Thirsty by M.T. Anderson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Consumer Culture, High School, Vampires, and H.P. Lovecraft Massachusetts small-town high school freshman Chris has a crush on Rebecca Schwartz. Being an imaginative, shy boy, he only indulges in romantic fantasies in which they do things like wear black clothes and attend cool art exhibits. He's been feeling uneasy and tetchy, quarreling with his best friends, Tom (handsome and potentially one of the cool kids at school) and Jerk (good-natured but simple-minded and benignly ostracized). Is he merely going through the hormonal overload of all adolescent boys? Or is he. . . turning into a vampire? One of the neat things about M. T. Anderson's Thirsty (1997) is that he feeds those two metamorphoses into each other. Another is that he links them to American consumerism, as represented by, for example, fast food like McNuggets and Big Macs and vampire fare like potluck human casserole. Thirsty presents a 20th-century America (or at least Massachusetts) full of vampires, none of whom do like the Twilight Cullens and live on animal rather than human blood and protect mortals from bad vampires. No romanticizing here. Anderson's vampires are malevolent serial killers of human prey, and when humans catch one they lynch it with stake or fire, not wanting to waste time and expense on a trial. None of this bodes well for Chris' future with his family. The vampires worship a Lovecraftian lord by the name of Tch'muchgar who is imprisoned in a hellish world, while the mortals of earth (or at least Massachusetts) perform annual sacrificial rituals to maintain the dread being's imprisonment. Chris' community sacrifices goats, the neighboring town virgins (an example of Anderson's pointed humor is that the night before the rituals teenagers from Chris' town travel by bus to the neighboring one to try to take advantage of those kids' desire to not be virgins on the next day). The major plot of the novel concerns a vampire plot to free Tch'muchgar to enter our world. As is usual with vampire novels, in service to his story Anderson picks and chooses which genre features he wants to avoid or use or modify or invent. His vampires for instance become long-fanged and invisible in mirrors only when angry or thirsty, are fine in daylight, have the strength of ten men, heal with supernatural speed, and fall into comas without drinking enough human blood. Anderson muddies this Nosferatu water by tossing in celestial beings and their opposites, as well as fairies, changelings, witches, and warlocks, though only the vampires and celestial and anti-celestial beings play roles in the story. Anderson's black humor high school vampire novel is unpleasant. The characters are unappealing, especially the first person narrator Chris, who in the face of his nightmarishly alienating transformation becomes increasingly ineffectual, passive, and self-pitying. This grim and bleak novel lacks comfort. And that is one of its strengths! I admire Anderson's refusal to cater to usual YA reader needs and expectations and his probably quite successful attempt to make them think. Anderson avoids typical young adult romance adventure vampire tropes and tricks like romantically teaming the hero up with a girl to save the day, or easily demarcating between good and evil, or tidily resolving everything. And he excels at capturing the voice, thoughts, and emotions of an American adolescent boy and the way that American teenagers tease each other and form groups and do reckless things and scorn their parents. The book is often very funny, partly because Anderson captures young Americans' speech (idioms, insults, sarcasm, slang, and over-use of "like"): "Are you boasting?" I ask. "I have something to boast about. You're hyper. What the hell is your problem?" "I do not have a problem," I say. "My problem is the fact that you're doing this male boob-boast maneuver." Anderson also effectively depicts the stress of becoming a vampire, as when Chris is intensely relieved to see his reflection in a breakfast spoon, or listens appalled by how grotesquely and noisily humans like his family eat dinner, or watches the blood "skating through his [brother's] skin as he sleeps. Thirsty resembles Anderson's later novel Feed (2002), which also features a flawed first-person present tense teenage boy narrator protagonist who is likely to lose the struggle to do the right thing. I think Feed is a better book, because it's more straight sf (about our unhealthy dependence on Internet media), while Thirsty loses some impact (for me) with its evil lurking beneath our real world and supernatural anything goes streaks, but both books display Anderson's salutary satire of the domination of American culture by mass media and consumerism and superficiality. Both books potently express what Chris thinks at one point: "We have to fight to remain human." NOTE: Some Goodreads reviewers say the book is an allegory for gender identity, with Chris being a homosexual unable to come out of the closet as a result of his society's (and family's) prejudice against homosexuality, but I don't see a single hint as to his being even unconsciously gay, for he really has a crush on Rebecca and regularly daydreams about her but never about any boys. View all my reviews
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