Callouses For Thousands of Years

First appeared on Escape Between the Pages, March 2011, for the Blood Knot book tour.

There is a peice of dialogue in Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire series that always sticks in my mind when it comes to building a new urban fantasy series of my own.  Harris’ vampire Bill Compton rubs his chin, which is dark with a day’s growth, and says that he was lucky that he had shaved just recently, when he was made a vampire.  There were other vampires he knew destined to move through time with three or four day growths, or full beards.

And I always think about the movie Interview With The Vampire, when the disturbingly adult Kirsten Dunst chopped off her waist-length hair, only to have it reappear overnight.

This has always struck me as one of the more fascinating aspects of vampirism.  Once one is made a vampire they’re, well, stuck that way.  They’re a frozen version of their human selves, destined to pass through time (one can hardly call it “living”) unchanging, except to repair whatever damage may happen to them from time to time as they move about the world, restoring them back to the exact copy they were when they were made.

If you extend that even further…what if you got made after you’d spent the day sweating heavily?  A really bad hair day?  Just before you were about to wash your hair?  Just before you were about to do your roots?  (Does dye even “take” on vampires?  It does in the True Blood TV series world, but Harris implies her vampires can’t even shave.)

But let’s be nice and say you were made when you were looking your best, and so, phew, you get to pass through time looking pretty damn good.  But uh-oh, fashions change.  Now, the long ironed-out locks hanging dead straight, and the pretty bangs you have are looking passé.  Not just out of date, but like the hair styles mothers used to wear back in the twenty-tens.  If you want to look like the age you’re supposed to be, you have to crop your hair around your ears and crimp it so it’s fuzzy, and make it look white.  How are you going to do that if it stays exactly the way it was when you were made?

Assuming you solve that conundrum and figure out a way to keep your hair short, what happens in thirty years time, when long hair is suddenly the fashion statement of the year again?  Or very long fingernails?

It probably sounds funny, but depending on which fictional world you’re reading, if the vampires are hidden from humans, then this sort of attention to detail becomes critical.  If their physiologies never change, they have to find some way to compensate and appear to change as humans do.  In the hands of a good author, details like this can add wonderful depth to a book.

Interestingly, in Laurell K. Hamilton’s fictional world, vampires can grow their hair long (Jean Claude) and breed human children, which I always find faintly wrong.  It doesn’t toll loudly enough for me to not enjoy reading her books — are you kidding?  Jean Claude and Micah out-rank any small off notes.  But vampires who can change their physiology in any way makes them less timeless and one step closer to human and mortal, to my mind.  It does get around all the problems vampires would have with unchanging physiologies, however.

But Hamilton is a rare exception.  Most vampires in most universes tend to be the immortal, unchanging variety.  They have to deal with little problems like callouses that never go away, as my own 1,500 year old hero, Nial, did in Blood Knot.  His callouses were on his hand, and came from the sword he once used, hundreds of years ago.  But, as his physiology never changes, the callouses still remained for Winter to find, fourteen centuries later.

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