This is the picture of my Christmas display at the college I teach in.

Books are almost as undying as the vampires that hide within their pages, waiting to crawl from them to impact our dreams, fantasies and perceptions of life. But is the bloodsucking fiend we read about Fiction or Nonfiction? Fact or Fantasy? Should it lie within the soft sheets of romance or the blood soaked nightmares of Gothic Horror? The image of the bloodsucking, powerful, almost immortal appears in all cultures, societies, and times. What is the attraction of this enduring, undying, yet constantly changing myth? What kernel of essential need does the figure of the vampire supply? How do we read them, create them, interpret them?

Examine them and what do you find? You find a creature that still retains human form, although dead. It is a creature that has a truly parasitic relationship with humanity, most especially with its own family. It drinks the blood of the living to survive. It needs to be invited into ones' home. It has rigid rules to exist by. It is a creature that continues to have a life (of sorts) without the need of divine (Holy of some sort) intervention. It is usually in direct opposition with the ruling theology of whatever culture it "lives" in. It is usually either inherently evil, or the product of an evil action. And like all evil, it usually wears an attractive face.

So just where and how do they relate to religion? And why in societies where traditional relegions still retain dominence does the symbols of the religion still help to save the wearer from being destroyed by the evil eternal life of undeath? Yet put yourself in the Hamilton-verse and ask if a cross will work unless the wearer believes in the power behind the symbol -- or must the vampire also ascribe to the belief? I have wondered whose belief would win if the Christian cross-wearer ran into an unbelieving vampire in a dark parking lot; who would be driving/driven away?

There seems to be some inherent and warring juxtaposition between the two trinities -- God, Jesus, Holy Ghost versus Vampire, Victim, and Slayer -- bearing in mind that both have relationships built on blood, souls, and eternal lives. What could we discover about our society and ourselves through an examination of these relationships?

What is the relationship between the vampire and blood and sex? Sex seems to be a predominant theme in many of the novels we buy (think Anita Hamilton, Charlaine Harris) in which the drinking of the blood and sexual pleasure seem interchangeable and totally merged. Is the taking of the blood about penetration -- a sexual metaphor -- or it is simply about blood? If it is about blood, any donor should do and sexual orientation should not matter, nor should age or race. As both the Bible and Bram Stoker's Dracula says, "The blood is the life."

Where in the modern bookstore, the modern psyche, does this particular supernatural creature belong? Fact or fiction? Romance or horror -- or even perhaps both?

As a society we encode our ideas, morals, perceptions, and hidden agendas in writing since they can then wander out into the world to impact and infect other readers. We explore our relationships to ourselves through our relationships to vampires: things that are almost human, but not quite; almost monsters, but not quite, almost men or women, but not quite. They are malleable, changeable, undying... what?