Will the Vampire People Please Leave the Lobby? (True Adventures in Cult Fandom) [Paperback]

Allyson Beatrice (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 2007

Allyson Beatrice lives a not-quite-ordinary life. Her job and almost everyone she knows are the result of spending too much time on the Internet talking about vampires, slayers and lesbian witches. And her encounters are even more unusual than you'd imagine. A hilarious collection of true stories from Allyson's days as one of the Internet's leading cult TV fan gurus, her mind-boggling escapades include meetings with network executives in dark steakhouses to try to save doomed TV shows and one hastily arranged wedding for two committed Buffy fans. Honest, emotional and side-splittingly snarky, Allyson Beatrice brings a fresh voice to these wild but true stories. Will the Vampire People Please Leave the Lobby? welcomes you to a fun and sometimes bizarre world where stupidity frustrates, wit triumphs and connections are made in most unlikely ways...a world, in fact, not too different from our own.

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Sourcebooks; 1 edition (August 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1402208456
• ISBN-13: 978-1402208454
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,314,272 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An Interesting Biography of a More-Than-Fan, September 21, 2007

By 

Lisa Shea "medieval swordfighting enthusiast" - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Will the Vampire People Please Leave the Lobby? (True Adventures in Cult Fandom) (Paperback)

When you read this book, you're not reading a tale about Buffy, or of fans in general. You're really reading the biography of a specific "super fan". Allyson Beatrice knows (as she mentions several times) several writers and producers for shows such as Firefly, Buffy, Angel and so on. She has been in Joss Whedon's "sphere" for many years. She has been extremely active and instrumental in the forums about those shows, the efforts to keep the shows going, and the parties.

Allyson would be the first to admit that she's a flawed character, which is a good thing. Reading someone "self praising" through an entire book can get quite tedious. Allyson does mention her high points, but she is quick to point out that she can be nasty and cut-throat in forum postings as well. It makes her more human.

Unfortunately, that's the way she begins the book. She starts by bashing people who love TV shows like Buffy, looking down on them and pitying them. Now, I have to admit that I didn't watch Buffy - the theme of a pretty blonde girl in High School just didn't appeal to me - but I love sci-fi in general. I saw Star Wars ten times when it first came out, and spent my childhood completely immersed in anything sci-fi and fantasy that I could. I read Lord of the Rings at least yearly. So while I didn't feel personal angst about her diatribe against Buffy people, it still bugged me that she - who used to love the show - could turn so easily against people who felt that kinship. It set a poor tone for the book.

I kept going, though. I was rewarded in portions by laugh out loud commentary. Surely anyone who has been on forums can relate to some of the situations described. It has nothing to do with Buffy - it simply has to do with online web forums. In one area she talks about how forum arguments tend to escalate until someone brings up Hitler or Nazis - and that the person who does this is immediately considered as having lost the argument, and the thread is shut down. I happened to have been with my father while reading this, and he had this exact situation happen only a few weeks earlier on a USGENWEB (genealogy) group.

Part of the issue I have with the book is that it makes it seem at times that Buffy fans were unique in their reactions and issues. I can probably cite exact duplicates of pretty much every situation here - from the woman lying about her dying child on a forum for sympathy, to people gathering thousands of dollars to help out a friend they'd never met, to tons of online people meeting together for the first time - in numerous other forums. These are, really, very common things on the web.

I've been to many science fiction conventions. The situations she mentions have actually been going on BEFORE there was an internet (really, there was such a time!). People used to have paper newsletters, mail groups and phone conversations.

So it felt a bit silly to hear for the fourth or fifth time how amazing it was that people who had NEVER MET BEFORE were getting together to see each other! Yikes! They'd only talked remotely before? And now they were in person? Really, this happens all the time. It's neat, but it's common.

So in the end, I had a mixed reaction. I certainly enjoyed some sections. Other, long sections felt more like reading someone's personal diary - with people I'd never met, and who weren't described in enough detail for me to really connect with. Yet other sections felt a little like reading Al Gore talk about how he invented the Internet.

If you've ever been involved in forum activity, this book will probably have areas you really enjoy. I'd highly recommend getting it out from the library - or borrowing a copy from a friend, to glean those gems from the book. But as far as a book that I'd repeatedly read, or that I enjoyed from start to finish, it didn't fall into that category for me.

