Shooting Hot Loads
The Intercourse of Vampires and Volcanoes
You know what can really make me blow my top?
Yeah baby, vampires. But also: volcanoes. Those quivering mounds of oozing hot juice always make my igneous go molten.
And if you like a bit of the ol’ V on V: get ready, because we’re going to get nasty when it comes to scissoring vampires and volcanoes.
Gothic novels embraced volcanoes fairly early, with Charlotte Smith’s Montalbert. The heroine — I presume a wayward virgin auditioning for her first role as an “actress”— travels to Italy to take an eruption of Mt. Etna right in the eye. Instead of being horrified, she marvels at the beauty and asks for more.
But it was that slut Varney who took it beyond the paywall when it came to hot tectonic action. Varney the Vampire, of course, was an early piece of vampire fiction; and also a long thick one — an estimated 2200 pages in paperback form! Varney was a true freak, not because he was the first literary vampire to have fangs, but because he committed suicide by jumping into a Mount Vesuvius.
But volcanos aren’t just relics of the 19th century vampire novels. The modern Syfy series Van Helsing uses an eruption and a subsequently darkened sky to give vampires free passage during the day. They like it ebony, is what I’m saying. BBC means “Big Black Clouds” in this context.
Modern novelists also want to take a turn at filling the vulcan hole. J Cameron Boyd lets Edward Cullen get nasty with Moana in his Chasing Immortals series, where he shot his hot magma right inside the ring of fire that is the Hawaiian islands. The first book is literally subtitled “Vampires & Volcanoes”. It’s a little on the nose, but hey, some people like taking it on the face.
Even the Papa Bear of vampires, Dracula, isn’t immune from the allure of “hot+hole+spew”. As discussed in earlier blogs, Bram Stoker originally penned a different ending to Dracula, which existed in a galley form before being edited prior to publication. In that ending, Castle Dracula was sucked up and swallowed up by… get this… a sumbitching volcano.
It’s almost like, there’s a connection or something?
Seriously, what is with fangs and warm, wet holes? They’re either piercing them in necks or they’re falling in them and burning to death.
As to the latter — the connection may be in the irresistible mythological alignment of volcanoes and Hell; or in non-Christian traditions, an Underworld of Death. So yeah, Hell.
Vampires, though supernatural, haven’t been uniformly associated with demons or Hell in literature. But I suppose imagery is too good sometimes? Even in a more grounded tv show like Van Helsing, nods to what worked in fantastically supernatural vampire fiction could be expected.
Plus volcanoes are sexy as fuck.
But nothing will give me a rock hard eruption like the most vivid magma shot of them all: Mount Tambora, which let loose hot loads all over Earth’s face in 1815. This Indonesian Ron Jeremy shot so high and so far, that it literally darkened the skies all over the world. This last part is not a porn analogy — the globe really had a shortage of sunlight the following year because of all the ash Mount Tambora put in the atmosphere. Crops failed and temperatures dropped across the globe. In the English-speaking world, 1816 became known as “the year with no summer.” Real life Van Helsing stuff here.
It was this particular dreary and drizzly summer, brought on by the geologic throbs of Tambora, that several friends found themselves housebound on the shores of Lake Geneva, where their host, Lord Byron, challenged them— after the requisite orgy, group shower, and toweling off — to write a scary story. Thus was birthed the first English novel on our blogs topic; John Polidori’s The Vampyre (with an assist from Lord Byron).
It was of course also the night that saw the genesis of young Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. But if you’re into monsters and teenage girls, go watch hentai, you freak.
The Earth’s mantle is something to be respected and feared. Like vampires, it’s bigger, older, and stronger than us and we penetrate it at our peril. It occasionally ejaculates and destroys whole cities, but it also builds new islands and puts on great fireworks and inspires excellent fiction.
Fault me harder!
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Image Sources: Filmnation, Getty, Edward Francis Finden
