US Horror – Doctor Strangemind

Ray Bradbury & The Unguarded Moment

I shot an arrow into the air. Where it fell, I know not where.

It’s true that in this modern world of today the Internet and social media have elevated the social gaffe to unprecedented frequency. However, there’s nothing new under the sun and thus, even before people had Twitter and Facebook to help get them into trouble, it was possible to offer up an opinion and only then pause to consider whether it was something you truly wanted on the record.

I’ve already written about how unexpected the results can be when an author decides to kick off their inhibitions, “You want to know what I really think? Well here you go, bucko!” However, what follows here isn’t in quite the same category as the Philip K. Dick article I previously posted about . Regardless of how surprising his opinions might be to somebody not familiar with the man, Dick was still consciously writing for publication. Regardless of what the article he gave to Terry Carr for publication contained, and regardless of whether he truly believed what he wrote (rather than just messing with us) you can be sure it contained nothing he wasn’t comfortable with sharing with the whole wide world.

On the other hand the subject for consideration here and now is an article titled Ray Bradbury Speaks, which was published in a fanzine called Guts (the magazine with intestinal fortitude). The piece in question appeared in the fourth issue which was published in September 1968 by Jeffrey & Robert Gluckson. At first I wasn’t entirely sure that the piece was even by Ray Bradbury. Not only did it jump erratically from topic to topic with each new paragraph, something which seemed unlike the typical Bradbury article, but many of the individual sentences struck me as too poorly constructed to be the work of an author of Bradbury’s reputation I did hope however that it was genuine though as various of the opinions expressed in it are unguarded to say the least.

Luckily that good fellow, Denny Lien, pointed out to me that Robert Gluckson was still contactable. So I wrote and received confirmation that Ray Bradbury Speaks was in indeed by Ray Bradbury. According to Robert Gluckson the article was assembled from an interview granted to him and some other teenagers in 1968. Apparently Bradbury had asked to review his material before publication, but the editors of Guts were in too much of a hurry to publish and didn’t allow him the opportunity. The fact that Ray Bradbury Speaks is a transcription of off-the-cuff answers to various questions asked him by the boys, questions they did not choose to include in the article for some reason, certainly explains the disjointed nature of the piece. It also explains the general clumsiness of the prose because few of us, Bradbury included, can speak as well off-the-cuff as we can write.

More importantly I can see now why some of Bradbury’s comments were more than a little unexpected. In an informal setting it’s not surprising that Bradbury might make a few unguarded observations, in the heat of the moment as it were. Which would be why he asked to review the interview before publication. I imagine that if Bradbury had been given such an opportunity some of his statements would be toned down or altered as he thought better of them.

That he wasn’t given the chance to do this is all for the best as far as I’m concerned. Crotchety ol’ Ray Bradbury is more fun to read than any other kind.

Now, before I go any further I need to mention that I’ve only quoted the more interesting replies and rearranging their order to suit my own train of thought. Given the source material is a series of answers to undisclosed questions rather than an article in which the parts make up a greater whole I don’t think this alters Bradbury’s opinions in any way.

So let’s start with something that’s not too controversial but does nicely illustrate my own view of Bradbury as an author:

The movie The Cat & the Canary scared the hell out of me. I love being scared – we all do. Every kid I’ve ever known loves to be scared. So I wrote Something Wicked This Way Comes to do what? To scare the hell out of myself. I knew if I could do that, I could scare all the kids; and if I did, I’d have a classic on my hands. And it’s turning into that. A lot of kids are really getting scared – and I love it.

