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Susan Sontag, in her seminal essay "Notes on 'Camp'" (1964), described this aesthetic as a "love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration" (275). Rooted in hyperbole, excess and attenuation, "Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp, but a 'lamp'; not a woman, but a 'woman'" (280). Decades before widespread discussions about the performativity inherent in identity, Sontag identified both the dramatic and the artifice that are central to this style: "To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-asPlaying-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater" (280). For this reason, camp possesses what Sontag calls a "failed seriousness" (287), and this trait results in "gestures full of duplicity, with a witty meaning for cognoscenti and another, more impersonal, for outsiders" (281). Highlighting the parody and self-referentiality inherent in camp, she explains that "Behind the 'straight' public sense in which something can be taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing" (281).
Given camp's interest in visual and verbal double entendre, as well as its use of a sophisticated set of wink-and-nod codes, this aesthetic mode may seem to have little to do with the allegedly innocent and uncomplicated realm of childhood. However, as figures like Kerry Mallan, Roderick McGillis, and Freya Johnson have demonstrated, camp has long been a central facet of children's print, visual, and popular culture. For example, "re-readings of such canonical texts as . . . Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows can find a camp sensibility at work" (Mallan and McGillis 10). Meanwhile, contemporary authors like Lemony Snicket and Edward Gorey employ the doubleness, self-referentiality and blurring of boundaries that are hallmarks of this mode.
In March 2009, prolific avant-garde author Carlton Mellick III added to the ongoing tradition of campiness in children's culture when he released his latest book, The Faggiest Vampire: A Children's Story. An illustrated narrative that combines the conventions of the fairy tale with those of gothic horror, the story chronicles the experiences of protagonist Dargoth Van Gloomfang-or, as he is more commonly known, "the faggiest vampire." As the blurb on the back cover announces, "The citizenry of Broodsarrow sure has its share of faggy vampires, but old Dargoth has...