Real Men Have Fangs.

Can you believe it - front page article in the WSJ on vampires.. I told you they were everywhere! Thanks to Natalia for this fabulous read. Full article below.

Real Men Have Fangs
"With series like 'Twilight,' vampires have crept up from the crypt to the book aisles for women and girls -- and found a rich vein of interest. Laura Miller on why the enigmatic guy with an unusual diet is so hard to resist.
By LAURA MILLER

Pulp genres interbreed as wantonly as alley cats. The vampire novel, once strictly relegated to the horror section, has in recent years infiltrated the romance, science-fiction, fantasy and young-adult shelves of bookstores. Individual authors may specialize in anything from gothic swooning to crime-fighting, globe-spanning action, high-school intrigues, chicklit-style shenanigans and Southern-fried humor.

Vampires have never been more popular. "Breaking Dawn," the final volume of the "Twilight" series by Stephenie Meyer, sold 1.3 million copies on its release date in August. (The film version comes out Nov. 21.) There are six million copies in print of Laurell K. Hamilton's series of vampire detective novels, and Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse books have cropped up all over the best-seller lists since being adapted as the new HBO drama, "True Blood."

These three series are only the most visible examples of a booming fictional genre that's aimed primarily at women and girls. Labeled "paranormal romance" or "urban fantasy," it's a hybrid species that includes dozens of series comprising hundreds of books in which mostly human heroines fall in love with assorted supernatural beings: werewolves, shapeshifters, gods, fairies and, above all, vampires.

The rules of these fictional vampire universes are dizzyingly diverse: in some books, they can be repelled with crucifixes and garlic; in others, not. They may or may not have souls. The ability to tolerate sunlight and silver, to survive on just a sip of blood or on an artificial substitute, to fly or transform into an animal or to reproduce sexually -- all vary according to the author's whim.

Nevertheless, a few indispensable qualities reside at the heart of the vampire's appeal. Vampires are always good-looking, excruciatingly so; the word that Bella Swan, the protagonist of the "Twilight" series, most often uses to describe her adored undead boyfriend Edward is "perfect." Washboard abs are a must. Vampires are also invariably well-dressed, whether in period costume or the pricey designer outfits sported by the blood-sucking boyfriends in Gossip-Girl-style gothics like Richelle Mead's "Vampire Academy" or Melissa de la Cruz's "Blue Bloods," both set in exclusive prep schools. Above all else, vampires are rich. (The source of vampire wealth is obscure, since few of them appear to be gainfully employed. The assumption seems to be that anyone who's been around for 300 years must be in a position to take full advantage of the miracle of compound interest.) In short, they uncannily resemble the heroes of traditional romance novels.

The fusion of the romance and vampire genres isn't as unlikely as it might seem. The archetypal romantic hero owes a lot to two characters from Victorian literature: Mr. Rochester in "Jane Eyre" and Heathcliff in "Wuthering Heights." The two sisters who wrote those novels, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, were, like most literary women of their time, great admirers of Lord Byron, whose stormy, passionate heroes (based on his own bad self) served as patterns for Rochester and Heathcliff.

In turn, one of the earliest stories in which a vampire is depicted as a decadently attractive aristocrat is "The Vampyre" (1819), by John Polidori, Byron's physician, who achieved a minor literary notoriety by writing thinly veiled portraits of his former employer. Both the classic romance hero and the suave vampire are handsome yet dangerous, mysteriously worldly and a little cruel, but gifted in erotic persuasion.

If the conventional romance and the vampire yarn share an ancestor in the poetry and persona of Byron, they achieved their first communion in 1976, with the publication of "Interview With the Vampire," the first of Anne Rice's "Vampire Chronicles." Ms. Rice's brooding vampire hero, Lestat, espoused the whole spectrum of Byronic defiance and license, even turning rock star, to assume the cultural role of bad-boy celebrity that Byron is often said to have pioneered.
Vampires have been used to represent sexual minorities, artists, drug addicts, bikers, even the mafia: any group, in short, both subject to ostracism for its social transgressions and prone to romanticizing its outcast status. The vampires who star in paranormal romance, however, are seldom scruffy or strung out. The cliché is that vampirism is a metaphor for sex, but the vamps of paranormal romance don't need metaphors for that: they tend to cavort their way through a range of impressively explicit bedroom escapades. What these undead lovers promise is not just eroticism, but a particular variety of eroticism that their female admirers more than half suspect of being reprehensible and anachronistic, if not flat-out extinct: They offer old-fashioned romance in the arms of an alpha male.