This makes sense to me because I prefer to think of Ray Bradbury as more of a writer of horror stories who occasionally made use of science fictional settings than an author of science fiction who also wrote a couple of fantasies as he has generally been portrayed. I would argue that even a classic SF novel like Fahrenheit 451 is as close to having a classic horror plot as it’s possible for pure science fiction novel to do. Even some of his best known and loved short SF; The Veldt, A Sound of Thunder, & There Will Come Soft Rains all strike me as being essentially horror stories that could easily have been written by Robert Bloch and published in Weird Tales. (Incidentally, according to The Collectors Index To Weird Tales by Sheldon Jeffery & Fred Cook, Ray Bradbury had no less than 25 stories published in Weird Tales between 1942 and 1948, so the horror connection isn’t as unlikely as you may be thinking.)

On the other hand I don’t put much faith in his sweeping generalisation that ‘kids’ want to be scared given he completely fails to specify what age group or level of fear he’s referring. I can’t speak for anybody else but I can assure you that as a thirteen-year-old I discovered a number of horror anthologies in my high school library. Out of curiosity I read a couple of these anthologies (which included The Small Assassin and The Foghorn by one Ray Bradbury), but decided to swear off doing so when I begun to have vague but disturbing dreams every night. Something Wicked This Way Comes I will concede contains an appropriate level of scare for younger teens but that doesn’t mean they’re ready for adult Bradbury.

So let’s get a little controversial:

I’m not a big Batman or Superman fan. The difference them and Prince Valiant is Valiant is human, and I really believe in him. In other words, if he gets into a fight, he has to get out of it through his wits, or his talent, or his imagination. But Superman and Batman get into a fight, and really, there’s no context. Everything is pre-ordained, and it’s no fun. So who cares. You know Superman can always out, but you know if Prince Valiant gets into such a situation, he can get beat up pretty bad, and almost die. If he gets into a situation with a witch, giant, or an ogre, he will then find a way to terrify, in turn, that giant or ogre by disguising himself as a bat – suspending himself by a rope in an ancient castle. It’s all beautifully illustrated, and very logical. The things that he does, you and I could do, if we wanted to spend the time on it – if we wanted to train ourselves. There’s nothing done in Prince Valiant that most of us couldn’t do if we trained ourselves as Valiant did. We’re superman in different words.

Again, an interesting but hardly controversial opinion, but perhaps only because it’s one that I agree with. On the other hand fans of superhero comics/movies might not be so sanguine. I think Bradbury is right on the money when he suggests that everything was pre-ordained in regards to the Superman and Batman of the 40s and 50s. Characters such as those were such power fantasies that they simply over-matched their opposition with inevitable regularity. However I would add that it wasn’t the inevitability of victory that was the real problem. As Bradbury himself implies Prince Valiant, and characters like him, could also emerge victorious time after time. It is after all difficult to build a continuing series if the main protagonist keeps being defeated. (Actually, I believe that in one of the British anthology war comics there was a series of stories featuring a German soldier who served during WWII. Given the inevitability of the Germans losing every encounter in a British war comic I can’t imagine he was an easy character to write for, or that serving with this fellow was anything but a suicide mission for his comrades.)

The real difference between a Superman and a Prince Valiant was the suspense created by not knowing how the inevitable victory was to be achieved. With Superman and Batman back then there was little suspense in this regard. Their abilities were well known and how they could use them to steamroller any opposition. Of course what Bradbury fails to mention is that such characters can still be made interesting by giving them problems to solve that can’t be overcome by sheer brute strength. To be fair to Bradbury though he was speaking in 1968 when Superman and Batman were perhaps still being featured in less nuanced plots (I was never into superhero comics so I have no idea how much Superman and Batman had evolved by the late 60s).

And now for some real controversy:

I have one tempera I did which is travelling around the country with a benefit for cerebral palsy, called the Halloween Tree. It’s a huge tree filled with cut pumpkins; I’m writing a film on this too. It’s going to be a cartoon, by Chuck Jones, who did The Grinch, and has done Road Runner cartoons for years. A wonderful man to work with. It’s a history of Halloween in cartoon form. It’s going to be a heck of a lot of fun, and it’s going to be much better than The Great Pumpkin show by Charles Schulz. I thought The Great Pumpkin was just dreadful. So mean. It was so dreadfully mean, to anticipate The Great Pumpkin arriving for a whole half hour, and when it was all over , my kids sat there, and they were depressed. And so was I. We finally got angry, and we wanted to kick the set. I thought it was just dreadful for Mr. Schulz not to know that you can’t build up this kind of need in people, to see The Great Pumpkin, and not have him show up, one way or the other.

