All posts by Alyssia

About Alyssia

Alyssia is an Adult Services Librarian at the Vaughan Public Libraries. Nothing makes her happier than a great book and a great cup of coffee. She loves fiction in all formats - books, movies, television, you name it - and is always on the lookout for awesome new music.  |  Meet the team

The Vampire: A Brief History

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This spooky season I find myself falling headlong back into the clutches of vampire fiction, a turn of events spurred on by the fantastic new television adaptation of Interview With the Vampire. Ever since HBO’s bonkers True Blood ended, I’ve been craving something that truly gets the horror, the thrill, the sheer camp of vampires. Pop culture needed a bit of a break from them, but this fall we have four new vampire book adaptations airing. We’re back, baby! And we (vampire fans) are getting everything our goth little hearts desire. For too long it’s been all about zombies. Enough. Time for the return of decadence. 

For the past couple hundred years, vampires have enjoyed a stable presence in literature, waning in and out of fashion. And while people might still roll their eyes at the concept of vampire romance, probably bemoaning the cheesiness of Twilight, the fact of the matter is that for as long as there have been vampires in fiction, they have been intrinsically tied to romance—or at least, to desire. In 1700s Western Europe, the novel as we know it was in its fledgling form, and much of the written content was meant to be lurid and titillating (often under the guise of morality-teaching) for a newly widespread audience (think Fanny Hill or Pamela). Around the same time, Eastern Europe was gripped by a “vampire epidemic”; a sort of mass hysteria that caused townsfolk to exhume corpses they were convinced were coming back to life. Shortly after this time period came Gothic literature. The motifs are familiar: decaying castles or abbeys, vengeful murder, damsels, lascivious villains, and so on. Basically, Gothic fiction was the height of melodrama (for a crystallization of all of these themes and more, see 1796’s The Monk by Matthew Lewis). 

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Fall TV: Return to Westeros, Middle Earth, and More

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Fall television season is upon us, and fantasy fans are eating well. I have a real penchant for fantasy movies and television shows based on books that I haven’t read, and there is plenty of new content to keep us entertained as the nights start to get darker. Below are some adaptations I’m particularly excited about; let us know your own picks in the comments! 

House of the Dragon

How are we feeling, everyone? Are we ready to revisit the world of Westeros? Have we put our hurt sufficiently behind us? We all remember the catastrophe that was season 8. I don’t want to talk about it. Suffice to say, when Game of Thrones ended in 2019, I declared that I would never lay eyes on another A Song of Ice and Fire–adjacent property again. Fool me once, right? Cut to three years later, which in pandemic years feels more like eight, and I find myself cautiously optimistic about this new prequel series. The groundwork has already been laid; we already know the houses and the lore of Westeros. We all have our fave houses (Tyrell forever!). But where Game of Thrones spanned several houses and the entire continent of Westeros (and a bit of Essos), House of the Dragon, based on the novel Fire and Blood, reins in the scope to focus mainly on the platinum-haired, dragon-wielding Targaryen family.  

Where the original series covered conflicts and power grabs from house to house, House of the Dragon deals with the inter-family civil war known as the Dance of the Dragons (not to be confused with A Dance with Dragons, the fifth book in the Song of Ice and Fire series…), which is essentially a war of succession (funnily, apparently the showrunners looked to Succession for inspiration). So get ready for more inappropriate family relationships (the Targaryens are famously incestuous, much like the real-life Ptolemy and Habsburg dynasties) and confusing names like Rhaenyra, Rhaenys, Aemond, Daemon, and multiple other combinations of a and e (as someone who still can’t spell Daenerys without the help of Google, this will surely be fun for me). I just watched Wigs Versailles, a show about King Louis XIV’s court at the titular palace, full of melodrama, political machinations, assassinations and the like (and also beautiful, gorgeous hair). So I, for one, am primed and ready for more of that…plus dragons.  

House of the Dragon airs on Crave (HBO), Sunday nights at 9:00 pm. Get caught up on the original series here.

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What Went Wrong with Netflix’s Persuasion?

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What was it that Shakespeare said? “My kingdom for a decent adaptation of Persuasion?” Some versions have gotten close, but we’ve yet to land on a definitive take (unlike, say, Pride and Prejudice, which is done, now please leave it alone forever). The latest brave soul to take a crack at Jane Austen’s final novel is Netflix, who takes misinterpretation of the source material to soaring new heights in an adaptation that is not only just plain bad, but bafflingly off-base. And it seems that many of us have taken that personally. By now, plenty of hilariously dramatic thinkpieces have been written on the ways in which this version fails. But all the hubbub got me thinking: there have been plenty of terrible movie adaptations of beloved books before. Why is this one so offensive? 

First and most obviously, it takes Austen’s most mature, melancholic, pensive work about lost love and regret and tries to jam it into the shape of a romantic comedy. Then there’s the questionable dialogue, which switches wildly between the 19th and 21st centuries without any rhyme or reason (there’s a scene where protagonist Anne Elliot’s sister asks her how she would dance to Beethoven. Anne: “Alone in my room, with a bottle of red.” Where is the Beethoven playing from, in this scenario? Her Spotify account?), and also has the subtlety of a sledgehammer (I particularly enjoyed the scene where the mustache-twirling villain Mr. Elliot fully lays out his dastardly plans to sabotage Anne’s father’s relationship in the style of a Bond villain—and Anne has no problem going shopping with him later). The romantic lead Captain Wentworth—who carries himself with a dignified, wounded pride in the novel—has the air of a boxer who has taken one too many hits, always seeming a bit dazed; I have a hard time believing this version of him could craft the iconic “I am half-agony, half-hope” letter.  

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