Dancers In The Dark & Layla Steps Up: The Layla Collection by Charlaine Harris

Spoilers ahead, and with that please note the serious content warning: Harris’ novel contains direct discussion of sexual assault, intimate partner violence and sexual violence

The thing about Charlaine Harris, right, the thing about Charlaine Harris… is that she’s basically one of the all time greats, yet treated as some kind of off-piste nothing.

Charlaine Harris isn’t a poet, sure, and she doesn’t use language in ways that are unique and unexpected… (Then again, she sometimes does use language in ways that are uniquely silly, but that adds to the charm of her work, and I feel isn’t appropriate to mock affectionately here, because there’s no guarantee any mocking would be read with affection and the last thing, the absolute last thing, I’d ever want to do would be to write about Charlaine Harris in a way that could make anyone think I wasn’t 100 per cent behind her as a creative visionary…)

What Charlaine Harris does, and what she does in a way that is more effective, more competent and more undeniably fucking brilliant than hundreds, thousands, of far more acclaimed and canonical writers, is characterisation, in particular is writing people who are complex and suffering and – most of the time – not dickheads because of it.

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It’s easy to look at Harris’ work from a distance and dismiss it as derivative: derivative of folk traditions and mythologies and the genre work in her field that has come before her.

It’s easy, yes, to pull out clunky sentences or slightly sticky moments of description when she’s writing about the bodies of people who aren’t white and/or don’t speak like middle class Americans, but it’s the rough-around-the-edges elements that stop Harris’ work from being subsumed by the joyless, ungenerous, literati. Yes, Harris is more talented than many of the dweebs who win the Nobel Prize¹. No, she’s never going to get it.

Her work is “too much” for many people. Too silly, too sexy, too sad, too playful, too not-written-by-or-for elites, too imperfect…

She forgets slash doesn’t care when her narratives are set across her books, and that’s even more apparent here than in the many-volume Sookie Stackhouse series.

The two pieces in The Layla Collection were written/originally published decades apart, but are set with only a year in between. Technology and pop cultural references in each piece, though, match the publication year, rather than a consistent one-year-different timescale. If you care deeply about things like this, Charlaine Harris is not for you. And you’d be massively losing out.

Because what is always perfect, what always works, is Harris’ characterisation.

The first (and longer) piece here, a novella called Dancers In The Dark, is about a young human dancer and former beauty queen who joins a troupe of human-vampire dancers, who perform specialised dances where the vampire bites and drinks from the human as a finale.

Obviously, Layla ends up fucking the vampire she dances with, while Harris unravels a deep past trauma of hers: she was sexually assaulted by the richest boy in her hometown as a teenager, the boy whose dad owned the biggest employer in the town, and he then assaulted her a second time to perform an amateur abortion and hysterectomy when he found out he had got her pregnant. The story was hushed up, the boy sent to rehab instead of prison, and Layla hounded out of town and blamed for her own attack (the first one for sure, the second one also to some extent).

With the vampire-human dance troupe and her vampire boyfriend, she begins to rebuild confidence and self-hood and comfort in her own scarred body. And then – because he wasn’t sent to prison but instead to rehab – the violent rapist from her hometown is released and immediately sets out to chase her down and kill her, which he basically manages to do, with the vampire boyfriend from the dance troupe turning Layla into a vampire instead of letting her bleed out on the floor of the big museum where she was performing.

In Layla Steps Up, the second story, Layla has been a vampire for a year (though, as I mentioned, the technology available to her and her friends has changed by about 20) and is getting mocked by other vampires for being a weak vampire, too reliant on her “maker”. In the end, though (as per the title), Layla does indeed “Step Up”, when a kinky demon kidnaps her vampire boyfriend for sex he doesn’t want to have.

It’s a bit different in tone, but still, too, about control and abuse and violence and cruelty. It’s efficient, dark, serious fiction that plays with the conventions of vampire narratives and manages to make something new. There is less “play” in these two stories than in the Sookie Stackhouse novels, but Harris loses little in stepping up, slightly, the overall darkness of her vampiric world…

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I was reading this book – and read the whole thing – in a single setting on a beautiful, 30 degree beach day, looking out over the Atlantic, at a latitude where the water is actually pleasant to be in.

As I read, the sun began to set, the beach began to clear of other people as the cocktail hour began and my partner asked me to start packing up. But I only had ten pages left, and I had to finish. “She’s stepping up!” I stated, through tears in my eyes, “she’s stepping up!”

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Harris writes texts that seem overblown, glossy, hyper-emotional, perhaps, but to dismiss them as sentimental or saccharine or cloying or melodramatic is to miss the point.

One doesn’t care about Harris’ characters because of what happens to them, in spite of their flatness, one cares about them because of their depth, in spite of the often melodramatic, overblown things that happen to them.

Being turned into a vampire is treated with the same emotional weight as being the victim of violent sexualised assaults.

Being abandoned by ones family due to their kowtowing to their employer is treated with as much heft as being told you’re a bad vampire for not killing people yet…

Harris treats the things that matter to her characters with the weight the characters treat it, and though it’s often difficult to summarise the stories she tells without making them sound like potential failures, that simply just isn’t how they land.

Her stories, her work, is rich and serious, often treating things that aren’t rich or serious with seriousness, yet it works.

What Harris can do is something few writers can, or choose to, or think is worth doing: she creates people who fully function within their own fictional world, with the details of their lives as individually meaningful to them as a real person’s.

These aren’t stories that sideline the mundane in order to focus on the salubrious, Harris’ stories are detailed and rich and full of important, grounding, detail, making wide and serious and complex individuals, even in the face of absurd or overblown fantasy world-building.

She’s a fucking powerhouse, who deserves more attention than she gets.

Though, to be fair, I’ve never met anyone who’s actually read her once who hasn’t chosen to read her again. Addictive, sure, but as with most (not all) addictive things, they’re only dangerous if you give up everything else in your life in the pursuit of them.

Charlaine Harris is one of the greatest living American writers. More more more please.

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1. They’re not all dweebs, of course. ↩︎