Humans in a Vampire World

Lately I have been working with students in Tales of the Vampires, a compilation of stories in graphic novel form collected and organized by Joss Whedon. Each story is written by a different writer who worked with him on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series. Each world is totally different; each story focuses on a different vampire, often telling the story of his/her/its creation. And in most of the worlds, most humans walked around totally unsuspecting that there were vampires in their midst.

Why, one wonders, look at the "normal" humans? Because doing so lays stress on many things:

• Vampires look like us. This is important because it reminds us that the monster -- as Pogo long ago said, is us. We carry the seeds of monstrous-ness within us when we place our own survival needs over those of the other creatures around us. This comes into play when the banker who recently foreclosed on the unemployed soldier's home goes home, driving his Beemer to his Million dollar McMansion. Comes into play when the boss tells the worker that they need to take a pay loss due to economics, while giving themselves a 11%, $11,000 per year raise. Yet not only do we not recognize the monster; we want to be that monster.

• The humans, too often, are totally oblivious to the vampires among them. They simply don't want to accept that such "evil" can exist. And since vampires don't really exist and are figments of literary license, there is no need to even worry about them. Criminals from some cartel are taking revenge on some other cartel through beheading and burning them. And "why doesn't someone do something about those people?"

In this book it is usually the marginalized: poor, homeless, unwanted, who become the victims -- and it is so much easier to not notice the disappearance of people who have never been noticed to begin with. So the humans go about their day to day in blind obliviousness to the vampires among them. Lambs only if they, themselves, get an unlucky economical broken leg.