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Tag Archives: Jeannette Ng

[Vampire Month] How universal are Vampires? by Jeannette Ng.

31 Saturday Mar 2018

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Vampire Month

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Folklore, Jeannette Ng, Jiangshi, Mr Vampire, News From the Spirit World, Vampire Month, World of Darkness


chinesevampire_330_6492For her blog post, Jeannette has an important question to explore… one which I have touched upon in other blogs (in News from the Spirit World especially).

How Universal Are Vampires?

 It is a staple of the genre that vampires are ubiquitous in myth and folklore across the globe. That there is one ur-creature that inspired all these stories with a uniting theme of the importance of blood, predation and corpses. Our fictional vampires stride across history, witnessing the building of pyramids, sailing on Viking longboats and writing plays for the Elizabethan stage. They’ll often also have fought in the American civil war and so forth.

20170124-DSC_0945Even Stephanie Meyer’s TWILIGHT has a passage where its protagonist reads through a website about vampires: “The rest of the site was an alphabtized listing of all the different myths of vampires held throughout the world. The first I clicked on, the Danag, was a Filipino vampire supposedly responsible for planting taro on the islands long ago.”

And these are all fun tropes, the dark progenitor and ancient curses, but rather obscures the fact that many of the myths grouped into “vampire” lore have little in common with the early 18th Century Transylvanian revenant. The word has gained a secondary meaning that encompasses any and all death-associated blood-monsters.

Except even then, not all so-called vampires are blood-drinkers, as hopping “Chinese Vampires”[1] do not traditionally drink blood. The jiangshi (殭屍) inhales and thus depletes the “life force” of their victims. In Chinese, the western vampire is translated as “blood-drinking jiangshi” to distinguish it from its less sexy, rigor mortis-suffering analogue.

I sometimes fear that in straining for these parallels, we impose a universality that obscures what is interesting and unique about these old stories. These overquoted lines spoken by Ishtar in the EPIC OF GILGAMESH serve as an excellent example:

“If you do not give me the Bull of Heaven,

I will knock down the Gates of the Netherworld,

I will smash the door posts, and leave the doors flat down,

and will let the dead go up to eat the living!

And the dead will outnumber the living!”

EPIC OF GILGAMESH, Tablet 6, translated by Maureen Gallery Kovacs

http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/mesopotamian/gilgamesh/tab6.htm

These lines have cited in many stories about the undead, ranging from the more elegant vampires to the more mindless zombie, but the effect is the same. They are understood in the context of the modern tradition and not the ancient one. Reading further into GILGAMESH would show how the Mesopotamian dead are not corporeal in nature but ghosts in the shape of dust and clay-eating birds.

The imposition of one culture’s monsters onto another and erasing their original form is merely a move towards homogeneity when writing of ancient cultures but is far more problematic when it comes to modern, still living ones. The impulse remains to understand the foreign through familiar lens, to reframe it as merely versions of what we already know, brushing aside differences and elevating the western version as the progenitor and original. Much of the study of comparative mythology is about drawing connections and seeing patterns across cultures but we must not allow our language and eagreness for conclusions to erase actual differences. These stories that we borrow from culture to culture are born of their cultures.

So perhaps this is something of a downer conclusion, noting how the vampire devoured so very many other blood-drinking demons and animated corpses. Even within Slavic folkore, vampires are not universal. The Ukranian tradition features blood-drinkers who are not actually dead at all. The word itself is Serbian (in fact, the only Serbian loanword in English).

And yet, there is an undeniable simplicity and universality to using the shorthand of “vampire” when talking about these loosely themed array of night terrors. Despite her reluctance to do so Silvia Moreno-Garcia ultimately terms her creations CERTAIN DARK THINGS [link: https://theillustratedpage.wordpress.com/2017/02/18/review-of-certain-dark-things-by-silvia-moreno-garcia/ ] vampires. And there remains a mystique to the term and much like any other genre word, the baggage is heavy and hard to shed.

[1] They rather iconically appear in the classic MR VAMPIRE (1986) and THE LEGEND OF THE SEVEN GOLDEN VAMPIRES (1974). Despite having vampires elsewhere be based on the same blood-drinking template, WORLD OF DARKNESS has the supplement the KINDRED OF THE EAST that allow the reader to play chi-inhaling jiangshi.

[Vampire Month] Jeannette Ng Interview

27 Tuesday Mar 2018

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Vampire Month

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Angry Robot, Carmilla, Charlotte Bronte, Cinderella, Durham, gothic fantasy, Jane Eyre, Jeannette Ng, Kiersten White, Norman Churches, Under the Pendulum Sun


20170124-DSC_0945.jpgOur next Vampire month victim is Jeannette Ng who has recently published the novel ‘Under the Pendulum Sun’ through Angry Robot. Being very clever and sneaky, Jeanette is not technically a vampire author but has managed to sneak into the line up through a technicality. She is an author of Gothic Fantasy and, I am sure, will have vampires in a future novel….

For now, she will answer the insidiously seductive vampire month questions….

1)      What is the earliest memory you have of writing? What did you write about?

