Vampire Rules: As Red as Glass Apples

She used to rate Michael Whelan

“Let my daughter have,” said the woman, “hair black as mine, black as the wood of these warped and arcane trees. Let her have skin like mine, white as this snow. And let her have my mouth, red as my blood.” And the woman had smiled and licked at her finger. She had a crown on her head; it shone in the dusk like a star. She never came to the window before dusk: she did not like the day. She was the first Queen, and she did not possess a mirror.”  

-Red as Blood by Tanith Lee

In the comparative youth of the internet, there was once a site called The Dominion although the URL was Scifi.com.  Today it will lead you to SyFy.com but back then it led you to some place a bit more special. 

SciFi.com was one of the few first sites to try and turn the World Wide Web from what was really just public newsletters into a true multi-media experience.  Truthfully in a dial-up world, they were biting off more than they could chew. Aside from short stories and Starlog-style promotional pieces for SciFi Channel’s own shows as well as a schedule of its upcoming shows (which was becoming important in a world where TV Guide was becoming rapidly unfathomable due to channel-creep)  The Dominion also took it upon itself to revive lost art of the audio drama with Seeing Ear Theater.  

And they paid what had to be serious money to do it too. As was usual in those days the business model was “get the eyeballs then figure out some way to make money.” They never did.  Regardless, the voice actors were people you actually heard of like; Steve Buscemi, Alfre Woodard, Oliver Platt, Clancy Brown, Kyra Sedwick, Bronson Pinchot (naturally) Stanley Tucci, and Bebe Neuwirth.  While there were some revivals of classics like Sorry Wrong Number and HG Wells’ The Time Machine, there were contemporary stories by writers like Gregory Benford and Harlan Ellison.  There were even specially commissioned audio plays by Clive Barker, J. Michael Straczynski and (sigh) Neil Gaiman.

Snow, Glass, Apples, has an air of something that was sped through in its making. A feeling of, ‘Oh shit, I forgot all about that damn thing.  I’ve only got two weeks to get it in.”  Fortunately, Seeing Ear Theater productions were just novella-sized stories, and that only needed a novella-sized script.  Where to get an idea in a hurry? Tanith Lee! It was as if someone apparently threw a dart at his bookcase and it pinned an anthology of her’s called Red as Blood: Or Tales of the Sister Grimmer. Perfect!

Red as Blood is a terrific little short story in that collection which inverts the tropes of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.  Red as Blood is a subversion of Snow White where the queen is the heroine and Snow White is the villain.  It’s told second person from the Queen’s perspective.  

Like Grimm’s original Snow White, it begins with a recounting of Snow White’s mother being heavily pregnant and vocalizing a wish list of physical traits she wanted her daughter to have. Except in this case, it feels far less like a prayer and more like a pact.  Snow White’s mother dies giving birth to her. And there was some concern at the funeral because some holy water that was spilled on the casket, sizzled.

Nonetheless, the old queen got her wish(?) her daughter had black hair, skin as white as snow, and her mouth was red as blood. 

The King’s second with was the Witch Queen and while she was indeed a witch, she was devout Christian (or at least was framed that way).  She did have some knowledge of magic but it seemed to be more like Gandalf’s sort of thing.  It was more like she knew a bit more about how to slip past some of the laws of reality without breaking them.  Her Stepdaughter Bianca (White in Italian) would not appear in her magic mirror.  Because of course, she could not appear in any mirror. Snow White in this version is more of Nosferatu than a Dracula, her father’s kingdom has been afflicted by plague her entire life. She refuses to be baptized, wear a cross or take communion and claims her stepmother is trying to kill her.

The Witch Queen tries the loyal huntsman thing, but Bianca changes herself into an image of the Witch Queen, seduces him, and kills him.  Then using her own witchcraft Bianca fashions seven homunculi from blasted trees to be her servants.

The Witch Queen tries a desperate gamble, she (okay here it gets Tanith Lee weird) summons the Fallen Angel Lucefiel.

“Since you have called me, I know your desire. It is a comfortless wish. You ask for pain.”

