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Popular Culture Review
characteristics, is not enough. Readers are searching for and finding ways
in which the texts reveal and confront their own humanity.
First and foremost, today’s paranormal literature has characters
who can offer the promise of longevity (near immortality) and beauty, a
characteristic valued in the youth-obsessed western culture. Author
Stephen Case, in his text Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and
How it Drives Civilization, claims:
All living things seek to perpetuate themselves into the future,
but humans seek to perpetuate themselves forever. This
seeking—this will to immortality—is the foundation of human
achievement; it is the wellspring of religion, the muse of
philosophy, the architect of our cities and the impulse behind the
arts. It is embedded in our very nature, and its result is what we
know as civilization. (2)
A society obsessed with long life, youth, and beauty, will likely spawn
literature that glorifies just this. While humans obsess about ways to
prolong both youth and lifespan, vampires, werewolves, and the fey are
naturally graceful, beautiful, and immortal (or near-immortal), dying
only through dismemberment or magical intervention. Connecting
oneself to a paranormal creature through “a vampire’s marks” or the
“natural long life” that comes with being the life partner of a werecreature of fey is seductive to a human population afraid of death and the
unknown afterlife. Case writes, “...We have developed our cultural
worldviews in order to protect ourselves from the fear of death” (21). A
way to alleviate this fear is to fantasize that death need not be the only
alternative; hope of a life that persists is found in these novels, and not
just in a single novel.
In Faith Hunter’s Jane Yellowrock series about a skin walker
(shape shifter) who works as a rogue vampire killer, she emphasizes that
female skin-walkers can retain their youth by merely taking on the shape
of their bodies at the age they would like to retain. This not only means
Jane Yellowrock remains youthful, but physically strong and able to heal
herself through purposeful shifting from human to animal form. In many
paranormal storylines, this kind of regeneration of youth is available in
some form to characters. This ideal of youth as desirable is shown
through other such novels, particularly those in a series.
To maintain popularity, as well as to provide answers to
questions that have long plagued humanity, paranormal and urban