Most of the stories in this collection start out innocently enough to easily fit their way into a collection by a writer like Eudora Welty or Ann Beatty. Even though the story has the word “vampires” in it, one is immediately lulled into a sense of quiet expectation of something different courtesy of an opening paragraph describing the lemon groves of Santa Francesca. (Which, one should take note, is capable of transforming into “San Francisco” quite easily if your autocorrect is particularly sensitive to a slight misspelling. Be forewarned!). Likewise, “Reeling for the Empire” starts out innocently enough as an accounting of a some Japanese women who have become victims of some sort of sinister trafficking. Speaking of writers like Eudora Welty, the opening scene of “Proving Up” might not feel entirely out of place in a short story by University of Nebraska’s one great contribution to American culture, Willa Cather.
Each of these stories and several others begin innocently enough, but it is not just vampires that make things go weird. In fact, in comparison to the creatures that dominate “Reeling for the Empire” it must be admitted that the vampires in that Italian lemon grove actually do wind up coming off as kind of quaint and normal. Ditto for the mysterious shadowy figure that transforms the Cather-like rural scene that opens “Proving Up” and turns into something from one of Stephen King’s more political nightmarish landscapes. In other words, these are stories about intrusions into the real world by entities that you had better hope to god do not actually exist. Some have termed the stories examples of Magical Realism and perhaps that is closest one can get to a fully rounded generic term for what occurs here, but beneath the surface of genre there is a strain of North American post-modernism that seems at odds with the mordant South American celebration of the weirdness of existence. To sprout wings and fly in a small Latin village is one thing, but to read the rules for tailgating the sport of premature extinction of Antarctic wildlife is something else entirely.
It is not so much the post-modern concept of telling a story from the outside looking in that is at work here as the lesser-known post-modern quality of digging into the world we know to cut it up and put conventional expectations on display. What makes the vampires in that grove sucking on lemons special is that the lemons become a substitute for blood. Turns out that much of the mythos about vampires may not be true at all. In fact, turns out that vampires may be able to withstand the sun without sparkling, even. Rutherford B. Hayes was a useless American President precisely because he was never supposed to be President. The story titled “The Barn at the End of the Our Term” has Pres. Hayes having been turned into a horse in a weird place which may be hell or may be heaven. He is joined by other President who in their equine form are still struggling vainly to acquire power and establish their identity as the powerful. Hayes, who knows he fell ass-backwards into the job in the first place, just wants to locate his wife. It is American history put on display in a way that reveals the petty ugliness of it all.
Revelation of petty ugliness is the defining characteristic binding these stories together. The past intrudes upon the president in ways that sometimes change things, but often leave them ambiguously unresolved. If there really were vampires in the lemon groves, what would be the effect? Well, the answer to that question depends upon whether the vampires adhered to the conventions they believed in (and we all believe in as well) or the realization that what they have been told is not necessarily the truth. Throughout the book are vampires hiding in lemon groves that turn out not to be quite the bloodsucking fiends one expects.
