Undead Poets Society members exorcise their various personal demons by reading . . . : Verse With a Bite

Meg Reed flaunts her black-lacquered fingernails and spiked black hair. She wears a long white dress trimmed in lace, with a slash of blood-red lipstick across her mouth. When she smiles, two very real-looking vampire fangs glisten.

On this night, she has brought a group of similarly dressed friends in a production she calls the Vampire Poetry Series to Ipso Facto, a small Fullerton clothing store and art gallery squeezed between a tattoo parlor and Taco Bell.

Tony Lestat takes the microphone and reads from his work, “Guttersnipe.”

Then the creatures of the night shall drink A toast in crimson gore!

The standing-room-only crowd of young artists and intellectuals offers rapt attention and generous applause to the collection of poets who make up the Undead Poets Society, a high-spirited organization that celebrates the writing and performance of horror literature. Through its literary journal “Rouge et Noir, les poems des Vampires,” the group provides a safe, creative milieu where artists, writers and the public can confront the dark side lurking in every human psyche.

The vampire series is making the rounds of Southern California coffeehouses, art galleries and bookstores this Halloween season. The events draw on a pool of nine poets who rotate throughout the various venues--part of the burgeoning Southern California poetry scene. The last vampire event will be at Fahrenheit 451 in Laguna Beach on Sunday from 7 to 9 p.m.

Although the series is all in fun (the flyer for the readings is splashed with fake blood and advises “Dress to Kill”) a few years ago Reed could barely smile, much less joke about vampires. She was suffering from deep suicidal depression because of a death in her family and her concern about national and global problems such as the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

Her psychiatrist suggested that she look for a creative way to express her dark thoughts. She dreamed up the Undead Poets Society. The project, she says, helped her regain mental health and perspective on her life.

“Life has its terrors,” she says. “Putting some of them out in costume, with a sense of celebration, helps to exorcise them. It allows you to confront the bogyman in the closet, the monster under the bed.”

She credits her project with helping to restore her mental health and putting her life in perspective.

“It has kept me from doing anything suicidal,” she says. “When you face the real horror of depression, none of this seems so horrible.”

Dr. Allen Koehn, executive administrator of the C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles, a training center for psychotherapists, says it is important to release dark thoughts that come from what he calls the shadow side of the self. “The biggest danger is to deny it altogether,” he says. “Any creative expression is a way to give voice to that kind of thing.”

This year marks the second anniversary of the Vampire Poetry Reading Series. Months before the event, Reed solicits vampire poems and performers with flyers placed around Southern California bookstores, record stores, nightclubs and boutiques. This year, “the response was overwhelming,” says Reed, an elementary school teacher who lives in Long Beach.

Along with her co-editor, Chad Hensley, Reed selects poems for “Rouge et Noir” from the piles of submissions she receives. Hensley, a computer analyst in the aerospace industry, is a poet and fiction writer published in small-press horror magazines with titles such as “Death Realm” and “Psycho.”

Undead poet Denise Dumars’ poetry, horror, science fiction and fantasy writing also appears in literary journals throughout the country. She creates frightening images in her work, such as these in her prose poem “The Coming of the Heat and the End of Death:”

Then the ringing of a pair

Of boots

Filled the street, hard and

leathern

Approaching the castle. Then the

Beating of

Two wings frantic and obdurate

Filled silent

Castle corridors. With this

madman came the

Heat and the end of death .

Scary writing is actually pleasurable to Dumars. “I like make-believe monsters because they’re not real, and they help me forget the real horrors of everyday life,” she says.

Dumars says horror writing also illuminates larger social issues. “Horror makes a point about the way we live now and the way we will live in the future,” she says. “After all, all those ‘50s horror and science fiction films about giant, radioactive monsters were making a point about society’s fear of the atom bomb.

“Today’s horror films about characters like Freddie Krueger and Jason, who are murderers, are about our society’s fear of crime,” she adds. “Writing about such things helps us cope with our fears and helps us decide what to do about the monumental problems our society faces.”

Dumars’ work is inspired by a rich literary history of horror writing. Her influences include Edgar Allan Poe as well as the elements of horror in poets Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and William Butler Yeats.

Like Dumars, undead poet Marguerite Garner is at home with literary talk. She performs at Ipso Facto, dressed in a long black gown she calls “vampiric Emily Dickinson,” and easily quotes from Shakespeare in casual conversation.

Garner, who is studying for a master’s degree in anthropology at Cal State Fullerton, performs ethnic dances professionally. She approaches the microphone with dramatic flair, hooded in yards of black fabric, to read dark lines like these from her poem, “Pain:”

The shadow hounds

Are running in our blood .