I was more than a little surprised by Bradbury’s reaction to this TV special. I don’t think Bradbury grasped what Charles Schulz was trying for when he created The Great Pumpkin. To me Linus’ belief in The Great Pumpkin is all about Schulz introducing the idea of faith to his readership. If the Great Pumpkin makes an appearance then this would sabotage Schulz’ promotion of faith because faith isn’t necessary when there is clear physical proof that the thing you believe in actually exists. I’m quite surprised that Bradbury couldn’t see that.

And then we have further evidence that Bradbury wasn’t really a science fiction author:

I’ve never been a predictor of the future. I’ve left that to other people. The easiest thing you can do is predict certain developments in the future. You think of one machine, and think of what it’s going to be like in thirty years. You could’ve predicted, in 1910, that the country would be full of automobiles to the point where it would start to destroy the entire country. The automobile is our biggest problem, and it is at the center of our culture, dominating it. Ten years from now, L.A. will be totally devastated. It’s so easy to predict this. We’re doing nothing to prevent it. New York is being destroyed by the automobile. We’ll have to ban the car. Downtown in L.A. looks like Hiroshima right now. This is so easy to predict – it’s no fun. It’s the easiest thing in the world to say.

It was wise of Bradbury to deny he was ever in the prediction game given how his claim that the automobile was about to destroy city life has turned out to be a big swing and a miss. However it wasn’t so wise of him to claim that predicting the future was so gosh darn easy given how his claim that the automobile was about to destroy city life has turned out to be a big swing and a miss. (Well, okay, you can make a case for the automobile degrading, and thus ‘destroying’ city life, but my impression is that Bradbury meant that the car would make cities uninhabitable, and that has manifestly not come to pass.) In an answer to another question (an answer not included here) Bradbury mentioned recently witnessing an accident in which a pedestrian was hit by a car and I suspect this coloured his response more than a little. Even so I suspect his claim that cars were destroying everything was more wishful thinking by an author in love with the idea of small town life than well considered prediction.

Back to the controversy:

I’m much more interested in moral attitudes. I’ve never predicted, I’ve only expressed myself in moral situations. Given television as a fact of life: how do we raise our children; how do they raise us; what does this do to personal relationships; how does this change our lives? What does it do to the family; what does it affect? Will it destroy us? Will it weaken the bonds in the family – or will it strengthen them? What will it do to our reading habits? Well, we find out it’s increasing them. Librarians were all worried when TV came out. They were all running around and bleating like a bunch of chickens, afraid that libraries would close down, books wouldn’t sell any more, people wouldn’t read. Well, the reverse has happened. The doomsayers were wrong. The TV has only made us more curious about the world. If there could be only a little texture… we need books to tell us what we really must know, because TV can’t give it to us. It can only give us pictures, and this is the beginning of knowledge. And then we have to move on from there.

Now I was under the impression that Ray Bradbury had a low opinion of television based on quotes such as this; ‘The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.’ For that matter I thought he had a high one of librarians based on quotes such as this; ‘Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.’ Perhaps given when he said all this it’s possible he was still positive about TV and only grew more negative later on. More inexplicable is his negative comment about librarians. Bradbury is noted for his support for and identification with librarians so to find him saying this was more than a little unexpected.

