Product Description

Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one of the most original and popular television programmes of the last decade. It develops inventive variations on stock horror material partly for thrills, partly as eloquent metaphors for the anxieties of contemporary American teenagers, but does a lot more - varying its tone from surrealism to moments of intense romanticism. Reding the Vampire Slayer is a book of critical appreciations, which examines a variety of the complex ways in which Buffy and its spin-off series Angel have won the hearts of its target audience and the minds of intellectual commentators. The book also provides a short episode guide to all five seasons of Buffy and the first two seasons of Angel, as well as assessment, based on interview material, of the contributions of the shows' principal writers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #747543 in Books
• Published on: 2001-10-26
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 232 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Reading the Vampire Slayer is a very accessible collection of essays, edited by Amazon.co.uk contributor and respected SF and Fantasy reviewer Roz Kaveney, which analyses the first five seasons of the TV show "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and the first two seasons of "Angel". Kaveney's opening article sketches out the territory, providing an insightful introduction to the themes and structures of the two shows. The essays that follow consider a wide range of issues, but a common theme is the complexity and inventiveness of the shows, with their deconstruction of patriarchal authority and highlighting of the ambiguous nature of evil. Variously, the authors consider how Buffy subverts the "male gaze", the ways in which the shows challenge such concepts as established authority and traditional ways of learning and knowing, the use of humour, how the landscape of Southern California plays its part, and how fans have become actively involved in the writing of slash-fan fiction (which pairs characters such as Xander/Spike in sexual relationships). It's an eclectic mix, with some essays more obviously academic than others, but on the whole the style, which includes bibliographies for further reading, means this book should interest both students of cultural and media studies and more general readers. And it's a lot of fun to read, providing many thoughtful insights into two shows that have proved popular television can be both thought provoking and deeply moving. --Elizabeth Sourbut

Review
.,."very thoughtful essays...accessible and intriguing..." -- "Booklist"

About the Author
Roz Kaveney is a well-known reviewer, contributing editor to The Encyclopaedia of Fantasy and co-founder of Feminists against Censorship.

Customer Reviews

Complex and brilliant
If you've ever doubted that the show 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' lacks intellectual merit, this book will blow those doubts away. A series of critical essays, each approaching 'Buffy' from a different angle (e.g. acting, feminism, socialism), 'Reading the Vampire Slayer' shows us just how much symbolism and metaphor there is lurking beneath the weekly 45-minutes of fantasy fun, whether it was intentional or not. It's not an easy read by any means, but it's certainly accessible and definitely makes you sit up and think 'Wow. I've never seen it like that, but they've got a point/they're talking rubbish!', which is exactly what a critical reader should do. And even the introductory 'this is what Buffy's all about in case you've not seen the show' chapter is detailed and intellectually stimulating. All in all what *should* happen when pop culture and intelligent thought combine, and a must read for any serious fan.

Views on Buffy the Vampire Slayer from the Ivory Towers
"Reading the Vampire Slayer" is a critical appreciation of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" from those living in their proverbial ivory towers but glued to their tube for "BtVS." This collection of 10 essays focuses on seasons 1-5 of Buffy, 1-2 of Angel, and as the spelling of some of the words in some of these titles will tell you, a lot of these authors are British:

1. Roz Kaveney, "She Saved the World. A Lot: An Introduction to the themes and structure of 'Buffy' and 'Angel'" is the first and most fan friendly essay in this collection. Looking at character clusters and season structures, Kaveney does a nice job of articulating what most fans of "BtVS" have intuited regarding why the show works and works so well. The key section of the essay books at each season of "BtVS" in turn from the perspective of Big Bads and Emotional Traumas. This is the perfect introductory essay for this collection because it makes a clear case for how patterns and meaning become significant in this series. The only problem is that as the most comprehensive look at "BtVS" in this collection, readers (whether academicians or fans) will find all the rest of these efforts pale in comparison.

2. Boyd Tonkin, "Entropy as Demon: Buffy in Southern California," might have the most erroneous title of the bunch because the article focuses much more on So Cal than notions of entropy. Whereas "Angel" deals more explicitly with the cultural mythology of Los Angeles, "BtVS" creates a fictional local with Sunnydale that Tonkin argues "gives a fresh, and quite distinctive, twist to a strain of Southern Californian suburban noir that has flourished at least since the 1930s." However, the best parts of this essay look at the way "BtVS" confronts genre cliches and typologies.

3. Brian Wall and Michael Zryd, "Vampire Dialectics: Knowledge, Institutions and Labour" looks at the battles of Buffy and Angel with supernatural creatures as allegorical battles with the very logic or modernity. Writing in the tradition of Walter Benjamin and Fredric Jameson, this essay might be a struggle for many readers, but there are a couple of very interesting sections in which they look at the death of Joyce as the first "real" death in the series (all others being essentially "symbolic") and look at the evolution of Giles's character.

