Werewolves, vampires, and little women

In the past few months, a new breed of ghoul-populated novels has quietly made it to the local bookstores’ bestseller lists: the literary monster mash-up. These are adaptations of classics that incorporate zombies, vampires, werewolves, sea monsters, androids – the monster line-up continues to grow as fast the authors come out with their mash-ups. Two of the latest such reincarnations are inspired by the all-time classic Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. The success of the Twilight series – first as a book trilogy for teens, then later as a blockbuster movie franchise – proves that these days, ghouls on screen and in print mean big bucks. Writers were quick to ride on the ghoul-monster bandwagon by tweaking time-honored classics. The first to merit the mash-up treatment were several novels of Jane Austen. Individual works by Charlotte Brönte, Leo Tolstoy, William Shakespeare, L. Frank Baum, and Lewis Carroll quickly became the next beneficiaries. Even Abraham Lincoln becomes a vampire hunter and Queen Victoria of England is now a demon hunter. But thus far, only Louisa May Alcott has had the honor of having, not one, but two mash-ups of the same novel. Authors Porter Grand and Lynn Messina were both aware that Alcott had a dark side: using the pseudonym A. M. Barnard, she wrote lurid, blood-and-thunder tales with stalkers, demon lovers, and murderers, making her works fair game for mash-ups.

Little Women and Werewolves by Porter Grand purports to be the suppressed, uncensored, and original draft of the Alcott classic. That is this novel’s come-on. The first page contains the alleged rejection letter from Alcott’s publisher, dated April 1868, advising her to “expand upon [the story of] the sisters and extract the werewolves and other unsavory themes." The author, a librarian, explains that she found the “very old manuscript, tied together with a faded, ancient blue ribbon" in a smelly cardboard box bequeathed to her by a Ms. Barnard – alluding to Alcott’s pen name. Needless to say, the ploy worked and my youngest sister and I were wholly taken in by the idea of reading an original draft of an 1868 American classic. In contrast, Little Vampire Women by Lynn Messina is a straightforward mash-up. The first line of this novel quickly establishes irony and a tongue-in-cheek tone, with Jo complaining that “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any corpses." The abundant footnotes explaining the vampire references seem to be inspired by the entries in J.K. Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. For example, the first footnote on Mr. Bloody Wobblestone’s Scientifical Method for Tracking, Catching, and Destroying Vampire Slayers is explained as the “[b]estselling how-to that introduced the so-called scientifical method of slayer hunting, by Clifford Farmer (b. 1685)." Literary purists would probably balk at these two novels and consider them, at best, bastardized versions of the timeless novel Little Women. However, I found both of them decidedly entertaining, each in their own way, and, yes, even philosophical. Vampires is light-hearted and action-packed, while Werewolves seriously questions how a society can condemn those who are different, like werewolves. Little Women and Werewolves starts out very much like the traditional Little Women. However, the writing turns sensual in the second chapter when Jo accidentally sees and observes Laurie’s transformation into a werewolf. The lines here can easily take their place in an erotic novel; in other passages, the author does not spare the reader from descriptions of graphic violence and carnage either. Meanwhile, Little Vampire Women could have for its subtitle Jo, the Vampire Defender. It takes its time explaining the vampire lifestyle, the ancient vampire traditions, the long-standing conflict between the vampire slayers and vampire defenders, Jo’s never-ending efforts to master the art of being a vampire slayer; hence, the copious footnotes. When the vampires sire a human (turn a human into a vampire), the writing becomes graphic but it never quite attains the sensuality and understated eroticism of Werewolves. In both novels, the character of Beth is radically re-imagined and more thoroughly fleshed out by both authors. Lynn Messina gives Beth’s sickly and languid nature a vampire twist while Porter Grand allows Beth to mature as a woman the same way her sisters do. Despite her general helplessness, Beth has shocking moments in both novels where she firmly takes the initiative to direct the course of her life. Both authors also give an added dimension to Beth’s closeness to old Mr. Laurence. Werewolves expands on the characters of old Mr. Laurence and Mr. March while it is John Brooke, the husband of Meg, who receives the same treatment in Vampires. On its face, the March sisters, their friends and neighbors in Concord and New York seem almost unrecognizable in these two monster mash-ups of Little Women. But although the members of the March family are vampires in Vampire Women, they are humanitarian vampires, choosing to ingest only the blood of animals and not of humans. And although they live alongside werewolves who can easily choose to devour them for dinner on the nights of the full moon in Werewolves, the Marches staunchly abide by their strict personal code of peaceful and harmonious co-existence with their monster neighbors – in spite of the danger of being punished for being werewolf sympathizers. Almost 150 years after their first appearance in print in 1868, and despite the ghoulish embellishments in these two Little Women mash-ups, the liberal and fair-minded spirit of the March family remains an enduring tradition. – YA, GMANews.TV