Blood & Chocolate
I went to NYT bestselling author
Christopher Moore's book event in Berkeley last night. It was the first time I've seeen him speak publicly and it was SRO with fans clutching copies of his new vampire comedy,
You Suck. Chris was all kinds of funny, riffing on everything from having his chest hair shaved off in patches to
Janet Maslin's ambiguous review of the book in the NYT. If you have a chance to see him talk, GO.
Vampires are still all the rage.
Will Smith's people, and when you're that successful you have your own "people," have announced that he'll star in the vamp thriller,
I am Legend. The movie is based on the
novel by scary writer Richard Matheson. It's about "a mutant virus gone wrong." Those darn mutant viruses! Speaking of which, some nutjob scientist has
reconstituted the virus for the 1918 flu. He tested it on monkeys and then had to kill the monkeys after a few days because they were so sick. The mad scientist had some convoluted justification for re-creating the death virus; if it somehow gets out, no magical character will come save us.
I thought
Blood & Chocolate, by
Annette Curtis Klause, was a killer title for a book, and then, duh, I remembered:
Elvis Costello used it first. When struggling for a title, I go to Costello, too. The
movie based on this well-received teen vamp book is coming out next week.
So, does the interest in vampires reflect our zeitgeist, and, if so, what does it mean? The wish to encounter and yet survive a deadly force? Or maybe just a fascination with
glamorous and dangerous Eurotrash types.