Predator and Prey

• Published in: Edda Vol. 104; pp. 130 - 144
• Main Author: Maria Holmgren Troy
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: Danish
• Published: Scandinavian University Press/Universitetsforlaget 01.01.2017
• Subjects: Child Sexual Abuse; John Ajvide Lindqvist; Pedophilia; S. P. Somtow; The Gothic; Vampire Child
• ISSN: 0013-0818; 1500-1989
• DOI: 10.18261/issn.1500-1989-2017-02-04

Abstract The temporal convergence between the social and cultural preoccupation with child sexual abuse, with the pedophile as the ultimate predator, and the appearance of the child vampire as a central character in vampire fiction in the late twentieth century can be traced to genre conventions and to representations of the vampire and of the child. This article examines vampire children and child sexual abuse in three novels: S. P. Somtow’s Vampire Junction (1984) and Valentine (1992), and John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let the Right One In (2004), and shows how they tap into contemporary sexual taboos and fears for children in order to create uncanny and Gothic effects. Highlighting that the representations of the vampire child contain a number of dichotomies, the article also relates all three novels to splatterpunk, and outlines a different trajectory for the sympathetic vampire that led to Lindqvist’s novel, which triggered the Swedish Gothic boom in the twenty-first century.