these characters are dangerously overripe fruit fit to burst, to spray fluids and seed everywhere, juices sickly sweet and pungently sour and acridly bitter, their flesh glossy, their innards rotting. they love their melodrama and they! love! their! exclamation! points!!!! they arrive on this island paradise ready to break down and ready to break each other down. they are witches and warlocks, actresses and groupies, innocent twins and a predatory 14 year old, priests and virgins and whores of both genders. they burst all over each other while playing various inexplicable games and enacting various inane rituals, all created solely to reveal their hollow cores and lack of soul, and to provide what skeleton there is of a plot. the characters and the story itself teeter constantly between seething malevolence and outraged shock. it all feels like an insanely stylized soap opera.
this is a rarified world of sophisticates who are basically garbage people. it also appears to be a view of Straight World through a very dated gay lens. the women are mainly over the top, theatrically emotional divas - drag queens turned into women but who have no relation to any women that I've ever met. perhaps I should spend more time with sophisticated garbage people? there is a trans woman as well, treated respectfully by the other guests but quite cruelly by the far from woke author. the men are all studs, their bodies drooled over, fit and hung and hairy (even the priest and even the boy - whose oversize equipment and fuzzy legs are repeatedly described), all ready to fuck with your head while feigning interest in fucking your body. toxic predators, with a smattering of prey. the book itself is quite toxic in its hilariously overheated take on human nature, power, secrets, and sexuality. well, straight people have written gay characters as vicious predators for who knows how long, so I suppose turnabout is fair play. but that doesn't make the book any less noxious, and obnoxiously written. I imagine the lesson to be learned here, the underlying theme, is a fairly reductive one: trust no one, not even yourself; you are probably better off dead.
the book is pretentious, silly, and trashy, yet enjoyable in the way that a bad movie is enjoyable. a bad movie of the excessively mannered, melodramatic, arty sort. it takes itself all too seriously which makes it a pleasing experience to laugh at it. you have to understand that it is telling you nothing useful about the human condition and that its attempt at ambiguous storytelling is a joke; there is nothing in The Vampires that is actually worth understanding. but it is also a lot of fun at times, a rickety rollercoaster tour of garbage lives, a water ride where everyone is drenched and everyone's clothes have to come off. the book has a garbage perspective on relationships, gender, life itself. but! it! is! still! a lot! of pretentious! trashy! silly! stupid! mean! fun!
my favorite character: a cowboy hat-wearing, whip carrying, predatory but of course actually lovelorn lesbian, an "underground film" star (I think Rechy was thinking Warhol films) who is constantly plotting vengeance and who also constantly cracks that whip - and occasionally uses it on surprised fellow guests to strip off their clothes or to stop a thrown knife from finding its target. she is amazing and her name is... Bravo! and to that I must say BRAVO!