41 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting writing about fans of shows -- though not much about the shows themselves, August 13, 2007

By 

Robert Moore (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Will the Vampire People Please Leave the Lobby? (True Adventures in Cult Fandom) (Paperback)

My reaction to this book was fairly complex. There are parts that I liked a great deal and parts that I did not care for at all. And I'm baffled by the string of five-star reviews. I know there is a lot of room for disagreement about such things and perhaps I'm missing something. I certainly don't see it as being as funny as other reviewers are finding it.

I guess I have to start by explaining my own stance to "fandom." I currently have a somewhat disproportionate number of featured reviews for the shows I most care about, whether DVDs or books, for instance BUFFY, ANGEL, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, DEAD LIKE ME, WONDERFALLS, LOST, VERONICA MARS, THE OFFICE, HEROES, FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS, and their ilk. I also post on one private board (which was formed by invitation only when the old City of Angel board was overwhelmed by trolls and shippers when they shut down the old WB Angel official board) and one public one, the official BSG board on Scifi.com. But that is about all. I've never attended any event connected to any series, never been to any convention, never met anyone I've gotten to know through any Internet board, and apart from buying a beanie baby angel bear to support the Save Angel campaign, never engaged in the vast majority Save the Show activities described here. My reviewing on Amazon comprises almost all of my involvement with almost any show I could mention. So while I'm vaguely familiar with much of what Ms. Beatrice describes, it isn't my world, though I will pit my knowledge of BUFFY and FIREFLY and BSG against anyone. My involvement is--except for the one private board of which I am a member and on which I post 4 or 5 times a day--exclusively with the show and not with "fandom." Watching FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS or LOST is not, for me, a communal experience.

Still, much of what is contained in the book is distantly familiar. I know how trolls or shippers (people who focus exclusively on romances on a show rather than overarching themes or character development) can destroy a board. When she writes of Televisionwithoutpity.com's boards, I remember how totalitarian the moderators there can be, reprimanding posters for having written something on THIS thread when any minimally moral person knows that it should have been posted on THAT one (TVWOP does have funny summaries of shows, but it is the least fun board I've ever seen). And I enjoyed reading her when she wrote about boards and stuff. I honestly did. I didn't laugh like the other reviewers say they did. I found it more humorous than funny. But all in all I didn't find it as good as other reviewers found it nor did she describe a world I really wanted to be more involved with. I read an awful lot, watch a lot of TV (always either on DVD or "by appointment"--I haven't "channel surfed" in the past 20 years even once), and watch a lot of movies. Or spend time with real life friends going out to eat, out to get a drink, or out to see a movie. I simply don't have time to be a part of an online community.

I have to confess that the book started off on an extremely alienating note that might have colored the way that I responded to the rest of the book. She starts off her book with a diatribe against people who write academic papers on BUFFY. She writes, "I feel a sense of pity that these folks [the academic admirers of BUFFY] are still stuck in a continuous loop of BUFFY watchage through the show has been off the air for as many years as it was actually worth watching" (p. 3). Setting aside the question of whether the show was worth watching in Seasons 6 and 7 (and I believe it most definitely was, though I will grant it was not as consistently as good as it had been), there is a MASSIVE amount of projection going on here. She states later that the only BUFFY papers she likes reading are the ones about fandom. Those are precisely the ones that I don't like to read. Fandom bores me to tears. What interests me is textual analysis of shows. For a few decades about the only papers about TV shows that were ever written were either about fandom (e.g., endless papers about why people dress up like characters from STAR TREK) or the nature of the medium of television. You will look in vain for more than a small handful of academic papers analyzing concrete themes in a TV series prior to the early nineties. Only in the nineties did people stop writing about fans or what distinguishes TV from reading or movies and start writing about what the shows were about. So, I see her interest in articles about fandom to be incredibly regressive, a fleeing to an age of TV studies that "Thank God!" we had left behind. And if you look over an exhaustive bibliography of BUFFY you will find that the vast majority of articles analyze themes or characters on the show, instead of the audience.