Here lies one of the unique pleasures that the vampire romance can provide for its female readers: the opportunity to enjoy an 18th- or 19th-century courtship while remaining a 21st-century woman.

The problem with historical romances is that if you want a man who behaves like Mr. Darcy, you have to live within the constraints imposed upon a woman like Elizabeth Bennet; in addition to the lack of voting rights, credit cards and any chance of pursuing a profession, there is the fun-squashing little matter of virginity taboos. In order to bask in the chivalry of a Regency-era gentleman, a modern woman can be magically transported back to his time (another popular romance device), but she'll still be stuck in a society where she hasn't mastered the rules and her freedoms are severely curtailed.

Make the gentleman immortal and he brings with him into her modern world not only his ancestral estate and fortune, but an anachronistic understanding of how to treat a lady. Replete with old money, the vampire hero has plenty of leisure time to embroil himself in politics (fictional vampire societies tend to be complex and conspiracy-ridden hierarchies) and to woo the heroine.

Vampires have long served as a nightmare symbol of the idle hereditary gentry as seen through the eyes of the hardworking bourgeoisie. The original Count Dracula, as conceived by Bram Stoker, came from a backward corner of Mitteleuropa and had the atavistic, parasitical authority of all aristocrats, whose claims to power and status are founded, tellingly, in blood. Dracula, with his schemes to feed off the "teeming millions" of London, coolly selects the rational, upright solicitor Jonathan Harker as both prey and instrument, confident that obedience is his birthright. Then, by night, the count plunders the womenfolk.

But "Dracula" was written by a man, and so his vampire aristo is more monster than seducer. Jonathan Harker's modern-day female counterparts -- independent lawyers and businesswomen -- would no doubt balk at acknowledging a duke or an earl, let alone an ordinary commoner, to be anything better than their equal. Nevertheless, the nagging longing to be plucked from the ashes and exalted by an exceptional, masterful man remains hard for contemporary women to exorcise. If flesh and blood men disappoint, if men's innermost thoughts have proven to be largely coarse and selfish, a vampire, at least, has a perfectly valid claim to superiority. Besides his wealth, his looks, the wisdom afforded by his centuries of existence, a vampire possesses superhuman strength, heightened sensory perception, the capacity to hypnotize his victims and, last but not least, immortality.

Not only is there no shame or degradation in surrendering to a lover this powerful, but a woman can ogle him freely without rendering him effeminate. He can wear his hair long, murmur preposterous lines like, "Allow me to touch you or I will go mad," as does the master vampire lover of Karen Chance's Cassandra Palmer series, without coming across as vain, ridiculous or psychopathic. Best yet, if he is troubled, as he should be, by his conscience (and most vampire heroes are), that conflict can throw numerous obstacles onto the path to consummation, further prolonging the couple's delectable courtship.

In "Twilight," Edward is reluctant to deflower Bella (he maintains that if he loses control he might bite and kill her). But it's not the absence of sex that makes the readers of Ms. Meyer's series sigh and neglect their home and housework to spend hours posting in online discussions with titles like "The intensity... will it ever go away?" Though technically chaste, the couple engages in marathon sessions of what used to be called "heavy petting": drawing out the erotic tension to just shy of the breaking point. You could call it all a big tease, but as many a woman can testify, sometimes the tease is the best part, and it certainly does add zest to the finale.

Some adult women worry about the effects of the "Twilight" series on young girls. They point out that Edward is overprotective and controlling. Worse yet, when the deplorably passive Bella isn't mooning over his "bewildering perfection," she's running herself down for being unworthy of his magnificence: "There was no way this godlike creature could be meant for me." Bella is the exception among paranormal romance heroines, who tend to be the sort of women described as "kick-ass" in back-cover blurbs. (The obvious inspiration here is TV's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer.") No matter how tough, intrepid, sassy and smart these heroines may be, however, their vampire boyfriends will always be stronger.

It's hard to imagine any real man pulling that off, and so the authors and readers of paranormal romances have simply ceased trying to imagine it. As fantastical as the paranormal romance may appear, it reflects a rueful pragmatism. The classic romantic hero has been relegated, like the vampire, to the realm of legend and superstition."