Notes on Live Girls
I've always been a fan of the vampire. When I was a kid, I found the vampire to be an especially menacing monster because he looked perfectly normal ... until he bared those fangs. It occurred to me early on that the vampire would be even more dangerous if those fangs weren't readily visible. I grew up watching the old Universal and Hammer horror films, both of which took great advantage of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Bela Lugosi played him first, and quite iconically, and was followed by other Universal stars like Lon Chaney, Jr. and John Carradine. Later, Hammer added Christopher Lee to the canon. Lee was my favorite, I think, because he didn't talk much and was a great blend of European gentility and animalistic savagery. There have been many vampire films since then, but as I got older, I noticed that nothing new was ever done with vampire mythology. Richard Matheson's I Am Legend was a brilliant exception, of course, but for the most part, vampires remained gothic, cowered at the sight of a cross and slept in coffins. Once I started writing horror fiction professionally, I looked for ways to freshen up the vampire. I finally found it during a visit to New York City's Times Square in the mid-1980s.
As a small-town boy who'd been sheltered by a very religious upbringing, Times Square was an eye-opening experience, and so was the peep show I visited. It was an unpleasant experience because the young woman on the other side of the window in the dark booth I'd chosen looked quite ill. She was emaciated and pale, with rashes, an infected pierced nipple, and she didn't appear to be fully aware of her surroundings. But what really caught my attention was the slot below the window through which customers were supposed to slide their tips to the dancer beyond the glass. The slot in the wooden divider was long and slender, but in the center, it had been widened into a round hole. As soft light glowed through from the other side, I saw that there were grooves around the edges of that round hole, as if someone had dug it open with a sharp object. Or perhaps ... it had been chewed open.
With that thought, the idea for Live Girls, complete with title, dropped into my head. I was visiting my editor at the time and rushed back to his office. I found an available typewriter (yes, Virginia, back then we used typewriters) and began writing. At first, I thought it was just going to be a short story, but that changed quickly. Live Girls was one of those books that kind of wrote itself, and it gave me the perfect opportunity to modernize the vampire mythos in ways I hadn't seen done before.
The vampire has always been a sexual creature, but it's been underplayed in the past. Putting vampires in the sex business brought it to the forefront. There was another element that I didn't even consider as I was writing the book. At the time, the fear of AIDS was spreading a lot faster than the growing facts about it. Some critics saw the vampires in Live Girls as a metaphor for AIDS, something I didn't intend, but which admittedly works well.
Almost a quarter of a century — and 60 books — later, Live Girls remains my most well known novel and the favorite of many readers. It was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award, it's been published in several languages and has seen numerous reprintings. The book has received some wonderful reviews over the years, but the one I found most flattering came from Ed Gorman, a writer whose work I greatly admire (if you haven't read his outstanding mystery and crime fiction, you should). He's reviewed Live Girls more than once, and in 2006, he wrote:
"There are two vampire novels I think you can put on the same shelf with Dracula and I Am Legend. One is 'Salem's Lot and the other is Live Girls."What Garton has done is take the tropes of the vampire novel and sexualize them in a way that would have been impossible a quarter century ago. This is a raunchy, gritty, sometimes hilarious and always spellbinding novel set in the universe most of us inhabit. At least most of the time – bosses, lovers, budgets, relatives, etc. Where we depart company with the protagonist is when he starts going to live porn shows and, baby, that's when he starts the long, dark slide into several kinds of death.
"Garton nails every character. For all the praise laid upon the novel, I've never seen anybody talk about its people. They're great. A few of them I've never seen before anywhere and I don't mean just the vampires. Even the walk-ons have the stink and sass of real people – not necessarily people I'd like to have lunch with, you understand, but real nonetheless.
"The other thing Garton does is make the sex here both truly seductive and truly scary. You think AIDS is scary? Wait 'til you meet this crew. This is one of the novels I give mystery readers who are leery of horror. It usually meets with effusive approval. This is one you've got to pick up."