“You speak of pain, Lord Lucefiel, who suffer the most merciless pain of all. Worse than the nails in the feet and wrists. Worse than the thorns and the bitter cup and the blade in the side. To be called upon for evil’s sake, which I do not, comprehending your true nature, son of God, brother of The Son.” (No, Tanith wasn’t a Mormon)

“You recognize me, then. I will grant what you ask.”

Which is how she gets turned into a hag. She seeks out Bianca and offers her the gifts of a girdle, comb, and the apple.  Bianca insists the Witch take a bite first, which she happily does.  Bianca then consents to bite the apple and falls over dead because the Witch Queen had (this was clever) inserted a eucharist wafer into it. 

The stepmother goes home. And Snow White’s Glass coffin forms about her. Although, in this case, it’s more of a cyrillus.

The thing is the Eucharist wafer was doing work  

The Prince arrives to resurrect her.

“She got to her feet and shook out her hair, and began to walk toward the Prince on the pale horse.

But she seemed to walk into a shadow, into a purple room; then into a crimson room whose emanations lanced her like knives. Next she walked into a yellow room where she heard the sound of crying which tore her ears. All her body seemed stripped away; she was a beating heart. The beats of her heart became two wings. She flew. She was a raven, then an owl. She flew into a sparkling pane. It scorched her white. Snow white. She was a dove.

She settled on the shoulder of the Prince and hid her head under her wing. She had no longer anything black about her, and nothing red.

“Begin again now, Bianca,” said the Prince. He raised her from his shoulder. On his wrist there was a mark. It was like a star. Once a nail had been driven in there.”

Bianca finds her way back to her stepmother and is an innocent girl of seven again.  The Witch Queen places her cross around Bianca’s neck and the mirror can now see her for the first time.

And now a brief… Very brief look at Gaiman’s editorial reply; Snow, Glass, Apples. An inversion of the story where the Queen Stepmother is the good one and isn’t really copying things.  A version where Snow White is a vampire clearly crosses the line into unoriginality if not plagiarism.  Besides, there were drastic differences in the plot. 

It feels as if Neil Gaiman looked at this charming story of holy redemption and felt that shriveled.  What this story really needs he appears to have decided, was non-consensual sex, pedophilia, blood sports, incest, body horror, and the good to be utterly degraded, completely humiliated, then tortured to death by slowly being cooked alive.

Oh yeah, and necrophilia. 

There was way too much sex for an audio play that was only 45 minutes long.  The queen had two sex scenes, thankfully Snow White’s with her father and the Prince Charming were performed behind a veil. Oh, wait, the one she had with the Friar when she was twelve that was fairly explicit.  There was an implied sex scene between Snow White and the Queen, the six-year-old Snow White bit the Queen on her :Mound of Venus.”  In the story, it did expliticly refer to the base of her thumb but there was only one reason to use that archaic term. And it was used more than once.

The apple trick worked but Neil couldn’t come up with anything anywhere near as interesting as Tanith Lee, so it was just poison… That killed a hugely powerful vampire.

When the prince woke Snow White, (you know how he did it (gag)).** They captured the Queen and at their wedding had her stripped naked, shaved completely, and carried spread-eagled to the kiln “completely exposed” where she was cooked to death.  

All that in a short story that is only fifteen pages long. The reason I say that it felt like it was produced quickly is that Gaiman’s brakes were almost entirely off. There was no one to tell him by 2001 (when this was produced) that he should really dial it back a little.  By then he was the “master storyteller” and comic book rock star. He’d gotten very used to doing what he liked and had been reportedly indulging his darkest tastes. He was clearly having trouble hiding them by then. 

I went looking for a likely source of plagiarism and found instead perverse mockery.  A tale of holy redemption turned on its head into a revoltingly warped and twisted grotesquery of the triumph of Satanic evil over good.  

Thanks, Neil!  

*Or Thetan, whatever.

**No, that isn’t accurate to the fairy tale you’re thinking of Sleeping Beauty.