When Will Vampires, Werewolves, and Zombies Jump The Shark?

I’ve been observing the contemporary fad, zombies, for awhile now. Their new compatriots the vampires and werewolves have also crawled into our collective consciousness’. What is behind it? I tried to explain a fad from my youth to The Varmint the other day: pet rocks.

She just laughed at me and said “Are you serious?” Truly, I was. Pet rocks were a pretty self-limiting contagion though. Zombies, vampires, and werewolves (ZVW) have a long, long, history, though. Many cultural groups scattered across the globe and through history have their own versions of ZVW lore. The monster in the dark. The monster that carries off the unwary, the unchaste, the unfortunate. Monsters have always had a place in our legends. Grendel surely wasn’t the first, and the sparkly vampires of Twilight intensely hypersexual Trueblood brood surely won’t be the last. They have always been there, just not so…omnipresent.

Jumping the shark, though? Daylight vampires seem to be a first step towards that. Vampires in the cheerful daylight are an absolute abnegation of what those monsters are. The Shadowspawn of S.M. Stirling’s A Taint in the Blood strike me as a much more realistic (if the word can apply) imagining of the ZVW mythos. The Shadowspawn see us as little more than cattle, and why should they? They rule the world from behind the stage, much as the sinister puppet masters that they are. The Shadowspawn owing to their very long lives are fossilized reactionaries who long for nothing less than the bad old days, hating the modern world very non-cordially. As a group they are immensely wealthy, powerful, and influential. They use those attributes for their own ends, as a dairy farmer milks or culls as he desires.

What does this have to do with the ZVW phenomenon slipping blissfully into that long night? I see the Shadowspawn of Sterling and the sparkly vampires of Twilight fighting for ownership of the new ZVW mythos. Perhaps not an existential crisis, but conflict regardless. If Stirling doesn’t carry the day, then sparkly vampires and their Disneyfied cousins will transform the monsters of our nightmares and legends into nothing more than the literary equivalent of Three’s Company. Charming, I suppose, but mindless fluff in any event. What I want to know is when can I get back to serious business, like Civilization V?