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Vampire Nation, by Thomas Sipos.
1998-2000, Xlibris
I ranted about this a couple of years ago elsewhere but then I saw this vampire-heavy thread and had to post a version of it here.
"Wenn de Vernunft Schläft, wachten die Vampire auf"
That's written on the portrait of Lenin that watches over the former Stasi office, now the Stasi Museum, in the Runde Ecke in Leipzig (which hosts a big goth festival), and it's the first thing I thought of when I saw Vampire Nation at the American bookstore here.
I really wanted to like Vampire Nation. It called itself a satire and had a cool cover, featuring a fanged Lenin, "Father of Revolutionary Vampirism" (complete with backwards R's). It had possibilities. Soviet-bloc vampires, in Romania, no less; what's not to like? Fodder for dark humor and/or horror, potentially very entertaining, maybe like Anno Dracula. In a fit of Ostalgia, I bought it.
Big mistake (Xlibris, aren't they a vanity publisher?) Unfortunately, Caeusescu's Romania was reportedly a miserable place. Almost 20 years later the country's still working off the very real horrors that just leave pretend horrors like vampires in their dust. Sipos's way of dealing with that literary difficulty is to call it a satire by painting the obvious metaphor of Communism sucking the blood out of, well, everything good and productive, and by hammering that point home, woodenly, again and again, like some pointy vampire-related metaphor that escapes me right now.
In 1986, a Hollywood writer gets roped into a movie project in Romania and the project falls through, but then he suddenly hooks up with a Russian countess (therefore, a good Russian, not a Commie, and possibly working with the CIA) out to kill the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
It's got broad characters who would shame Tom Clancy. Aforementioned Russian posh superbabe (possibly with the CIA), ineffectual liberal embassy official, crazy peasant Nicolae, crass son Nicu, fat and oversexed wife Elena. The Ceausescus were bad enough that making them into vampires is superfluous, and Sipos never lets up. He interrupts decent action scenes for gratuitous tirades against the Red Menace and Western complicity in its success, up to and including rent control (!). By the Power of Friedrich Hayek, Victory or Death!
This could have been a lot better. The touches of horror, like the TAROM stewardesses snacking behind the curtains, the secret microphones in the hotel and the hospital/orphanage scenes kept me reading. The mix of the Internationale and horror movie soundtracks on his main page is inspired. But I sorely missed the 20 Euros and 6 or so hours I wasted on the book.
The copyright on the book is 1998-2000, which puts it well before the current wave of Ostalgia that crested with Goodbye Lenin, but it's still 9 years after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc (1991 for the USSR), plenty of time for a little critical distance. I suspect the Holocaust for capital "L" Libertarians is the Stalin Terror (as opposed to, say, slavery or King Leopold II's rule over the Belgian Congo), so maybe critical distance is impossible.
Maybe Sipos saw the 1980s movie "Gotcha," starring Anthonay Edwards and Linda Fiorentino, who had a movie-Russian accent to die for, and a seed was planted.
There's a good story in the concept of communist vampires, certainly when you throw in Ostbloc kitsch, and I'm still waiting for it. |
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