But wait, it gets better:

There’s a strange story behind R Is For Rocket and S Is For Spaceship – I wrote those two books to go into libraries. The librarians of America are too dumb to take my books from the grown-up section and move them over into the children’s section of their libraries. The kids have to go over to the adult section to get my books. Librarians are too dumb to know that kids are hungry for certain books. So I was forced into writing these two books which are nothing more than stories from some of my adult books. I get a few pieces of mail over the years saying that I am a fraud, a cheat, and a liar. The thing is. They shouldn’t blame me, they should blame the librarians. If they would just bring my books over to the children’s section, I wouldn’t have to do this. I have to put out S Is For Spaceship and R Is For Rocket, which say on the “For Young Readers”. Then they have enough brains to put them on the shelf. I have this sort of nonsense with librarians so often, it drives me up a wall. That is why the two books exist.

Wow, just wow. So much for Ray Bradbury, friend of librarians, eh? I guess his high regard for the office of librarian depended on them falling into line with his desires. Again, it would also help if Bradbury had been a little less vague in his terms. What age group was he referring to when he mentioned ‘kids’ and just which stories of his did he think they should be reading? Given my previous comments about encountering Bradbury as a young teenager I think that on the whole I’m with the librarians in this matter.

And now here’s my favourite Bradbury response to a question:

Look at all the imitations of the Martian Chronicles that have come out – it’s still holding its own. I find that I write a number of stories in a number of fields , and they manage to stick around anyway. The bad stuff vanishes after awhile – it’s just not good enough. There’s a guy named Bradbury writing books over in England, and having them published. They’re science fiction-fantasy, like John Carter – Warlord of Mars; and a whole series of Martian books by a guy named Edward P. Bradbury. I know his publishers are hoping that people will mistake him for me. It doesn’t work that way. He’s not good enough. If he were better, I’d be in trouble; but I’m not. I think excellence finally wins out. The really good writers will stay around – Sturgeon, Arthur Clarke, Heinlein, Fritz Leiber; and eight or nine others, and myself. We’re good. We’re very good. That’s the first thing you learn: how to tell quality from something that has no quality. You’re not going to get any false modesty from me. I don’t believe in modesty. I don’t believe it’s a virtue. I believe you know what you want to do, and that you should grab onto it, and run with it, and have a ball with it, and have great fun, and love it very much. Then you’ll do good work. That’s what I’ve tried to do.

To properly appreciate the above you need to know that Edward P. Bradbury is a pseudonym of Michael Moorcock. Now as it happens Moorcock was, and possibly still is, a big Edgar Rice Burroughs fan who had for some years as a teenager edited Tarzan Adventures, a Burroughs themed magazine. As far as I’m aware the Edward P. Bradbury trilogy was a tribute to Burroughs, in particular his Mars series. Now while I’ve never seen any explanation as to why he chose the pseudonym Edward P. Bradbury I doubt it was a deliberate attempt to leach off Ray Bradbury’s fame. If nothing else these books were Burroughs imitations and nothing about their packaging ever hinted at a connection with the author of Fahrenheit 451. If the the blurb writer had claimed ‘In the tradition of Something Wicked This Way Comes‘ I would concede that Bradbury had a point but as far as I recall the British paperbacks at least screamed Burroughs. As to why Moorcock decided to use a pseudonym at all, well I suspect he didn’t want the Edward P. Bradbury books to be confused with the various series set in his ‘Eternal Champion’ universe as those books had a very different tone and somebody expecting Elric of Melnibone style adventures might be disappointed by a Burroughs tribute.

This also raises the interesting question of whether in 1968 Ray Bradbury knew Edward P. Bradbury was a pseudonym, and if so who the pseudonym belonged to. It’s quite possible that he had no idea at the time because I’m not sure he was moving in science fiction circles much outside of Los Angeles. Still, even if he was aware perhaps it wouldn’t have made much of a difference. I have no idea what Bradbury thought of Moorcock’s fiction (assuming he had even read any in 1968) but it wouldn’t surprise me if he hated characters such as Elric of Melnibone and Jerry Cornelious and wasn’t adverse to giving their creator a hotfoot with his Edward P. Bradbury comments.

