Amara Tanith > Recent Status Updates

I liked this way more than I expected to???

oh ho ho Snow in the epilogue is fucking deliciously evil. Got his "friend" killed and fucking replaced him in his own family, Jesus Christ lmao.

My first impression is that the climax and denouement are both a bit too swiftly paced, but I might??? change my mind on that one upon rereading/reflection.

lmao, I've been listening to the audiobook of this alongside listening to the Unspoiled! podcast coverage of the story... and it's really hammering home just how much respect I've lost for Natasha and Roshawn lately. Seems like every time I try to jump back into the pod, their takes are even worse than before!? Misunderstanding plots/characterization/symbolism, missing context, so much smugness & judgment...

OH MY GOD HE DID IT. KING JUST MADE THE METAPHOR TEXTUAL.

Just a few pages after a scene involving an implied pedo vamp hunting little boys, King apropos of nothing references the cover of Edgar Winter's "They Only Come Out at Night", which he describes as being a "picture of a transvestite" with a "strangely masculine face bleeding with rouge and paint".

How is NO ONE talking about how homophobic this book is???

Yeah, if you want to hide that you're doing pedo hunt bullshit (King clearly doesn't actually want to hide it), maybe stop making the villain repeatedly vow to castrate the little boy before turning him into a vampire (which was early referred to as "holding intercourse," which is an insidiously deliberate word choice).

This book's biggest flaw truly is the blood libel / Satanic panic / pedo hunt of it all. He takes Stoker's antisemitic/xenophobic and queer undertones to Dracula's vampirism and combines them with Lucy's pursuit of children (implied to be a feminine longing for innocence/motherhood/whatever) to play into the "queers are coming to rape your kids and sacrifice them to Satan" bullshit we've been fighting for like 50yrs.

Yeah, GR is throwing errors every time I try to post this lil paragraph:

Barlow/Straker are implied gay pedo predators. Ben is the straight man whose love for an unrelated child is paternal in comparison. He's their foil to accentuate the gay = pedo "moral". 🤮

Susan was probably only ever there to hammer home Ben's straightness; I don't doubt King would've cut Lucy/Mina entirely otherwise. [2/2]

Wait shit ew. I've been sitting here this whole time wondering what the fuck was the point of short-shrifting Susan in favor of Mark, and with this little post-climactic "I love you" from Ben to Mark, suddenly I understand King's point.

Goodreads isn't letting me post, so give me a minute while I finagle.

[1/?]

King's moralizing is so fascinating because it's just so fundamentally alien to the modern sociopolitical landscape. But the line about Barlow being in this town specifically because the town, like him, is already dead and just kind of pretending to be alive? That's delightful.

I'm 99% sure that Callahan doesn't come back for the climax, so... well, King, do we really need more Callahan scenes? Stick a fork in him at this point?

And right on the heels of me mentioning how much I appreciate King's writing sometimes... one page later, he decides to teach me an entire new racial slur. I just????

"They did not look out their windows. No matter what noises or dreadful possibilities, no matter how awful the unknown, there was an even worse thing: to look the Gorgon in the face."

When King is good, he's good.

Truly most of these people deserve to be eaten by vampires. Not turned, mind, but fucking eaten.

Maybe I am mad at Barlow after all. Just eat these jackasses!?

Did this dork just compare his vampire bite to the fucking mark of Cain? That's so fucking funny.

There's an interesting comparison to be made between Barlow's deliberate seeking-out of a small town and Callahan's post-(quasi)turning journey to New York. City people versus town people is always a theme in King's works; if I ever reread, I'd like to pay attention to all of what he says in this book on the subject (and into whose mouths he puts which words) to take a look at Callahan's choice through that lens!

...except that, just like how his cross lost its power because he lost his faith in it, it's perfectly possible that he's only burned by attempting to enter the church because he has faith in his own damnation now. Someone more familiar than I with Christianity/religiosity has written some interesting stuff analyzing that, I bet. [2/2]

What happens to Callahan is at least interesting from the perspective of his actual motivation to join the church. It wasn't originally faith; it was a longing for epic black-and-white battles full of heroic victories over good and evil. And now he's gone up against "evil" and fucking failed (specifically because he gambled on his god and lost) and is transformed into something incongruous with Christianity... [1/?]

"Not to the new God, the God of ghettos and social conscience and free lunches"

Stephen King has a truly baffling pseudo-liberalism about him, doesn't he? This is the second time in the novel that discrimination (everything behind the creation of ghettos) is implicitly equated with anti-discrimination ("social conscience", $$$ assistance, etc.)

Like, what do you think you're trying to say here, bro?

Callahan being the one to get the "Dracula makes Mina drink from him" scene, which in Stoker's version is a quasi-rape, is just a fascinating decision. TBH, I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that King hadn't noticed any of the sexual subtext in Dracula (except perhaps enough to have his characters throw the f-slur at Straker/Barlow) AND missed the rape metaphor, too.

Okay, maybe Callahan's quasi-defeat is kind of what I was looking for? Explicit exploration of the notion that the symbols of Christianity are only empowered by the human belief in them...

The Book: "Barlow's face was handsome."

The Movie, for some reason: Barlow is Nosferatu.

???????

It's very funny that King used "this guy voted for Nixon" as such perfect shorthand for how useless, stubborn, shortsighted, and accidentally self-destructive Mark's dad is.

Wow, why on earth would that ~slut~ cheat on her lovely husband who beats and rapes and threatens to kill her? She's such an awful horrible woman! dae woman bad?????

If there's one thing King knows how to do, it's description!

It's so funny to me that King was so utterly against writing women that he looked at Stoker's two important female characters and was like "ew gross that's too many thanks" and just combined Lucy and Mina into Susan so he didn't have to have a yucky gross ew feeeemale hanging around for the climax.

I feel like a big missed opportunity in this and most other modern-ish vampire stories I've read/seen is that they either continue the Christian influence of the vampire tale without interrogation or else turn it completely secular (again, without any interrogation and often with still-present gestures toward Christian symbols).

Where tf are all the explicitly atheistic and/or non/anti-Christian vampire stories at?

OMG not the characters explicitly pointing out that the teacher character (Matt) is based on Van Helsing. King, some subtly would go a long way, lmao!

Ooh, so this is 1975 and King says that pop culture usually has vampires immediately "mortify" into "dust", which is confirmation for me that dusting as a trope was the standard pre-Buffy. I honestly hadn't been sure, so that's fun!

Also, the little touches of incorporation of Satanic panic ideas (strangers--probably gay, foreign, and/or non-Christian--come into town, steal children, and sacrifice them to Satan... which, let's be real, is just modern-day blood libel) are... certainly something.

On the one hand, this technically predates the actual SP... and on the other, it might've directly helped to create it. Which is a huge yikes.