It’s all in good fun. And it really is a lot of fun.

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