Short Story Genre Survey, Part 9

 

cover art by J. Allen St. John

We finish up our Short Story Genre Survey with a horror story:

Sports

Adventure

Mystery

Crime

Horror

Science Fiction

Fantasy

Western

War

Sometimes, to enjoy a story to its fullest, you have to fully put yourself in the mind-set of the protagonist. "Vampire Village" (Weird Tales, November 1932), by Edmund Hamilton, is such a story.

Hamilton, by the way, wrote this one under the pseudonym Hugh Davidson. It's a name he used sometimes for his gothic horror tales, to separate those tales from the cosmic-level science fiction he was known for under his own name.

Anyway, "Vampire Village" is narrated by one of two Americans backpacking across Europe. They are warned about vampires in one village and the narrator is given a cross. The Americans, naturally, discount the possibility of vampires. So, when the next village they find is indeed inhabited by the undead, only that cross - still in the narrator's pocket - gives them a chance of living through the night.

It's a fun and atmospheric story, hitting the right level of gothic horror to make it work. But a reader might be a little bothered by just how darn DENSE the two Americans seem to be. It is mind-numbingly obvious that the villagers are vampires. How do these two idiots not see it sooner?

Well, the answer is simple. We live in a world where vampires are fictional. We are reading about a world where vampires might very well be real. We know this, so we wonder why the Americans don't catch on sooner.

The thing to remember is that the Americans don't themselves know they are living in a world where vampires might exist. As far as they know, vampires are always fictional. If we ran clues that a village was inhabited by vampires, we would simply discount those clues. We would KNOW that it can't be true.

So that the Americans don't realize they are in danger at first isn't unreasonable. They simply aren't going to shift their thinking into "Hey, vampires DO exist" until it's nearly far too late.

You can find the story online HERE. It's worth reading, but don't be too hard on the protagonists. They think they are living in our world, after all. They KNOW vampires don't exist.