4. Steve Wilson, "Laugh, Spawn of Hell, Laugh," focuses on the jokes in Buffy and not just Xander's lame jokes but also the larger humor of casting adolescent growing pains as externalized demons. Wilson goes to great pains to catalogue the times of "time-honoured buffoonery" that abound on the show, making connections to the comic impulse in history from William Shakespeare to David Letterman with extensive dialogue examples. This essay might be much ado about nothing, but it will probably be one of the more enjoyable ones for readers.

5. Karen Sayer, "It Wasn't Our World Anymore--They Made It Theirs: Reading Space and Place," looks at the concept of Home on both "BtVS" and "Angel." Sayer is particularly interested in how the group on each soul takes over the space of a specific individual (e.g., Giles in terms of the library, his apartment and the Magic Box on "BtVS"). However, Occam's razor reminds us that
these shows have "x" number of sets and building/finding/using news ones costs money. Just keep that particular grain of salt in mind while you read this one.

6. Zoe-Jane Playden's "'What You Are, What's To Come': Feminism, citizenship, and the divine" starts off with the idea that important aspects of Virginia Woolf's seminal feminist manifesto are reflected in "BtVS." Playden uses the metaphor of Buffy on patrol to explore some pretty heavy philosophical notions and deals most explicitly with Christian imagery and Buffy's spirituality. I think this is probably the most ambitious essay in the collection.

7. Anne Millard Daugherty's "Just a Girl: Buffy as Icon" is concerned with how Buffy exists as a "post-gaze" product (i.e., she functions as a "feminist spectator icon"). Daugherty looks at the episodes "Beauty and the Beasts," "Family," and "Buffy vs. Dracula" to argue that no matter how cute Buffy is, she remains an icon for female representation.

8. Dave West's "'Concentrate on the kicking movie': "Buffy" and East Asian Cinema" argues that "BtVS" draws thematically on the entire tradition of East Asian cinema while using those themes in a decidedly different context. However, surprisingly West draws more upon the films of Akira Kurosawa, most notably "Seven Samurai" and "Yojimbo," rather than the Hong Kong martial art films that seem an obvious reference point. The more you know Kurosawa, the more you will enjoy this essay.

9. Esther Saxey's "Staking a Claim: The Series and Its Slash Fan-Fiction," is the essay that may well send the more innocent Buffy viewers who have stumbled across this book running to the hill. Slash is a genre of fan-fiction in which the relationships between characters are developed along overtly loving and sexual lines (i.e., a different interpretation for all that tension between Spike and Xander). However, the key point of Saxey's essay is how the series actually invites such interpretations. The "gay" subtext of Buffy's "coming out" as a Slayer to her mom was particularly interesting as was her exploration of the Buffy-Faith dynamic. This essay actually devotes relatively little time to actual examples of slash stories.

10. Ian Shuttleworth's "''They always mistake me for the character I play!': Transformation, identity and role-playing in the Buffyverse (and a defence of fine acting)", makes the compelling argument that actors in genre shows are called upon for greater complexity of performance than do most naturalistic dramas. This essay examines the complexity of identity as a major thread in both series, with some solid analysis of Xander, Willow and Giles.

There are some nice critical insights into "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" in this volume, and I think that overall, despite the academic verbiage, most of the show's fans will be able to follow along.

Some parts hard to follow but other parts fascinating.
My only reason for reading this book was my love of the show, Buffy. I found the essays in this book fascinating... those of them that I could understand. Obviously if you are a media student then you know a lot more about the theory involved, but I think a real expert can present their material in such a way that it is accessible on some level to anyone with a genuine interest in the subject matter. A few of the authors did just that, explaining their ideas in such a way that Joe public could understand enough to find the essays really satisfying. Some of the authors, though, seem the type of academic who thinks that they are more intellegent if they use lots of obscure words and overly lengthy sentences.

In the essays I could understand, I found much food for thought. They took my appreciation of Buffy to another level. If, like me, you are someone who watches Buffy reruns over and over, seeing a new level of meaning each time, then buy this book. Don't give up if you stumble over one or two of the eassys. There are some real gems in here. The first essay is a great general overview and probably the easiest to follow (and it takes REAL intellegence to present complex ideas so accessibly, if you ask me!). I loved the essay about the role of humour in Buffy. Also surprisingly interesting (I wondered about the relevance) was an essay about Buffy and East Asian Cinema. The essay on slash-fan fiction was another unexpectedly fascinating one. The others I was able to follow and enjoy were the one about Buffy as an Icon, and the last essay entitled "They Always Mistake Me For The Character I Play". In fact this last one, discussing what the various actors brought to their roles, is great if you're fascinated by the people behind the characters too.

I struggled with a few of the earlier essays, but by the end of the book I was pleased I hadn't let them put me off all together. Overall this was a good read, but if I read it again, I'll probably skip one or two of the more "Why-use-one-word-when-ten-obscure-ones-will-make-me-sound-ceverer" essays.