Jan. 14th, 2011

lloydwood: (Default)

When Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was published, I immediately thought of Brontë's Wuthering Heights. The gravedigging, the nights on stormy moors...

  • "The intense horror of nightmare came over me: I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed, 'Let me in - let me in!'"
  • "Last night, I was on the threshold of hell. To-day, I am within sight of my heaven. I have my eyes on it: hardly three feet to sever me!"
  • "Kiss me again, but don't let me see your eyes! I forgive what you have done to me. I love my murderer--but yours! How can I?"

So The Vampyrs of Wuthering Heights had a nice ring to it. Worth adapting Brontë's out-of-copyright prose to create a bestselling vampire novel?

Well, no. It turns out Brontë deliberately wrote vampiric elements, as Clifton Snider's The "Imp of Satan": The Vampire Archetype in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre demonstrates. And the mentions of and parallels to Wuthering Heights in the bestselling vampire novel Twilight: Eclipse show that this is widely recognised.

There's no shock of juxtaposition or knowing winks to the reader to be had in embellishing what is already there.

Update: But literary sensibility hasn't prevented this from having already been done:

The horror.

Update 2: Ursula K. Le Guin's Emily Brontë and the Vampires of Lustbaden.

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