Goldmann - Latest Updates

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Comment by Magic Marmalade:

Wow!

...A whole lot better than I'd imaged it would be... and definitely better than the movie.

The movie is one of the great vampire movies of it's time, and possibly ranking as one of the best vampire movies ever, but that seems to lean into the Hollywood idea of the vampire, as a fetish-fest, of overly romanticised, achingly beautiful people in a posing and posturing competition... for want of a better word..."sexy".

This though, fills in a lot of the blanks in the story, and lean away from that, more into the genuinely tragic, truly horrifying in concept, and perverse sense of morality, and lack thereof... And definitely more away from the more supernatural / "superpowers" vampire model.

It's much more philosophical in tone, and tragic in that way, and the hypnotic, and beautifully poetic language used to tell the tell has a suitably hypnotic quality to it, like a long languid, hallucinatory fever dream aspect, which make this incredibly dark tale very, very affecting.

It deals a lot with the sense of detachment from humanity, and alienation, and a sort of being outside of the world, and times in which one lives... And these factors show how a corruption of moral sensibilities creates perversions of relationships, and twisted notions of family.

(An advisory note here should be that, not only with the child vampire Claudia, there are a few disturbing relationships between adults and the young... which, as with the idea that this is meant to be some kind of LGBTQ tale in it's depiction of male relationships, is, I am quite certain, not the point of the book, or what Anne Rice was showing us... but rather, as I say, how a lack of time and humanity can affect a person, and alter them... but a misreading of these elements might disturb some)

And it is actually not the usual blood suckery that is the true essence of the horror here, but as with The Wicker Man, it's the normalisation, and the casual nature of what these vampires do, and how they go about it, and how they view it, that is the most disturbing factor.

One of the best books I've read in a long time.