In Person
Fri., Oct. 30, 1998
"Okay, I'm lost. Tell me again who Anne Rice is?"
Thanks to a number of unwitting foils in the sparse audience for Ramsland's recent Austin stopover, the Princeton, New Jersey-based psychologist and author had her hands full, not only in filling in the background details but also defending a trio of local nightcrawlers who showed up for the event.
Ramsland's new non-fiction work, Piercing the Darkness: Undercover With Vampires in America Today, may suffer from a bit of Raymond Chandler's disease ("There was more to vampire culture than I realized. A lot more."), no one could accuse the author of not having paid her dues. Speaking in quiet tones before the assembled crowd of the faithful and the bemused, she managed to put the current crop of vampiric shenanigans in perspective, providing an overview of the culture from as far back as Vlad Tepes and Bram Stoker to Vampire: The Masquerade, and urging people not to be so close-minded about those among us who might want to, you know, drink our blood.
Can vampires go out in the daylight? Sure, said Ramsland, the rules have changed. Vampires in modern culture have rewritten the mythos to suit their needs, so that those lucky enough to be devoid of skin-pigment ailments such as proferia can freely move about without fear of spontaneous combustion. Are all vampires crimson-eyed exsanguinators? Not a chance, says Ramsland. In fact many of them just want to get along with their daywalking brethren and drop by for the occasional game of The Masquerade.
Ramsland made no secret of the fact that there are, to be sure, some very disturbed individuals out there, one of whom she had met (alone, in a dark forest, and how's that for journalistic street-cred?) and who claimed to have murdered several "mundanes" for the sheer vampiric thrill of it.
Judging from the vamps that made it to the lecture, however, the only thing we mortals have to fear is that our supply of trapezohedral dice might be imperiled, as the vast majority of Nosferatu out there seem more interested in keeping their hit points up to snuff, as opposed to eviscerating the family cat.
Millennial fever or just an overabundance of nattily-dressed computer programmers? Either way, it's still pretty a pretty frightening prospect.
– Marc Savlov
