Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, July 13, 1995 TAG: 9507130035
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
You want weird? Get a load of Aaron Stiltner's get-up. Man, does he know how to stand out in a crowd. Show up for the Vampires' Ball dressed in T-shirt and jeans, and you have to expect people to stare. The Roanoke telemarketer shrugged off his appearance. "I would have dressed up, but I'm a T-shirt and blue jeans kind of guy. Besides, I don't own enough black."
Well, yes, black did seem to be the color of the night. Not outside - a near full moon was glowing late Tuesday, appropriately enough. But inside Books-A-Million at Crossroads Mall, black was de rigueur. Or is that de rigor mortis?
Black lipstick? Check out Amanda Duff's lips.
Black nail polish? Have Teresa Jones show you her manicure.
Black eyeshadow? Jeremy Mason's eyelids were especially nicely done.
That doesn't begin to count all the black capes. For those, just check out the other 70 or so children of the night who gathered at the stroke of midnight to mark the first official sales of novelist Anne Rice's latest work, "Memnoch the Devil."
You've heard of "Interview with the Vampire," at least the Tom Cruise-Brad Pitt movie version? That was based on Rice's best-seller, the first in her five-part series of "Vampire Chronicles," which culminates with "Memnoch." It's a lavish affair that's essentially the history of the world, from the devil's point of view.
Think of Rice as a high-class Stephen King, only with lots more sex and lots more religion, all stirred up in a witches' brew of lush prose.
So what does the release of her newest work mean, at least to members of the Anne Rice subculture?
"It's like when the new Pearl Jam album came out and they had a big sale at The Record Exchange and had people lined up out the door," said 18-year-old Brandon Wykle, a recent Northside High School graduate who's working a telemarketing job. "That was the big deal then. This is pretty much the same thing here."
So the Books-A-Million chain went all out, throwing a late-night Vampires' Ball at each of its stores. On the program: A free, late-night showing of the "Interview with the Vampire" movie. A costume party, with prizes for the best attire. Blood-red punch. "It's ginger ale and red stuff," said sales associate Holly Jamison, who decked herself out in black. "I don't know what it is. I don't want to know what it is."
At midnight, the clerks rolled out a cart loaded with 60 copies of the new book, almost all of which were promptly snatched up by the horde.
Some couldn't wait and started reading the book right there in the store.
"This is more people than they expected," Jamison said, as she watched the stack of books dwindle. "I warned them. There are more vampire fans in Roanoke than most people think."
Indeed, the turnout astonished even some of Rice's most ardent devotees. "I showed up at 10:45, expecting to be the Lone Ranger," the uncostumed Stiltner said. Instead, "it was Halloween there for awhile. Some of the costumes are pretty amazing."
You mean like Karen Daugherty's fangs and dripping blood and death-white face? "It could be Halloween all year 'round and I'd be happy," said Daugherty, a hospital lab worker, who, as a matter of fact, works with blood every day. Like many of those at the Vampire Ball, she's infatuated not just by Rice's work, but by vampirism in general. "I like the idea of vampires, actually," she said. "To live forever and be beautiful. All you have to do is kill a few people."
(That living forever part was especially apt Tuesday; Daugherty celebrated her 28th birthday at the ball.)
Or how about Mason, with his top hat-and-gloves-and-walking stick? "Vampires are my passion," said Mason, a Northside High School senior. "I guess it's the mystery - the whole idea of being immortal, whether it's evil or not." He says his two great goals in life are to witness a total eclipse, and to visit the castle of Vlad the Impaler, the historical Dracula, in Romania.
Fascination with a pale version of immortality is a common theme for vampire hobbyists. "It's very appealing to see something not hurt by war or by AIDS," Jamison said. "Freud would have had a heyday."
Don't forget the sex, either. That's a big part of Rice's appeal. Her vampires are not your garden variety I vant to drink your blood B-movie monsters. They're, well, sexy. "It's a very sensual, erotic experience," Daugherty said. "According to 'The Vampire Companion,' the drinking of the blood far surpasses mortal sex."
This is, if you haven't guessed already, something of a phenomenon. "Anne Rice used to be, not underground, but mostly big with the college crowd," Jamison said. "Now, everybody is coming in and looking for her. It's almost as if vampires have gone mainstream in a way."
True, you've got kids such as Wykle, who says he set up a club of 55 "vampires" at Northside High School last year. "I bit their finger three times and they'd be a vampire," he said. "I wouldn't draw blood or anything. I just bit 'em." He says Rice inspired him so much he's written his own Gothic novel, "Angels of Armageddon," and is starting on the sequel.
Then there's Amanda Duff, another recent high-school graduate who drove from Lexington for the occasion. What's with Anne Rice? "She just has an interesting perspective on the world of darkness," Duff says. "She just has an interesting way of reaching all the erotic levels that transcend sexuality. I don't know. She's cool."
But there's also Gaile Detellem, who's old enough to be a grandmother and lives a perfectly ordinary life filling out birth records at Community Hospital of Roanoke Valley. "Nobody would ever think I was into vampires and Anne Rice," she said. "I'm not even a mystery reader. But my son read the first book and said, 'Mom, you've got to read this.' It's not just weird people."
Rice, she says, is simply "a fantastic writer. She makes you believe vampires are real."
Real enough that not only did Detellem come out at midnight for the book, she said she'd stay up even later reading the first few chapters, even though she had to be at work at 6:45 a.m.
Store manager Karla Kirk pronounced herself pleased, although she did wonder whether at least one of her customers had carried things a bit too far. "One guy asked him how he did his teeth. He said, `Super glue.'"
by CNB