Handbook of the Vampire: Between the Traditional and the Metaphorical: Bleeding Out the Foreigners in Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Saint Germain Novels

Written for Handbook of the Vampire by Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns the Chapter Page can be found here.

Yarbro’s Saint Germain novels are much loved, I know, but embarrassingly I have only read the first one - Hotel Transylvania. This lack of knowledge did not stop me for enjoying this exploration into the world of Saint Germain especially with the lens that was used. Berns sees Saint Germain not only as an ethical vampire but as a vampire who is an emigrant, moving through countries, through the various timelines that the full series explores. It was interesting, therefore, that the compelling conclusion was that “the hosts countries are those functioning as vampiric beings” (9) and I really liked that view and lens.

There was one aspect of the paper that, throwaway as it is, I have to comment on however. This is the view that the use of native or grave earth, for a vampire, originates in Stoker. It is true that this earth aspect is part of the vampire megatext and there is a connection to Stoker but his version was slightly different. In Dracula Stoker, through Van Helsing, tells us “For it is not the least of its terrors that this evil thing is rooted deep in all good, in soil barren of holy memories it cannot rest.” The soil he took to England was from his disused chapel, it contained holy memories (there is a leap in concept, therefore, when the Crew of Light use holy objects to purify and make useless that soil). He also rested in a suicide’s grave as it made that earth unhallowed (with memories of being hallowed). The concept is rather arcane and it is little wonder that the it was simplified in the megatext as native or grave earth. However, that detail aside, the earth with Saint Germain allows him to move with much more ease (the soil kept in his shoes), whilst a stranger in a strange and vampiric land.