The Orange Eats Creeps (5 pts): Are These People Really Vampires?

 I have never done drugs in all my 20 years of living, but reading The Orange Eats Creeps and attempting to piece together a coherent timeline, as well as figuring out just what is going on in most of the scenes, really made me feel like I was tripping for 168 pages. Some aspects of the novel were made clear, such as the protagonist being a 17-year old girl "vampire", she was in the foster home system for a while before running away and joining a group of older boy "vampires", and the setting throughout the entire novel is Oregon. Everything else, however, left me with so many questions. What's the plot of this novel? Is there even a plot? Who's speaking at this moment, because that doesn't sound like our protagonist's cynical tone and observations? Is this a flashback or sometime in the present? Timeline, plot, and narrators lost all coherence as I read through the novel, but even when I reached the end of the story, I still had one simple question- are the protagonist and her group of boys actually vampires?

It seems like a silly question at first. The protagonist describes herself and her group as "vampire hobo junkies" that don't age, and there are a few scenes that involve blood drinking in the beginning of the novel, but that's about it. There's no death by sunlight, capes or castles, there's just a group of "vampire" teens wandering around Oregon. I personally believe that the vampire aspect of these teens is more metaphorical than physical.

Vampirism can be seen not only as a physical transformation from human to immortal being, but also as a character trait. For example, someone who "sucks the life out of you" by being overly clingy or needy for attention. I think that the protagonist and her group of boys use their "vampirism" to consume culture and the world around them. They rob convenience stores with no regard for those behind the counter, they travel around Oregon with no destination in mind, leaving beer cans behind as their mark of having been in an area. The protagonist sleeps with many, many men without forming relationships with them, only using them to get a temporary feeling of satisfaction. Despite continuing to display this vampiric behavior, it does not seem to make the protagonist any happier about her life, which seems to be why she's an alcoholic and drug addict. The vampire lifestyle can only give one temporary fullness, before one needs to feed again.

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