Vampires: The Recent Undead

VAMPIRES:
The Recent Undead

Edited by
Paula Guran

To Chelsea Quinn Yarbro:

A woman to whom many who write (or read) vampire fiction owe more than they may realize.

Copyright © 2011 by Paula Guran.

Cover art by Szabo Balaz.

Cover design by Stephen H. Segal.

Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

ISBN: 978-1-60701-298-6 (ebook)

ISBN: 978-1-60701-254-2 (trade paperback)

All stories are copyrighted to their respective authors,and used here with their permission.

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Contents

Introduction
by Paula Guran

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
by Holly Black

This Is Now
by Michael Marshall Smith

Sisters
by Charles de Lint

The Screaming
by J.A. Konrath

Zen and the Art of Vampirism
by Kelley Armstrong

La Vampiresse
by Tanith Lee

Dead Man Stalking
by Rachel Caine

The Ghost of Leadville
by Jeanne C. Stein

Waste Land
by Stephen Dedman

Gentleman of the Old School
by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

No Matter Where You Go
by Tanya Huff

Outfangthief
by Conrad Williams

Dancing with the Star
by Susan Sizemore

A Trick of the Dark
by Tina Rath

When Gretchen was Human
by Mary Turzillo

Conquistador de la Noche
by Carrie Vaughn

Endless Night
by Barbara Roden

Dahlia Underground
by Charlaine Harris

The Belated Burial
by Caitlín R. Kiernan

Twilight States
by Albert Cowdrey

To the Moment
by Nisi Shawl

Castle in the Desert: Anno Dracula 1977
by Kim Newman

Vampires in the Lemon Grove
by Karen Russell

Vampires Anonymous
by Nancy Kilpatrick

The Wide, Carnivorous Sky
by John Langan

Selected Vampire Anthologies: 2000-2010

Publication History

About the Editor

Introduction

“ . . . every age embraces the vampire it needs.”

—Nina Auerbach

The year 2010 may have marked a new high point in the popularity of the vampire. Although Stephenie Myer’s Twilight series (books and film), Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mystery series and its HBO incarnation as
True Blood
, and the
Vampire Diaries
television series (based on L.J. Smith’s young adult series of the same name from the nineties) all began earlier in the decade, their popularity hit blood-fever pitch in 2010. Films like
Daybreakers
and
Let Me In
(the American remake of Swedish film
Let the Right One In
based on John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel
Låt den rätte komma
) also made an impact. In the UK, even
Doctor Who
featured vampire-like creatures in an episode titled “Vampires in Venice.” The Brits also enjoyed the second
Being Human
series—featuring a vampire living with a ghost and a werewolf—on BBC Three.

As for vampire fiction not (yet) on TV or film, it ranged from the “literary horror” of
The Passage
by Justin Cronin to a bevy of best-selling urban fantasy and paranormal romance titles and series for both adult and young adult readers, There were children’s books as well (including
Dick and Jane and Vampires
). The final two books of Gail Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate trilogy featured a “Victorian vampire slayer” while Seth Grahame-Smith mashed up the Great Emancipator with fangsters in
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

Vampires were inescapable.

Hundreds of thousands of words have been written about vampires, our fascination with them, and their meaning and place in our culture. If you want in-depth information, either scholarly or written for popular consumption, there’s plenty available. The focus of this anthology is short vampire fiction published 2000-2010, but let’s take a quick sip of the bloody background for context.

The idea of the vampire has probably been around since humanity first began to ponder death. In Western culture the vampire has been a pervasive icon for more than two centuries now, but the image of the vampire as something other than a disgusting reanimated corpse was profoundly reshaped in the early nineteenth century by a group of British aristocrats.

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Percy Shelley, Matthew Lewis, Lord Byron, and Byron’s physician, Dr. John Polidori, decided to amuse themselves one damp summer 1816 evening in a villa on Lake Geneva by writing ghost stories. Mary Godwin (who later married Shelley) created a modern myth (and science fiction) with
Frankenstein, or Prometheus Unbound
. Polidori picked up a fragment written by Byron and produced a story based on it: “The Vampyre.” It featured Lord Ruthven, a seductive refined noble as well as a blood-sucking monster who preyed on others. The character was obviously based on the already notorious Byron himself.

“The Vampyre” became wildly popular, particularly in Germany and France. The theatres of Paris were filled by the early 1820s with vampire-themed plays. Some of these returned to England in translated form.

As Brian Stableford has written, “ The Vampyre” was the “most widely read vampire story of its era . . . To say that it was influential is something of an understatement; there was probably no one in England or France who attempted to write a vampire story in the nineteenth century who was not familiar with it, one way or another.” Poldori’s story was certainly the inspiration for the serialized “penny dreadful”
Varney the Vampire or, The Feast of Blood
(1845-47) by (most likely) James Malcolm Rhymer.
Varney
appealed to the masses, but was of even less literary merit than the short story to which it owed so much.