But the main problem with her complaint about academics is the sheer projection. She moves from feeling that she can no longer engage in any kind of meaningful critique to insisting that any attempted such critique is "weird" (p. 2). Almost every paragraph in that chapter, "Everyday Apocalypses," is just stuffed with messy thinking. And I'll admit that some of this is reactive because I engage in such writing. I've published (not on BUFFY but other shows -- though I'm contemplating a paper on the similarities of Xena and Angel, who I think she resembles much more than Buffy) academic pieces on television and am currently working on a book on the rise of heroic women characters on television. Why? Because I'm "stuck in a continuous loop of BUFFY watching?" Well, no. I haven't in fact watched a single episode of BUFFY in two years and perhaps three. But because I am endlessly fascinated with how the portrayal of strong women on television has helped change the way our society thinks about the fundamental feminine virtues. As a single dad I was struck raising my daughter how passionately she reached out for characters she could identify with. For instance, after taking her to her first ever film in a theater, Disney's PETER PAN, she thought that Wendy was the hero of the film. But finding strong female characters for her was tough in the early nineties. There are just so many times you can watch THE JOURNEY OF NATTY GANN and WARRIORS OF THE WIND (the old gutted version of Miyazaki's NAUSICAA OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND--which bowdlerized or not, contained an endlessly resourceful female as the film's hero).

My point is that people have a wide range of reasons for doing the things they do and I'm pretty confident that they aren't what Allyson Beatrice imagines that they are. So, she projects and sloughs over the myriad reasons that people might write an academic paper on BUFFY. But you simply can't take the reasons why YOU might not be comfortable being the author of such a piece and imagine that it valid analyzing why someone else actually wrote it.

So, this genuinely terrible first chapter really hurt the tone for the rest of the book. I did manage to enjoy much of it. But I never came to love it. I do want to warn potential readers that there is virtually no discussion about any television shows. If you haven't actually seen BUFFY you won't get much of a sense about what it is about from the book. The subtitle is accurate: the book is about fans of shows, not the shows themselves. That isn't to say that there aren't a lot of fun facts about figures attached to these shows. I enjoyed reading about her friendship with Tim Minear, who has been involved with a huge number of shows I love (or might have loved, in the case of DRIVE and THE INSIDE, both killed off way, way too early for my taste). Had she just started off the book by not confusing her subjective reaction to the activity of others with the objective nature of things, I might have liked it a lot more.

18 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not Just for Vampire People, July 31, 2007

By 

K. Taylor (California) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Will the Vampire People Please Leave the Lobby? (True Adventures in Cult Fandom) (Paperback)

The title is clever and the cover is cute, but how relevant or entertaining could stories about "cult fandom" really be to the average reader?

Turns out, very.

Although the book is centered on Beatrice's life online as influenced by the cult classic Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this is not a fan book. In fact, you will find few references to the show itself beyond Beatrice's loving acknowledgment of how fun it was to watch and her gentle puzzlement about the level of fanaticism some people still have for it.

The first chapter explores the author's relationship with the Jossverse, but -- far more importantly -- explains how Buffy and other Jossverse shows brought a group of people together online that became a close-knit community capable of enormous generosity and random acts of kindness. Some chapters explore nuances of life online (such as how communities deal with 'trolls' or with imposters posting about fictional personal tragedy in order to garner attention), and other chapters focus squarely on the specific people who have become Beatrice's family. Especially touching are the chapters about a wedding between two of Beatrice's friends when gay marriage was briefly legal in California and the chapter about how one online community along with writer Tim Minear fully funded a cross-country visit to America for a beloved Israeli member. Other chapters explore the oddities of Beatrice's involvement in this particular fandom, including how she was tasked with finding a home for Joss Whedon's cat and how she ended up running a campaign to save a Jossverse show that she didn't particularly like.

Also notable is the incisive chapter "The Internet Wants Your Daughters" about the myth that everyone online is an axe-murderer or a pedophile. Without dismissing the fact that real dangers can lurk on the Internet, Beatrice explodes these myths and offers real, practical advice about how parents can protect their children without overreacting. It is one of the most honest essays about kids and the Internet out there.

Vampire People is bitingly funny and unexpectedly touching. I blew through the book in three hours and wanted more. Pick up a copy this summer -- I promise you'll find something to laugh at and something to relate to even if you would never dream of talking vampires with strangers.