Name
By Joseph Young

Reviewed by Laura Ellen Scott

Union Street Press, 2010
perfect bound, 134 pp., $10

Last summer, Baltimore-based artist and wiffleball enthusiast Joseph Young dedicated a month to writing a vampire book for the frankly declared purpose of raising rent money. I don’t know if that effort succeeded, but those of us who follow Joe’s work closely were very excited to see what he would come up with. Young, whose magical collection Easter Rabbit was reprinted in 2010 by Publishing Genius, writes elegant microfictions that make sense in your heart if not always in your mind, so the idea of him tackling a longer, sustained project was intriguing. But more important is the fact that Young does not traffic in cheap irony; so what the heck did he think he was going to do with the vampire genre?

Now we know. As it turns out, Nameis a vampire book after all, full of sensation, mystery, hunger, and existential distress. The protagonist of Name is Robert, a dumpy, loveless teen who is made into a vampire by a 40-year-old schoolteacher before being released into the world of eternal night with little or no instruction. Three months into being undead, he makes desperate choice when he meets Lena, a young woman who will die as a result of being beaten by her boyfriend. But Robert soon learns that making friends is a complicated process, especially when vampire proliferation goes unchecked. The phrase “babies having babies” comes to mind. Robert’s relationship with Lena spins out of control, and given their condition of permanent adolescence, it is possible that their relationship will forever be in a state of turmoil.

He wanted a girlfriend who would like him, like him, so he could stop mooning around after girls who would put up with him but kept him always at arm’s length. Now though, he was a vampire. His loneliness was sealed into night forever. He was doomed never to hold another pretty girl’s hand, never to eat pizza with her, never, oh god, make love to her. It was terrible, awful. It sucked.

This is a fun book, very readable and touching; Young’s writing always seems achingly honest, but in Name he seems to be striving for open-eyed clarity as well, perhaps because the subject—lonely youth—deserves it.

That said, my knowledge of the vampire genre ends with 1970s Dracula comics. So I decided to ask an expert, a fourteen-year-old reader we’ll call “Maggie.” Maggie is a goth-girl-poet-artist-punk-rocker who has read all the Twilight books. The following conversation is a fabrication—bits and pieces of e-mails collected over several weeks. She has a lot of homework to do so she read the book in short bursts, which is why, at different points, she has described the book as pretty good, confusing, “a somewhat good time passer,” or too graphic. What’s clear is that she wasn’t over the moon about it.

Me: IsName anything like Twilight?

Maggie: Not at all Twilight-ish. Robert’s ugly and doesn't sparkle, and he's not in love with a mortal. Robert seems depressing, but he’s like a normal perverted teenage boy.

Me: I thought the book was PG-13, but you seemed to react pretty strongly to the opening pages—is Name harsher than the Stephanie Meyer books?

Maggie: It's PG-13. He longs a little too much. One part I did not really like was the descriptions of all the gore. Maybe I'm just squeamish but I don't really like to hear “blood gushing from his throat” and “their throats slashed” and so forth.

Me: You said the book was confusing. How so?

Maggie: It didn't really explain things like "the giant" and why he was calling him "friend." The part with killing/making Daniel (Rabbit) got pretty confusing. I caught up with it two pages later but where I left off with the schoolteacher and all, it doesn't explain his relationship with the school teacher. In the beginning it seemed like he really didn't care about her. He was curious about being a vampire and mad she left, but now as he confronts her it’s like they were dating or something. Also what's with this guy and boobs? I swear he mentions them like every five pages.

Me: What advice do you have for Joseph Young if he wanted to write another vampire book?

Maggie: The style of writing wasn't really "vampire thriller.” More added-on edginess would be a good way to make it better. The book was an average okay for me. If he’s targeting girls it should be a little more romantic. One male character should at least be good looking, and it should be a little bit lighter on the blood aspect.

Visit Joseph Young’s Name page here.

Laura Ellen Scott teaches fiction writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Her short fiction has been selected for Wigleaf’s Top Fifty, Short Story Month, Eclectica Best Fiction, Gravity Dancers: More Fiction by Washington Area Women, and Barellhouse’s “Futures.” She was nominated twice for Dzanc’s Best of the Web and has made the StorySouth Million Writers notable stories list three times. Most of her published work is linked at her blog, Probably just a story. Laura is also the curator of VIPs on vsf, where editors and writers of very short fiction express very brief thoughts on form and craft.

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