Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Why I Hate the Comte Saint-Germain!!! No offence, Chelsea!

Of all the vampires around, the gory ones, the disgusting ones, the purely evil ones, the helpless and the messed up, no-one irritates me more than Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's suave and superior Comte Saint-Germain.
And the reason?  In a nutshell: he's too perfectly perfect and superior! Philanthropist, feminist, learned, wise, well-mannered ... he's cleaner than the proverbial pin!
Not that any of these qualities are unwelcome in any character, yet when every other man in the Saint-Germain stories is either a satanist, a rapist or downright stupid, Saint-Germain's goody-goody attitude and his know-it-all-ness just rub me the wrong way.
There is no doubt that the Comte has left his mark on the vampire genre, but it is not as if the novels themselves were works of high literature. They read more like audacious and uncensored versions of a Barbara Cartland novel than anything else. With all the high quality vampire literature around, I can't see why some people still make a fuss about Saint-Germain. Give me mad, bad and dangerous to know Lestat, Dracula, or Zillah any time!