A lot of ‘90s teen horror foregrounded the human horror of murder, dark secrets, and terrible consequences, but there were a few memorable supernatural tales as well, like the ghosts of R.L. Stine’s 99 Fear Street trilogy (1994), the otherworldly monsters of Christopher Pike’s Chain Letter duology (1986 and 1992), and Caroline B. Cooney’s Vampire trilogy, which includes The Cheerleader (1991), The Return of the Vampire (1991), and The Vampire’s Promise (1993). These supernatural forays draw together the real world stresses of interpersonal teenage drama with enduring and powerful forces of evil, raising the stakes much higher than whether or not you have a date to the dance on Friday night or what your alleged best friend might have said about you in the girls’ bathroom between class periods.
While teen drama and insecurities are inevitably central to the vast majority of ‘90s teen horror books, Cooney’s Vampire trilogy taps into these in a particularly profound and resonant way, immersing the reader in the misery of teenage experiences defined by exclusion and invisibility, in order to explain why the young women and men in these stories make the choices they do. In The Cheerleader, Althea grew up with a regular group of childhood friends, but when they get to high school, they splinter off into different cliques, leaving Althea alone. In the opening pages of the book, Cooney establishes that for Althea, “high school was horrible … Loneliness absorbed her life … It was a quiet life: no phones, no laughter, no giggles … It was November: a month of dark and chill … A month in which Althea saw herself, like an abandoned waif in the gutter, without hope” (2-3). Althea is shunned by her former friends and when she walks through the school cafeteria looking for somewhere to sit, no one invites her to join them or moves over to make room for her. She looks enviously at the varsity cheerleaders, with their popularity, their seemingly easy friendships, and the adoration of boys, and thinks about how perfect her life would be if she were one of them. So when an ancient vampire emerges from the dark shadows in the tower room of her family’s old house and says “Suppose … I could make you popular” (1), this is an irresistible temptation for Althea. She has the chance to be seen, to belong, to be popular—and she takes it.
There is nothing sexy or seductive about the vampire in Cooney’s Vampire trilogy. He is not a romantic figure of desire. He is largely disembodied, often appearing as a dark cape or a coalescing shadow. The vampire’s main physical defining features are that his skin is the color and texture of mushrooms and his fingernails resemble old, crumpled aluminum foil. He has an ever-changing mouthful of teeth, rather than the two traditional fangs, which expand in both length and direction as he hones in on his intended victims (a trait which emerges most clearly in The Vampire’s Promise). When he makes his offer to Althea, he doesn’t seem to be attempting to mislead her or conceal her culpability, telling her plainly that the cost of her popularity will be that she “deliver Celeste” (6), one of the cheerleaders she envies, to be his victim. Althea and her family live in an old house, complete with a tower. Some of the kids from school describe Althea’s house as “spooky” (11) and she uses their curiosity to try to make friends, telling them “There’s a room in the attic … the circular tower. You may have admired it when you’ve driven by. The tower room has three windows, none of which are ever opened. There are shutters on the inside and shutters on the outside” (12). The vampire is largely confined to the shuttered tower room and there’s an ill-defined history there that might point toward earlier encounters, with Althea telling the others that the shutters are never opened: “It’s a family tradition. The shutters in the Shuttered Room stay shuttered” (13). Until, of course, Althea opens them. Once the vampire is out, he seems to be able to amorphously travel at will. He knows what happens when Althea is at school, either through his invisible presence or by highjacking her own perceptions, and is able to exert his power there as well. He establishes a link to his intended victims by creating “a dark path” (23) that bridges the gap between himself and his prey, regardless of where they are. The only place where the vampire arguably hedges his bets or isn’t entirely forthcoming with Althea is in his description of what will happen to his victims, as he tells Althea that Celeste will just be “a little bit tired” (34) following his predation.
When Althea sees Celeste at school the next day, Celeste is more than tired: she is exhausted and listless, dragging herself from place to place, and barely able to lift her feet to walk. Her appearance is faded and washed out, her beauty gone. As she looks on at the life that was once hers, “Celeste’s face was caved in, like a child sleeping. She did not really cry. She just stared, her mouth sagging, as if she could not understand what was happening” (46-47). Her vivacious energy has been extinguished. And with the loss of these defining characteristics, Celeste also loses all of her friends, cruelly shunted to the outskirts of the high school social strata while Althea is welcomed into her place, claiming a spot on the cheerleading squad and joining Celeste’s former friends. No one expresses any empathy or kindness towards Celeste: instead, she is scolded for “upsetting everybody” (47) and told to go away.