And in conclusion:

I’ve often said, if some young man wanted , one hundred years from now, to take out his chalk and mark on my tombstone, I would like him to mark on it “Here Lies a Teller-of-Tales”. That’s a good honorable thing. I’ve always been intrigued with stories that I’ve heard about Baghdad, ancient Persia – the market places. Even today, if you go down a side street in some of these small, Mid-Eastern, dessert towns, you’ll find magicians and the tellers of tales. It’s an ancient heritage, and a very wonderful one. I belong on the street of the tellers of tales – and that’s the only place I want to be. I’ve no more pretension than that.

And finally here we have Bradbury trying to be humble in the same interview that he claimed not to be humble or modest. You need to pick one Mr Bradbury, either you’re one of the elite band of excellent authors or you’re a humble teller of tales with no more pretension than that. I don’t think you can lay claim to both.

And this gentle ready, is the danger of the unguarded moment. I don’t think Bradbury said anything irredeemably offensive but yes, I’m pretty sure if he had seen the transcript there are a few comments he would have been happy to tone down or qualify.

You know what the road to Hell isn’t pave with? Second thoughts. Something we could all do with remembering before pressing enter.

Bad Mad Vlad

Vampires are a lot like dogs you know.

Vampire

No. Don’t scoff. They really are if you think about it in just the wrong way (that’s always been the Doctor Strangemind way of course).

Here, let me explain.

So what is the single most noticeable feature of the animal known as dog? That’s right, the seemingly endless plasticity of the species. The fact is humanity has been able to twist and turn and breed dogs into a startling wide array of forms from poodles to corgis to dobermans. If the average Martian visited our planet what are the chances that this visitor from space would guess right off that all dogs are of the same species? Not likely is it? Instead the average Martian would probably decide that dogs make no sense to them. Which is probably why they don’t visit Earth all that often, they find this planet too weird and confusing to be a satisfactory holiday destination.

So what has this to do with vampires I’ve no doubt you’re wondering. Well, the answer to that is to point out how humanity has been able to twist and turn and write vampires into a startling wide array of types and situations, far more than any other supernatural creature. Why this should be has to do with the fact that vampires are essentially humans with supernatural abilities and are thus have human level or above intelligence. Consequently it’s relatively easy to insert them into a wide range of roles of roles and situations. Whereas many other supernatural creatures are trapped within a limited role due to their having little or no ability to think and plan.

To pick the most egregious example, how much variety have you seen in the many zombie films made since George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead first shuffled onto the big screen? Off the top of my head I can only think of 28 Days Later as presenting anything like a different take on the idea of the living dead. Even in a comedies like Zombieland or Shaun of the Dead the actual zombies are little more than off-the-rack shamblers. I’m sure that if I more was into zombies flicks I’d be able to nominate more good examples of different approaches but the mere fact that the genre is often divided up on the basis of whether the zombies move fast or slow does suggest to me variety is lacking among the living dead. In short, no brains equals no variety.

The werewolf strikes me as another supernatural creature unable to widen its role. The problem isn’t so much the inevitable changing into beast form and the hunting of humans but the fact that once in that beast form werewolves rarely demonstrate anything more than animal level intelligence. So it is that while I’ve seen the occasional good werewolf film (Dog Soldiers and An American Werewolf in London come to mind) I don’t recall a book or film that explores the possibilities of the form in a different way to those two films. I’ve certainly never read or watched the werewolf equivalent to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, or Steve Niles’ 30 Days of Night. Oh, and I’m definitely not counting anything in the Twilight series (or the imitations thereof) as those characters are such angsty teens that anything else about them is merely window dressing. (However, I will recommend to all and sundry a film called Werewolf Cop. It doesn’t entirely break the mold but does shake things up some by having the main character still perform his duties while in beast form. It’s also at least as funny as Shaun of the Dead in my opinion.)