The first thing I remember writing was just straight up rehash of Cinderella. I was probably around six or so because it was the first year of primary school. I have this very distinct memory of arguing over the spelling of certain words like magic with my teacher. Which means I’ve been basically doing fairy tale retellings my entire writing life.

2)      When did you decide to become a professional writer? Why did you take this step?

I don’t really think I can remember a time it wasn’t something I was working towards. I remember being about fourteen and putting out serial novels with my friends. I would typeset them like I did the school newspaper (which I was, of course, also involved in) and we sold them for about a quid per instalment.

After that it was just a matter of finishing something and selling it.

3)      What would you consider to be your greatest strength as a writer? What about your greatest weakness? How do you overcome this weakness?

My prose is dense but I’m told also lyrical. I’ve a penchant for weird details and am an obsessive researcher.

That research is also a weakness, of course, since it means I don’t get any writing done. On top of that, I am really bad at endings. For all that I have all these big concepts, I struggle seeing them through to a point of actual closure. I create worlds without plot and then some plots without people. The pieces rarely fit together the way I want them to. Which I’m still not sure how to overcome, really. I suppose it’s just a matter of keeping notes on everything and not rushing an underdeveloped idea.

4)      Tell us about the place where you live. Have you ever derived any inspiration from your home or from anywhere you have visited?

I live in Durham, which is in the North East. It’s mostly bridges and a marketplace knotted around a cathedral and a castle. There’s also a university nested inside the aforementioned mostly medieval castle. It’s one of those places with stones that just *remember*.

My debut novel, UNDER THE PENDULUM SUN, is about a Yorkshire missionary and his sister, so I’d say I draw a fair bit of inspiration from home or thereabouts. I was travelling through Birdforth when I had noticed its Norman church and a lot of that went into the novel, as well as the moody skies and windswept heaths.

5)      Which book, if any, would you consider to be your greatest influence and inspiration?

If we’re talking about my debut, UNDER THE PENDULUM SUN, then I’m probably obligated to say JANE EYRE since the plot mirrors the latter third or so of Charlotte Bronte’s novel.

6)      What drove you to write about Vampires?

I don’t think I’ve actually written about vampires, though a lot of my published work does fit neatly into gothic fantasy.

7)      What do you think is the attraction for Vampire fiction? Why is it such a popular topic?

Under-The-Pendulum-Sun-cover-largeSex and death make for an intoxicating combination that is as old as myth, so I suspect that’s a huge part of it’s draw. Vampires function as dark mirrors of humanity, both as monsters to revile and more commonly these days as dark heroes. They can be power fantasies of immortality and dominance over others as well as metaphors for the marginalised. The pieces are varied and various, so that legacy of myth makes for some very powerful metaphor.

8)      In a fight between all the greatest Vampires of fiction, who do you think would come out on top?

Lada. From the haunting AND I DARKEN by Kiersten White.

Which is sort of a cheat-y answer since she’s not technically vampire. She’s just Vlad Dracul, historical inspiration of one of the ur-vampires, but also a teenage girl.

Still, I’m pretty sure she can stab and stake her way through any canon of vampires. Because she is just that awesome.

9)      What about in some other contest such as sexiness or dress sense? Who would win that one?

Carmilla from the CARMILLA web series is awesome. I’ve soft spot for that sort of casual badassery and it very much helps that her attraction and romance with Laura is portrayed very much in ways that consciously reject the male gaze. Part of it is to do with the limitations of the web format but instead of the soft camera angles and fleshy bodyparts, it’s about their faces and that intimacy between them.

In general I would really recommend watching CARMILLA if you have time. It’s all free on YouTube and though it takes a little while to get going with its eldritch horror on campus setting, it’s a lot of fun.

10)   How well do you think one of your characters would fare against the winner(s) of the above?

I don’t really know, to be honest. I imagine that Mab, the Pale Queen of the fairies would be intrigued and ask them to tea, all the while smiling daggers and glaring poison. Carmilla does have some experience stabbing up eldritch horrors, so she’d probably hold her own even if Mab dissolves into a slither of snakes. Lada is also in camp stabby, though she does have plenty of inner turmoil for Mab to exploit, so not sure who’d win there.

11)   Tell us the basic premise behind your latest novel.

UNDER THE PENDULUM SUN is a gothic novel about missionaries in fairyland. It’s about pitting Victorian theology against the alien otherness of the fairies. And like any other gothic novel, we a seemingly innocent but curious young woman exploring a puzzle box of an old house. She finds things that are probably best left lost, but that’s how all these stories go.

 

Jeannette Ng is originally from Hong Kong but now lives in Durham, UK. Her MA in Medieval and Renaissance Studies fed into an interest in medieval and missionary theology, which in turn spawned her love for writing gothic fantasy with a theological twist. She runs live roleplay games and is active within the costuming community, running a popular blog.

Blog Link: https://medium.com/@nettlefish

I’m also on twitter as @jeannette_ng

Book Purchase Link (amazon): Under the Pendulum Sun

Book Purchase Link (ebook): Under the Pendulum Sun

 

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