Once Althea has fallen under the vampire’s power, he demands more, drawing his victims from Althea’s new friends, though he insists that Althea must be the one to choose, just as she chose Celeste. Althea is corrupted, each choice bringing her closer to the vampire in the tower, deepening her own monstrosity. As she prepares to resist the vampire, she thinks of how her choices “had closed off a part of herself. All that was strong in her, all that was determined, perhaps even all that was good, had been shuttered away, in some distant and unreachable compartment” (127). To stand against the vampire, Althea has to give up her popularity and while she is firm in her resolution, when it comes right down to it, she wavers. She has seen the devastating trade-off the vampire demands, but she still begs him to give her another chance, telling him “if I could be popular one more time … I would remember it … I would frame it in my mind and keep it. I would make it last. Like an ice-cream cone. I would have it slowly. I would know how wonderful it is” (174). Despite the destruction, both to herself and others, and despite the regret and self-loathing she feels, she comes perilously close to making the same deal again, before a cold wind through the tower windows brings her back to her senses and she realizes that the vampire will keep doing this to other girls and preying on other victims, and that she has the power to stop him by closing the shutters again, which she does.
While the vampire has been imprisoned in the tower’s shutters and neutralized once more, Cooney leaves the reader with a lingering threat, saying “The house is still there, although Althea moved away … One of the shutters has come loose. It’s banging against the tower, as if something inside hopes to get out” and the next person to buy the house may well find the vampire, “A vampire who needs a victim … A vampire who is used to waiting. And winning” (179). This enduring threat is the premise for the second and third books in Cooney’s Vampire trilogy: The Return of the Vampire and The Vampire’s Promise.
The Return of the Vampire follows a similar narrative trajectory to The Cheerleader: a new family moves into the house, with a teenage daughter named Devnee. Devnee isn’t beautiful or brilliant, and she would give just about anything to achieve these characteristics. She is particularly preoccupied with beauty and one of Cooney’s earliest descriptions of her is how “Devnee played the game she always played when she was alone. The beautiful game. Where the lovely funny terrific girl on the inside finally had a match on the outside: where Devnee’s hair gleamed, and her smile sparked, and her personality captivated” (3). Devnee’s bedroom is in the tower, so it’s just a matter of time before she meets the resident vampire and has the chance to make a horrifying bargain. The deal Devnee makes with the vampire is framed a bit differently than in The Cheerleader: while he approached Althea with a proposition and told her directly that her job would be to “deliver” his victims, in The Return of the Vampire, he responds to Devnee’s wishes. As she thinks about how she would like to be different, her wish “was sharp, intense. Every girl, every day, wishes for changes in her body, or her heart, or her life. But few wish so desperately as Devnee” (13). Through this shift, Devnee becomes more of an “everygirl” than Althea was and the vampire becomes a kind of gross fairy god-monster, intent on granting Devnee’s wishes.
In The Cheerleader, the vampire preyed upon Althea’s friends without much attention paid to their individuality: he wanted the most popular ones and the ones that would hurt Althea the most to sacrifice. However, in The Return of the Vampire, he is a bit more strategic. When Devnee wants to be beautiful, the vampire demands the sacrifice of Aryssa, the most beautiful girl in school; when she wants to be smart, she has to give him Victoria, the smartest girl in school. As he feeds on Aryssa and Victoria, both of these young women lose the characteristics that made them special, suffering in different ways as Aryssa becomes plain and Victoria loses her intellectual edge, with Devnee benefiting from both, becoming prettier, smarter, and more popular.
Like Althea before her, Devnee begins to become monstrous herself and in an oddly Peter Pan-esque twist, her shadow abandons her, marking her as something less than human. She instinctively covers her mouth with one hand when she laughs, just in case she has grown her own vampire fangs and she finds the vampire’s cruel thoughts seeping into her own. But while Althea wavered and felt remorseful, Devnee believes the dark deeds she has committed are worth it. She wanted to be beautiful, smart, and popular and while it may not be all it’s cracked up to be once she has it—for example, she finds out that Trey, the handsome boy she set her sights on, only cares about her looks and is a real jerk—as far as she’s concerned, this new life was worth the cost she (and even more importantly, the other girls) had to pay for her to get it.