Okay, so if vampires aren’t the supernatural creatures suffering most from plot limitations why am I writing about them? Well, there are two good reasons for me to be considering vampires right here, right now. (Don’t worry. I’ll get back to werewolves. I have some thoughts about them which will blow your minds in due course.) Now my first reason is that too many vampire stories focus on static locations (the previously mentioned Stephen King and Steve Niles works for example) and I don’t think this is still a viable option. The second is because I have an excellent solution to this perceived problem.

Vampire truckers.

The fact is stories like Salem’s Lot and 30 Days of Night highlight the problem vampires have in this modern high-tech world. Because we live in an interconnected society isolated communities that a vampire can prey upon for an extended period of time are increasingly rare. Even if we put the existence of mobile phones and the Internet to one side improved physical communication, in other words private and public transport, ensures no community sits in perfect isolation. Perhaps there was a time when the members of a rural community had no regular contact with people living further than a days walk away but that’s no longer the case (if it ever was). Those days are long gone as now even isolated communities have friends, relatives, and business partners all over, people who are going to want to know what’s going on if suddenly their contact, and the community they live in, suddenly falls silent.

This is why the vampire infestation in Salem’s Lot never seemed convincing to me. Sure, King made a few attempts to explain why the authorities never conducted an investigation of the town but it all seemed half-hearted, as if King knew it would be next to impossible to construct a sequence of events which would convincingly stop the town from being thoroughly searched. King didn’t help matters either by writing a sequel to Salem’s Lot, a short story called One For the Road. In it he reveals that the continuing infestation is an open secret among locals, “Ayup. We all know about the vampires. That’s why nobody much shops there anymore.”

I found the premise Steve Niles used in 30 Days of Night far more convincing. Having the vampires attack a community in temporary isolation due to the extremities of winter was certainly more believable, but still limited in possibility. I can’t see it being an easily repeatable event for starters. Even if the vampires managed to destroy all evidence of their presence (possible, but not easy) the fact remains that a sizable community was wiped out with no explanation and that fact can’t be hidden. There will be considerable scrutiny and precautions will be taken against this happening again. How many times could the vampires attack temporarily isolated towns before their presence is recorded by a multitude of hidden devices? If we assume that a vampire’s best defence is secrecy then the events described in 30 Days of Night have to be a one-off or else discovery is inevitable in a world where sophisticated recording devices are common. And then it’s all over for the vampires because humanity has the numbers, the determination, and the technology to do for them. We’re not a sharing species at the best of times and we’re certainly not going to put up with another species that preys upon us. It will be on until humanity has destroyed every vampire it can find. And given the sort of resources humanity would put into such a project I expect that would be close to a clean sweep.

Well that’s alright you might argue, a whole clan of vampires can comfortably live undetected in a large city for decades so long as they’re careful and Blade doesn’t blow into town. True enough but we’ve seen that option taken so frequently that the vampire nightclub owner; suave in public, predatory in private, has already become something of a cliché. On the other hand I think the mobile vampire is in fact the road less travelled and is thus worthy of serious consideration.

I have in fact seen a couple of films, the titles of which escape me, that featured mobile vampires. In one a group of them were tooling around in a camper van type vehicle while in the other the vampire spent his days concealed in the boot of the car while his minion drove him about. However, while entertaining as films, neither made any effort to combine the mythology of the road with the mythology of the vampire which I thought a great pity. I also thought both films made vampires appear to be fringe dwellers, not a cool outsider sort, but more like dangerous scavengers. To be honest this is probably more realistic depiction than I have in mind but I can’t help it, I want something with a touch of Mad Max to it.

