#741 Vampires in the Lemon Grove- Karen Russell
The title story of Karen Russell’s first short story collection sets a good tone. It’s a vampire story, but original and touching. These characters don’t need to be vampires, they could be anyone going through life with normal emotions—love, loneliness, depression.
Clyde grew up alone hearing all the horror stories about vampires, the killing, the bloodsucking the aversion to sunlight, etc. He built his own life around these stories until he met the only other vampire he has ever met, Magreb. She becomes his wife and disabuses him of the lore. They travel and live somewhat normal lives, but his hunger once psychosomatically about blood has led them to an Italian lemon grove. Lemons, it seems can quench their nocturnal thirst for a while.
“After an initial prickling—a sort of chemical effervescence along my gums—a soothing blankness traveled from the tip of each fang to my fevered brain. These lemons are a vampire’s analgesic. If you have been thirsty for a long time, if you have been suffering, then the absence of those two feelings—however brief—becomes a kind of heaven.”
He sits all day in the grove looking like an old Italian widower and with Magreb he feels that he need not travel anymore. He is no longer lonely:
“There is a loneliness that must be particular to monsters, I think, the feeling that each is the only child of a species. And now that loneliness was over.”
However, he is not an old man, and Magreb is ready to keep moving. Clyde’s dilemma is a very human one, caught between love and life, feeling lonely and depressed and not wanting to let go of old feelings.
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