Devnee’s tipping point comes when she gets annoyed with her mother’s attention and unthinkingly wishes she “had a different mother” (135). The wish is out of her mind and on its way to the vampire before she catches herself and Devnee “looked with horror at the woman standing in her kitchen; a happy woman who liked her life and her family. Who loved her daughter” (135). She tries to take the wish back but it’s too late, with her mother almost immediately drawn under the vampire’s dark spell, as he attempts to lure her first to the woods that surround the house and then later, to Devnee’s room in the tower. In this final confrontation with the vampire, Devnee has to both acknowledge the deep-seated things she doesn’t like about herself and let them go. While she tries to disavow her wish for a different family, both she and the vampire know that “She had meant it; she had made the wish; the wish had been strong” (160). She doesn’t like this about herself but she has to own up to it and then let that wish go. Althea imprisoned the vampire at the end of The Cheerleader, but in the final chapters of The Return of the Vampire, Devnee releases herself (and those around her) from the vampire’s control through an odd mishmash of physical and psychological banishments. She hauls a panel door from the first floor bathroom up to the tower because the door panels kind of make the shape of a cross, which (maybe?) neutralizes the vampire. She symbolically releases the things she took from Aryssa and Victoria by yelling their names out the window and shouting “It’s here! … It’s yours! Ask for it! Hope for it! Demand it! Take it!” (164), which somewhat problematically assumes they have the awareness and strength to do so, and that this release absolves Devnee of the terrible things she has done to them. Finally, she embraces the ordinary and resolves not to make any more wishes. And that apparently does the trick: Devnee is free, her mom is safe, and the vampire is gone.
The third and final book of Cooney’s Vampire trilogy, The Vampire’s Promise, upends the established narrative tradition (as the third installment of trilogies so often do). While The Cheerleader and The Return of the Vampire focus on the struggles and insecurities of a single female character and her interactions with the vampire, The Vampire’s Promise is an ensemble affair. Sometime after the events of The Return of the Vampire, Devnee and her family moved away and no one else has moved in. The house is spooky, abandoned, and will soon be gone: there’s a mall coming and the construction crew is tearing down the house and everything around it to make way for commercial progress. (There’s a fascinating consideration be had about teen interpersonal dynamics, dramas, and the social significance of the mall, but The Vampire’s Promise skirts this. A fourth book about the vampire emerging again, this time just down the corridor from the food court, would be AMAZING). Before the house is torn down, though, a group of six teenagers decide it would be a great idea to go spend the night in its spooky tower. Randy, Lacey, Zach, Bobby, Roxanne, and Sherree bring an awful lot of baggage to this weird slumber party—including the fact that Randy feels like he’s not cool enough for his friends and that Bobby is two-timing Roxanne and Sherree—but of course, once the vampire awakens, they get even more than they bargained for. The vampire gives the six teens an ultimatum, telling them “I will let five of you go in safety … You will choose who among you is to satisfy my hunger … That person will stay with me. Here. In the dark. In the quiet of this tower” (9). In the ensuing conversations, these teens’ perceptions of what kind of people they are and their friendships are pushed to (and beyond) the limit.
The Vampire’s Promise adds some new elements to the mix that complicate the narrative pattern of the first two books. First, the ensemble cast reframes the vampire’s allure, demonstrating how he can control and corrupt on a larger scale. Althea and Devnee were isolated victims. As a result, there was no one they could talk about their experiences with and the choices they made could be seen as anomalous (i.e. that’s what this one person chose to do, but that’s not how everybody—or even most people—would respond). The Vampire’s Promise cycles through all six teenage characters as they consider the challenge before them, why they themselves shouldn’t be the one who gets sacrificed, and what they truly think about their so-called friends. The majority of them are willing to leave a friend behind and justify that choice to ensure their own self-preservation. The only one who actively refuses the vampire’s demand is Lacey, who is established early on as the least popular member of the group, repeatedly derided by the others with the odd insult of being “a dwindle-head” (14). This ensemble expands beyond the teenagers themselves, further demonstrating the scope and reach of the vampire’s influence, as Lacey’s younger brother Kevin and Bobby’s younger sister Mardee go to the house to try to scare their older siblings, and Randy’s older sister Ginny and her boyfriend Jordan also find themselves at the house when they go looking for Randy, who is late getting the family car back home. While Kevin, Mardee, Ginny, and Jordan aren’t trapped in the same way the main six protagonists are, they feel the vampire’s influence and fall within his sphere of predation. There’s also a random carjacker who wanders into the mix to try to steal Randy’s car, though the extent of his contribution to the story is that humans can be awful too (this guy is a violent criminal and bad news) and to serve as a vampire snack so that the other, more likable characters can get away.