It took Sheridan le Fanu to craft a true literary gem with his novella “Carmilla,” published in 1872. The tale of a lonely girl and a beautiful aristocratic female vampire in an isolated castle also brought steamy (albeit lesbian) sexuality into the vampire mythos.

But it was Bram Stoker’s novel
Dracula
(1897) that became the basis of modern vampire lore: Dracula was a vampire “king” of indefinite lifespan who could not be seen in mirrors, had an affinity to bats and aversions to crucifixes and garlic. He had superhuman strength, could shapeshift and control human minds. Stoker’s vampires needed their native soil and the best way to kill one was with a stake through the heart followed by decapitation. There were humans who, like Abraham Van Helsing, hunted vampires . . . etc.

Not that Stoker’s Count Dracula was originally all that he came to be. Stoker described him as a tall old man with “a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere.” The Count’s “eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose” and there were hairs in the center of his palms. He also had bad breath.

True cultural permeation—and refinement of the Dracula archetype—came through later stage and screen adaptations. The silent film
Nosferau
(1922), for instance, took Dracula’s nocturnal nature and turned it into the inability to survive sunlight. Bela Lugosi’s portrayal (first on stage then, in 1931, on screen) of a suave foreign aristocrat in evening attire who seduced beautiful young women and slept in a coffin had much to do with the popular image of the count.

Various vampiric attributes and powers were added or subtracted in films and short stories in the decades thereafter. (Along with other innovations, Christopher Lee’s Dracula “showed fang” for the first time in 1958.) But although the vampire thrived in those two media, no truly notable vampire novels were published until 1954 when Richard Matheson contributed the idea of vampirism as an infectious disease with apocalyptic consequence in his novel
I Am Legend.

Other novels from the 1960s also added embellishments to the icon, but in the 1970s the image of the vampire changed radically. Fred Saberhagen’s
The Dracula Tape
(1975) presented a sympathetic Dracula telling his own story. Stephen King downplayed vampiric eroticism, upped the level of terror, and focused on the vampire as a metaphor of corrupt power in his 1975 vampire novel
’Salem’s Lot
(1975). Anne Rice introduced a vampire with a conscience who needed others of his kind, in
Interview With the Vampire
(1976). King and Rice brought the vampire fully into the cultural mainstream.

Less well-known to the public, but highly influential, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro began her series featuring the first truly romantic and heroic vampire, the Count Saint-Germain, with
Hôtel Transylvania
in 1978.

Meanwhile, millions had watched Jonathan Frid portray Barnabas Collins on television’s Gothic soap opera
Dark Shadows
(1966-1971) as he transformed from an evil villain to a vampire seeking redemption and his long-lost love. Dracula was again portrayed (beginning in 1977 on Broadway and followed by a 1979 film) by Frank Langella, who de-emphasized the violence and stressed the supremely seductive.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s vampires came in all varieties in literature and other media: traditional monsters, heroes, detectives, aliens, rock stars, psychic predators, loners, tribal, erotic, sexless, violent, placed in alternate histories, present in contemporary settings . . . the vampire became a malleable metaphor of great diversity in many forms, even—first in Lori Herter’s
Obsession
(1991)—in the romance marketing category. A number of notable vampire novels were published in the eighties and nineties, but Anne Rice continued to make the firmest impression on the masses as the best-selling queen of vampire novelists. The vampire also became graphically sexual in the mid-nineties as well.

The 1990s also saw a number of vampire-themed anthologies of original stories and, consequently, more opportunities for short form vampire fiction. Among these were Ellen Datlow’s
Blood Is Not Enough: 17 Stories of Vampirism
(1990) and
A Whisper of Blood
(1995);
Love In Vein: 20 Original Tales of Vampire Erotica
(1994) and
Love In Vein II: 18 More Tales of Vampiric Erotica
(1997) edited by Poppy Z. Brite and Martin H. Greenberg; and
100 Vicious Little Vampire Stories
(1995) edited by Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg. Marking the centenary of the publication of
Dracula
, the mostly original
The Mammoth Book of Dracula: Vampire Tales for the New Millennium
, edited by Stephen Jones, was published in 1997. For the very adult there were highly eroticized vampires in anthologies like
Love Bites
(1994), edited by “Amarantha Knight” (aka Nancy Kilpatrick). For younger readers there was
Vampires: A Collection of Original Stories
(1991) edited by Jane Yolen and Martin H. Greenberg (1991). Genre magazines and anthologies provided other venues for short vampire fiction, even if they had no specific connection to the icon.