Blood and Sunlight

When I was in fourth grade–I can recall reading it in my assigned seat–I remember loving a book about a boy my age who befriends a vampire girl. He was an awkward, lonely boy, and the girl was a mysterious outsider. There were anxieties. Will her parents eat him when he comes over for dinner? Perhaps they were older–sixth grade, perhaps. I think young people were younger in the eighties. There was no internet, as only one obvious and simple indication. There was a sweetness to their attractions (fascinations). It was mostly expressed as shyness.

I loved the story. As an unhappy child, I believed that only something supernatural or miraculous could change my life, which was in those days hopelessly real. I wanted something–someone–to draw me into a secret, undiscovered world where magic existed. That never happened, and perhaps I was right! I never became a happy young person.

I don’t think I was alone in my feelings. Thanks to democratized distribution of content and fan-made works, we can see that the idea of personal relationships with the supernatural has wide appeal. We see it in traditional media, too. Surely we have not forgotten–even if some of us remain confused by it–the success of the Twilight franchise.

This interest intersects with figurative presentations of monsters, perhaps especially vampires. Maybe vampires most of all. What does it mean to be devoured? What might it mean to be excluded from society? To never see “the light of day?” To have socially forbidden hungers?

These questions all pulse through the veins of vampire fiction, even when the dangers are subsumed within a nonthreatening package. So it was with my grade school book, and so it is too with Blood and Sunlight. On its surface, Blood and Sunlight seems concerned a logistical problem: will the protagonist, Zach, get home before daybreak? The answers in this multi-route games mostly answer “no.” The question might be robbed of its teeth: Zach isn’t in any danger of turning to ash. Still, he will and does suffer if he chooses to stay.

His drunk significant other, Lyle, suggests that he stay, but they're too intoxicated to add much to the conversation. This is really a discussion that Zach has with himself: “why can’t I be like everybody else,” he seems to wonder. He can’t, obviously, but how far is he willing to go to try? The player can choose to make him sick. Is this romance? I was reminded of Ellie and Riley’s doomed fantasy of madness unto death in The Last of Us: Left Behind, but those characters chose to fall apart together. Here, it’s just Zach.

I found in this story an inversion of my own grade-school fascination with the adolescent vampire girl. My young self wanted to be pulled out of the world, but Zach pushes himself hard to be in it. I think Blood and Sunlight appears–misleadingly–light, but deeper themes are there, for those who look. A thought-provoking and rewarding bite!