These outrageous comedies peep us into the world of the beautiful, the gifted, the manic vampires. We'll see them shining in all their sartorial splendor, despite their shredded hearts beating twice as fast as ours, their comic passions that can never be fulfilled.
The characters in O'Neill's comedies are humans, who for a time became insanely fashionable, charmers whom you'd follow into battle, stars whose face alone dropped you to your knees. Servers carried them triple chocolate cake and café au lait pralines, and swore they knew them. Movies stole them from their families, not knowing they were part of an endangered species.
The ancestral dead compel O'Neill, a native of New Orleans and sometime resident of Paris. These cold, yet passionate harvesters of sorrow, particularly the mystical half-living of New Orleans, populate her comedies. They try not to die, seeking justice but scaring others as they get it, luring the naïve in the streets of New Orleans to the chambers of hell.
Some say O'Neill's undead have 5 layers of teeth; when one falls out, another replaces it, and the teeth are constantly growing. Cemeteries and suicide oak trees are the veins of bloated graveyards. Daily death tours whisper of Vampires, Voodoo Queens, and macabre ghosts.
Vampires, to O'Neill, are the devil, the fallen angel, the pride-filled man. To her, there is something virulent, violent, aggressive, and simultaneously hilarious about them. In her stories, the heroine or hero must confront unbelievable evil (slay the dragon, if you will) to make some shift in character, to find love. O'Neill adores fairytales, happy endings, farces, and bigger-than-life, beautiful, brave characters. She likes to chuckle and scream with hilarity and that's why she writes about vampires.
You can't live in New Orleans without feeling the grief and humor in the city's huge out-flung oak trees, flooding rains that gouge neighborhoods and turn cemeteries into lakes, transform streets into gullies of dirt. Her vampires, like alligators, pop up from nowhere in Louisiana swamps. In her comedies, you will laugh and scream as you come to see the peril and the brevity of life. And the vampires will get you, if you don't watch out.