Footwear and gender issues in vampire books

April 24-27, 1975
Nothing listed, so maybe I wasn't reading much in that time period.

April 24-27, 2005 I read:

Necroscope III: the Source, Brian Lumley

I don't know how other readers or writers, or book people categorize books, but sometimes I divide them into "boy books" and "girl books" because the target audience is pretty clear.

Women will read often books primarily aimed at men. I know some women who grew up reading both The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries, but I've yet to meet a man who has read Louisa May Alcott's Little Women.

Necroscope III is a boy book. Espionage thriller stuff, supplemented with fighting, gory, slimy, scary monsters. Lots of explanation of machines and how gateways into other dimensions might work--including diagrams!

Another strong indication that a book has a male target audience is when all the women are beautiful, sexy and available, the male protagonists see them mainly as once or future sex objects, and are always having to protect them from being ravished by the bad guys.

There wasn't much humor in this book. I'm not counting the unintentional--e.g., I laughed at the hero's dead mother going on about how he hadn't "called" lately and all the dead people were rooting for him... I don't have space to totally explain, but briefly, the hero's special gift is communicating with dead people, his mother is dead, but she's not done fussing. I can kind of relate to this. The closest thing to laughter was the bad guys [evil laugh] kind of sneering at the good guys just before a fight. That doesn't really count for me as humor.

I had to contrast this "boy vampire book" with the "girl vampire book" I read several days ago. Undead and Unwed, tested my patience severely with the heroine's obsession with designer shoes. If the author hadn't managed to be genuinely funny about it, I would have stopped reading.

But then I never managed to get the whole high heels thing. Working as a receptionist and official "foot bath person" for a podiatrist for a few months when I was in school really sealed my fate as a comfortable shoe person. The prettier the shoe, the more damaged the foot. Forget it.

Margaret Mead once said something to the effect that a man never has enough tools and a woman never has enough shoes, and that remark seems to fit into the "boy/girl" categories I outlined above.

Suffice it to say, no one in Necroscope III: The Source pays much attention to footwear, except when hiking over razor-sharp rocks to get away from the bad guys. And come to think of it, it's the female character who brings up the whole footwear issue. Hmmm, Margaret Mead may be onto something. The tools in Necroscope, etc., however--usually weapons--were lovingly described.

I confess that, not having to fight off vampires, and being only minimally handy, I probably couldn't use any more tools than I now have. And yes, I wouldn't mind having more shoes--but comfy shoes! As one of my more fashion-conscious co-workers put it, "Your shoes are so. . . aggressively comfortable!"

Don't get me started on the stiletto heels in Hamilton's Anita Blake vampire books.