[CW: References to sexual assault, murder,
abusive relationships.]
Spoilers: The entire plot will be revealed.
‘Coming-of-age’
doesn’t generally mean killing spree. But adolescence means breaking free,
expressing who your truest self is, and Clover is a vampire. In the process of
finding herself and overcoming trauma a lot of people will die.
Clover
wants to leave home, live her own life. Unfortunately for her, her brother
Marcel is an incestuous bastard who keeps her locked in their castle.
Unfortunately for the world, she’s a vampire hungry for human blood. She
escapes her brother’s clutches, and hightails it to the city, killing this
person and that, stopping only for sunrise. But there are people following her,
a P.I. Marcel hired, and an Order of animal-headed figures.
Skelly
costumes a bildungsroman in the cape
and fangs of a vampire film (actually the sex and fangs of a 70s vampire film).
The tropes of vampirism intensify the conflict of the coming-of-age story. Our
protagonist, Clover, must break from the womb of childhood, and through a debauched
adolescence come to a compromise between the needs of her Self, and the needs
of society. In My Pretty Vampire,
Clover’s individual needs are to drink and kill: self-actualisation through
hedonistic murder. Society would prefer she not kill people. But like any decent
bildungsroman, the poles of Self and
Society are not synonymous with Good and Evil.
We readers,
as human beings with an interest in living, can understand Marcel and the
P.I.’s concern about Clover’s violence. A free society finishes when my fist
reaches your face, or her fangs meet your neck. In a realistic setting, where the
selfish excesses of self-actualisation rarely spout (much) blood, a reader can
be lulled into the protagonist’s self-justifications. Clover is a predator, only
a metaphor away from a murder-rapist. Skelly doesn’t contrive justification for
Clover, like more squeamish vampire writers do. Clover could drink animal
blood; human blood is merely a matter of taste. Nor does Clover prey on the
worst of society. Her first kill is a truck driver. She does kill two skeevy
guys, a drunk who acts boorishly to his prostitute, and a guy who creeps on
schoolgirls, but Clover doesn’t justify this as a cull of undesirables. She
kills them because they remind her of her brother.
But while
her brother keeps her from spree-ing, his dominion is not altruistic. Marcel
does not love his sister, though he thinks he does. He loves an image of his
sister. After she’s fled, Marcel stares at a photograph of a smiling,
brown-eyed Clover – not the hungry, red-eyed predator we know. Towards the
comic’s middle, we learn Marcel delivered Clover to an Order of vampires so that
she could live forever. The bunny-headed cultist says, ‘The one you love will
never die. (How selfish.)’ Marcel does not want an immortal sister, he wants a
forever young sister.
Marcel tries
to arrest Clover’s development by force. He wants his innocent schoolgirl
sister to live eternally. Like any decent guardian he gives his charge rules,
but his rules reveal what a selfish guardian he is. With context clues, we know
Marcel orders Clover to study, to wear her school uniform, and to avoid
smoking. Sensible rules for a teenager, but Clover is a vampire, four years past
high school. Why study? Her brother refuses to let her leave their castle, what
good will a high school diploma do? Why wear a school uniform when she cannot
go to school without bursting into flames? Why avoid smoking? If age cannot
whither her, tobacco won’t. Marcel does not love his sister: he loves a girl who
will forever fulfil his fetish for innocence.
The reader
becomes complicit in this reality-denying innocence worship. People don’t like
rooting for unredeemed murderers. As Clover slays her way through the city, the
reader conjures justifications for actions. ‘Did these people deserve it… In
the context of the metaphor… Well, when you consider where she came from…’
Skelly never validates these justifications. The P.I., Marcel’s agent, wants to
bring Clover back into her restraints. With the incomprehension of far-removed
authority figure, he says, ‘I’m sure you don’t like hurting all these innocent
people…’
She does.
That’s who she is. What the P.I., or Marcel, or we readers would like her to be
does not change who she is.
But Clover
does not start as who she will become. Although always evil, although always
predatory, something within her, even deep as her subconscious, restrains her.
The comic opens in her dreams, on a red rose bleeding black blood. Roses
symbolise sadistic lust, having thorns and associations with romance – but
notice how the sadism and lust are tempered. The roses have no thorns, like a
vampire defanged. The roses bleed, but they bleed black blood. For the first
half of the book, all the blood is black. Black is not the colour of blood,
black is the colour of censored blood. In Clover’s dreams and her first
murders, which hypothetically happen outside her brother’s control, her
savagery is sanitised.
Blood turns
red in chapter four. She has just hit her lowest. The daylight burnt her
unconscious, and she enters a lucid nightmare. The animal-headed Order grabs in
images suggesting gang-rape, and the leader of the group is her brother. He
holds a throbbing dagger to her face and tells her to ‘kiss it’. When Clover
awakes, she kills a prostitute’s john.
The john is
a boorish drunk, publicly molesting the weary prostitute. His is the first red
blood in the comic. Clover does not kill him for the prostitute’s sake. Clover
does nothing for anyone’s sake. In this creep, whose every affection is
assisted masturbation, who snaps at the slightest withholding of the affection
he believes he’s owed, Clover sees her brother. The john’s blood runs red
because killing him was more than feeding, it was sacrifice. She killed her
brother in effigy.
The
compromise she makes with society makes sense in this light. The bat-headed
leader of the vampire says he will not stop her, for her ‘evil is too beautiful
to destroy’. He says she can live, so
long as she lays low. In the end, Clover has found a place in the world,
forever tormenting her frantic-eyed brother. She must cause suffering, but of
all humans her brother most deserves her hate.
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