# The Inversion of Good & Evil in Vampire Stories

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Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/a-ghost-in-the-machine-by-daniel-d-5588479/the-inversion-of-good-evil-in-vampire-stories.md
Podcast: [A Ghost in the Machine by Daniel D](https://stenobird.com/podcast/a-ghost-in-the-machine-by-daniel-d-5588479)
Published: 2025-06-03T09:15:00+00:00
Episode link: https://aghostinthemachine.substack.com/p/the-inversion-of-good-and-evil-in
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/164974017/241355a1b81c8833b537fdb73ddd950f.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/a-ghost-in-the-machine-by-daniel-d-5588479/episodes/the-inversion-of-good-evil-in-vampire-stories
Duration seconds: 3432

## Resource

Welcome back to another episode of the regular A Ghost in the Machine Podcast . As many of you already know, I’ve started doing a separate podcast series called “ Paging the Everlasting Man ,” in which I read chapters of G. K. Chesterton books, starting with Heretics , and give some commentary after each reading. If you like Chesterton, check it out. While not reading Chesterton, I have I recently read (or rather, listened to the audio books of) a couple of vampire novels: The Delicate Dependency , by Michael Talbot (who also wrote The Holographic Universe ), and Dracula by Bram Stoker. I figured Talbot would infuse the story with esoteric symbolism, and he delivered on that expectation in some interesting ways. For better or worse, it is a thoroughly Gnostic-ish novel, but while I am sympathetic to some aspects of the Gnostic perspective, I have noticed that Gnosticism has a dark side: it has a disturbingly high correlation with LGBT-adjacent perversions and inversions. (Speaking of, I guess it’s Pride-Goeth-Before-the-Fall-Month now.) Case in point, the Wachowski sisters, formerly known as the Wachowski brothers, directors of that most explicitly Gnostic-themed movie of them all, The Matrix . While I think you can certainly adopt a Gnostic perspective without becoming a tranny or a fruitcake, the correlation is nonetheless there. And although there is nothing explicitly gay about The Delicate Dependency , there are definitely gay-ish overtones, with male vampires being depicted as youthful in appearance, physically attractive, and androgynous — something that appears to have become the norm in contemporary vampire literature (because what could possibly be more romantically appealing than a parasitic entity that drinks blood and avoids sunlight?). There’s a spirit be…

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## Transcript

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