Earth to Earth Dust to Dust

"Earth to Earth, Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust" the playbook disclaims, working quite nicely with the vampire universe since it blends both Christian beginning to vampires' Twentieth/Twenty-first century style.

So, in case you are not up the the Christian beginning of human from dust, I'd refer you to Genesis -- the section where God picks up a handful of "clay" or "dust," spits on it to moisten it and forms Adam, the first human. (Yes, man = dust and Holy spit.) One assumes that the Holy spit is what gives a human its immortal soul, but that is only speculation.

Then, Adam gets bit by a vampire -- and whether he looses his soul or not, his dietary tastes change. But his human family doesn't know about his new existence; he gets buried. If here were still fully human, his existence would end here and he'd return to the earth which he came from. But, Adam emerges from the earth not quite human this time, although he still wears a human shell no soul is home.

Enter the slayer such as Angel or Buffy (or Spike) in the Whedon-verse. If they are doing their job correctly, they will stick a stake through Adam's non-beating heart and what is left will now puff into dust. This is dual up-side. It nicely disposes of the corpse, and completes the Biblical circle. Earth to earth, dust to dust. The full measure of a man.

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.