CKblog

1. I read “My Sister the Vampire: Switched” on Tesla’s recommendation. Two twin sisters, one a vampire, are separated at birth then raised by different sets of adoptive parents. Chance reunites them on the first day of high school in a small town with a secret, parallel economy that caters to the large undead population.

In an early chapter, the mortal sister goes to the school library and reads “The Horla” by Guy de Maupassant. “The Horla” is formatted as an interview with a patient in a sanitarium who believes he’s been the victim of an invisible being that’s sickened him and his household by draining their life force while they sleep. (I went and got it from the library myself).

Wikipedia says that Maupassant suffered from dementia caused by untreated syphilis and that the paranoid, obsessive narrator of the Horla was likely generated in personal experience. Tesla and I discussed “The Horla” and the concept of vampires in general, but I didn’t mention the syphilis or Maupassant’s suicide attempt. A few days later,  I read an entry in a friend’s blog with a quote from Ford Madox Ford nested in an excerpt from an article in The Guardian:

“Ford and his friend Joseph Conrad loved a sentence from a Guy de Maupassant story: ‘He was a gentleman with red whiskers who always went first through a doorway.’ Ford comments: “that gentleman is so sufficiently got in that you need no more of him to understand how he will act. He has been ‘got in’ and can get to work at once.”

The red haired man is a character in “Boule de Suif”, the story of an overweight French prostitute, also in the anthology where I read “The Horla”. After this research, I reconsidered the “My Sister the Vampire” series, and began to read Tesla’s books more closely. The Lemony Snicket guy likes Pynchon.

2. Watched Conan the Barbarian recently and when the movie started Elizabeth announced, “I’ve seen this, it has Earl Grey Jones in it.”