If you’ve ever sat around wondering, “How could I possibly make Dutch people scary?” … Well, that makes two of us. A few years ago, I cooked up a short story based on that very idea, and you can read it in the new issue of Speculative City today.
“An American Vampire in Amsterdam” doesn’t quite hold the record for my “most almost-published” story; that title still sits with “The Apology,” which, among other things, was accepted by two different magazines that ceased publication before it could see print, before it finally landed in the disabled and neurodivergent people’s special issue of Shoreline of Infinity. Nevertheless, this one definitely did have a winding road to walk on the journey between my brain and your eyes. The folks over at Speculative City really put in the effort to get it (and this whole issue) out the door, for which I’m grateful. Maybe you’ll be too, after a read.
I lived in The Netherlands only briefly, way back in 2005, and I was out in the countryside, not Amsterdam. I had long weekends, though, and saw quite a bit of the cities and the countryside alike. The speakeasy where the opening scene takes place is based on my favorite thing I did in Amsterdam, courtesy of a Dutch friend who never asked me a single pointed question about cannibalism. I remember being terribly proud of myself for finding my way into that flavorful little adventure while all the other American 20-year-olds I knew were off doing cliché American 20-year-old Amsterdam stuff. I have less judgment towards them now – there’s nothing wrong with being young and stupid, even if it is a little embarrassing – but I still relish the authentic and the unexpected, especially in my travels.
This was before I knew I had any Dutch relatives. We didn’t learn about that until 2012 or so, when the details came out about a branch of the family whom we previously understood to all have died in the holocaust. The family’s kids, it turned out, had been taken in by white neighbors and passed off as theirs. This little hiccup in the story led to the fact that apparently, while I was looking at VerMeer’s “Het meisje met de parel” (Girl with a Pearl Earring) in the Mauritshuis museum in the Hague, my cousin was just down the street sitting on the Supreme Court of the Netherlands and both of us were none the wiser.
So, as with most of what I write, there’s quite a few stories behind the story you’re reading. I’d sum up The Netherlands as “18 million very nice people, in a country with a very not-nice history.” If you’d like me to boil down the inspiration for “An American Vampire in Amsterdam” into a single sentence, that would be the one. I don’t really understand why this happened; my experience with global imperialist powers (past or present) is typically that they’re either full of people who pretend to be nice but are actually incredible dickheads (like America and Britain) or just dickheads without the pretense (like France or Russia). Dutch people are nice and, as far as I can tell, not pretending. I don’t know, man. Maybe it’s because the food it’s so bad (I mean SO bad, worse than British food) that they need the niceness to lure in people who know what flavor is. If so, it’s working.
What can I say, though? A vampire is a vampire. I don’t care how nice they are.