To that end I’d like to steal an idea I encountered in a vampire novel years ago. What the novel is called I don’t remember as it wasn’t a particularly memorable book. However, it did include an interesting twist on the vampiric mythos. As I recall the vampire in this novel owned a yacht. The yacht had a secret compartment located below the water line in which the vampire’s coffin was secreted. This meant the vampire could slip from port to port, ensuring that he didn’t stay long enough in any particular city for evidence of his presence to build up. It also made him extra difficult to attack as fire or sunlight was unlikely to reach him before the yacht was sunk by his minions, and since vampires don’t need air being below however many fathoms of water was hardly going to bother him. All the vampire had to do was stay in his coffin till dark and then exact revenge.

However, while a yacht has a lot to recommend it as a vampire transportation device it just doesn’t excite me (I’ll choose Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome over Waterworld every time). That’s why I like the idea of transferring the hidden compartment idea from boats to trucks.

Yes, it’s true that a compartment built into the undercarriage of a truck doesn’t allow the occupant to drop into the murky depths of the ocean and escape like Aquavamp but that’s easily solved by invoking the right piece of vampiric lore. As I recall in Russian folklore what made the vampires especially difficult to kill was their ability to transmogrify into a hoard of spiders, snakes, etc. According to legend if even one of these creatures escaped the vampire could regenerate itself. How I imagine this would work in a truck is that there would be a tube running from the driver’s cabin down to the secret compartment where the vampire would have it’s lair. Attached to this compartment would be a series of other tubes linking the lair to various other parts of the truck. Thus, even if the secret compartment is in danger of being broken open, or filled with napalm, or whatever the author deems a suitable vampire extermination substance the vampire has a difficult to combat back door. Thus your average fearless vampire hunter would need to locate and seal the exit to ever one of these tubes. Which would be a more than slightly difficult task to complete without being discovered (not entirely a bad thing of course if you want to add tension to the story).

And yes, the whole idea can be seen as some barely warmed over Mad Max: Fury Road style hi-jinks. Especially if the author goes with the idea that there’s a whole community of vampires hauling rig along the highways of where ever. This becomes even more pronounced if the vampires stay in contact with each other and offer each other back-up via the medium of CB radio and ally themselves with gangs of motorcyclists as guards. Since any protagonist hunting vampires will surely take them on somewhere remote so no third parties gets the wrong idea and tries to interfere the Mad Max: Fury Road comparisons are obvious.

But that only need be true of the action scenes (and who would object to scenes such as were featured in Mad Max: Fury Road but with added vampires, not I for one). There are all sorts of tweaks that could be made to turn the story into a unique one.

What if, for example, the vampires were grizzled old loners who didn’t actually like each other and were supremely jealous of the resources they laid claim to. A radio documentary about paddlesteamers that travelled the Murray River (on the NSW/Victoria border in Australia) that I listened to years ago explained that these boats were fueled by locally cut wood and that each captain would arrange for stocks of this wood to be placed at intervals on the river bank so they could refill whenever was convenient. Now you might ask what was to stop a less than scrupulous captain from occasionally stealing a load of wood? Well apparently one steamboat captain ensured this never happened to him by planting sticks of dynamite in some of his logs. The idea was that while he (fingers crossed) knew which sections of log he had doctored nobody else did. Once word of what he had done circulated I doubt any of his fellow captains were game to take wood from his piles. The possibility of what might happen to your boat if the old bloke was telling the truth being too awful to contemplate.

It wouldn’t be difficult at all to depict a bunch of grizzled old loner vampires as being at least that crazy, and probably more so. It makes me shiver to think what such characters might do to keep other vampires off what they consider as their roads and away from their prey.

Another interesting starting point would be to set the story in a post-apocalyptic future where extensive chunks of the planet can no longer be traversed by humanity due to radiation and/or biological agents. In such a world the only way to transport goods from safe area to another might be through the agency of the living dead as neither radiation or biological agents can kill them. That would make for some interesting tensions as both groups would have something the other can provide, but how willingly?

However, regardless of what an author decided to do with the basis idea there is one thing of which I can be certain.

Blood guzzling monsters driving fuel guzzling monsters, it’s a natural.