Another key difference is that while The Cheerleader and The Return of the Vampire focus almost exclusively on teen girls’ experiences and insecurities—which makes sense, as teen girls were the primary audience of these books—in The Vampire’s Promise, Cooney acknowledges the complexity of teen boys’ adolescence as well. When the vampire first appears to the six teens, he understands that Randy has brought his friends to the tower to prove himself and his bravery. As the vampire says, “Boys have to press the accelerator to the floor. They have to drink harder and kick footballs farther. It is never enough for a boy to know that he is quicker than the rest. A boy has to prove it, and he has to prove it over and over and over again” (7-8, emphasis original). In the first two books, boys were fairly flat characters, the object of the girls’ romantic desires and the ones who have the power to give (or withhold) attention and validation. In this passage, teen boys are invested with insecurities and troubles of their own and throughout their time in the tower, these young men each try to prove themselves in different ways—Bobby with his strength and athletic prowess, Zach with his intelligence, and Randy with his bravery—and come up short.
Finally, in a shocking twist, it turns out that the vampire isn’t the only vampire in the tower. There’s a second vampire and when he appears, the teens learn that there are different kinds of vampires, rather than a reliable template that all vampires follow or expectations to which they adhere. As Cooney writes, “The first vampire—Lacey could not stop herself from thinking of him as their vampire—was so much more cloak than this new one. This new one was gelatinous, sticky and dark like molasses dripping on a floor” (117, emphasis original). Just as the ensemble approach of The Vampire’s Promise disrupts the focus on singular characters in The Cheerleader and The Return of the Vampire, the appearance of this second vampire gets readers wondering just how this whole thing works, why the vampires look so different, whether the vampires have their own complicated social hierarchy, and whether there are more of them just waiting to emerge. (These are all questions that go unanswered in The Vampire’s Promise, but the possibilities are fascinating and the mere existence of the second vampire fundamentally shifts readers’ perceptions of the whole human/vampire conflict Cooney has explored throughout the series). The vampires share a moment of commiseration that their home is about to be destroyed, lamenting that “They are wiping out our habitats” (120), but after this brief conversation, the first vampire effectively dismisses the newcomer, telling him that “I would like to finish up in here all by myself, if you don’t mind … But there is no need for you to go hungry. You need only slip outdoors. There are more humans waiting in the yard” (121), pointing him toward Kevin, Mardee, Ginny, and Jordan. There is not much exposition on this larger vampire community, but it does effectively reframe the first two books, giving readers the sense that there could be more than meets the eye in those established narratives. (If Cooney ever writes a fourth book about vampires at the mall, maybe we’ll see some more of them!).
In the end, the other teens leave while Lacey stays with the vampire in order to protect her younger brother, who she hears calling for her from the yard below. Her friends leave her to her fate, most without a backward glance. Her very existence starts to slip almost immediately from their memories (as does their entire ordeal in the house), but there’s enough of Lacey’s heroism remaining in their minds that Sherree stands up for Lacey when Zach (once again) calls her a “dwindle-head.” But even though all seems lost, Lacey is smart and resourceful and sets the vampire’s nest on fire, then flees through the burning house to be triumphantly reunited with her friends and her little brother. Heading away from the house, Lacey thinks about the vampires and what may have become of them, determining that “I do not think evil can be destroyed. Only subdued for a time” (165). But as they get further from the house and the night goes on, all the teens’ memories are wiped clean and “The hard-learned lessons, the heroism, and the sacrifices were gone as if they had never been” (166). So much for learning from the past.
Cooney’s The Cheerleader, The Return of the Vampire, and The Vampire’s Promise offer a uniquely ‘90s teen spin on the vampire narrative, with their exploration of the intersections between vampirism and popularity, as the protagonists grow more beautiful and popular through the vampire’s feeding on others. While Althea and Devnee don’t directly prey upon their peers, they do become more monstrous as they give into the vampire’s temptations. In the end, these teens are able to contain, refuse, or drive away the vampire, though it’s unlikely he’ll stay gone for long. He may turn up in another creepy old house or the mall that’s coming to replace the tower, but there will always be a teen who longs to be more popular, and he’ll never go hungry.
