Vampires: The Recent Undead (2 page)

Toward the end of the last century—sometime after the release of Laurell K. Hamilton’s fourth Anita Blake Vampire Hunter fantasy novel,
The Lunatic Cafe
(1996), perhaps during the second (1997-1998) or third (1998-1999) season of television series
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
, and just before the first of Christine Feehan’s romance
Dark Prince
, the first of her Dark series (1999)—vampires started getting “hot.”

The “good guy” vampire—usually sexy, often romantic, sometimes redeemed or redeemable, sometimes ever-heroic—started to dominate pop culture. So did sexy-but-empowered female vamps and kick-ass vampire hunters.

The frightening vamp was most definitely still around, however, and making an impact. A few examples: films
28 Days Later
(2002),
I Am Legend
(2007)
Van Helsing
(2004), and
30 Days of Night
(2009), based on the 2002 comic book mini-series written by Steve Niles and illustrated by Ben Templesmith. The novel
Fangland
by John Marks (2007) was an
homage
to Stoker-type scares.

The high literary metaphorical vampire (
The Historian
, Elizabeth Kostova, 2005) was still in our group psyche too, along with the viral/apocalyptic vamp (
The Passage
, Justin Cronin, 2010), the comedic vampire (
You Suck: A Love Story
, Christopher Moore, 2007), the science fictional/sociological vampire (
The Fledgling
, Octavia Butler, 2007), and just about every other variety—new or old.

But the popularity of paranormal romance and urban fantasy vampires soared and at least
seemed
to be the
numero uno
vampire of the decade. Numerous best-selling series featured vampires and then
Twilight
, a vampire fantasy/romance for teens by Stephenie Meyer was released in 2005. It and the other three books of Meyer’s saga were immensely popular, but the films based on the series propelled the romantic vampire hero to stratospheric levels of popularity. The
True Blood
TV series (based on Charlaine Harris’s novels) helped fuel the bloodlust.

What does all this mean? Pop culturists, scholars, pundits, various experts, and those who really have no idea but think they do will continue to weigh in. We’ll leave the analyses to them.

In practical terms, for short vampire fiction it has meant a boom in anthology opportunities for original urban and paranormal romance stories and, increasingly, for both types of fiction written for the young adult market. Vamps also crept into many urban fantasy, paranormal romance, supernatural mystery, and cross-genre original anthologies without a specifically fanged theme. Even funny vampires found their way into anthologies in the oughts.

There seem to have been fewer occasions, however, for writers with other vampiric ideas to show their talents. But new stories still found their way into periodicals, non-vamp anthologies, and compilations of reprinted stories that included a limited number of original stories. (See page 427 for a list of vampire anthologies published 2000-2010.)

The stories of
Vampires: The Recent Undead
were published from 2000 into early 2010. If you are an avid vampirist, you are sure to have come across some of them previously—this is, after all, a retrospective—but I think you’ll also make some new discoveries. You will certainly find a wide variety of vampire stories herein. It is so diverse, I’m fairly sure not every selection will please every reader. But that is to be expected. This first decade of the twenty-first century seems to have been marked by division more than cohesion. The world of 2011 is not the same as that of the year 2000, nor even the world of 2007. New threats and, consequently, new terrors have arisen. How we face those fears—or escape them—has a lot to do with our preferences in vampires.

Maybe we “needed” to embrace vampire heterogeneity in the past ten years.

As we enter a new decade, what kind of vampire will we embrace? Nancy Kilpatrick edited a 2010 anthology
Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead.
Its stories (none of which could appear here due to contractual necessity) may show a glimpse of the future of the vampire.
Evolve²: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead
is slated for this year. If you are looking for a glimpse of the Next Vampire, you might get some clues there.

Meanwhile I hope you enjoy exploring these examples of the myth of the vampire as written—so far—for the New Millennium.

Paula Guran
, January 2011

The Coldest Girl in Cold Town

Holly Black

I chose “The Coldest Girl in Coldtown” for
The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: 2010.
Since then I’ve come to feel even more strongly that it has the makings of a classic. Black’s irony-rich tale has more characterization, world building, social commentary, and emotion than many novels can manage with a dozen times as many words.

Black is a best-selling author of contemporary fantasy novels for teens and children. Her first book,
Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale
(2002) was included in the American Library Association’s Best Books for Young Adults. She has since written two other books in the same universe,
Valiant
(2005), and
Ironside
(2007).
Valiant
was a finalist for the Mythopoeic Award for Young Readers and the recipient of the Andre Norton Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature. Black collaborated with artist Tony DiTerlizzi, to create the Spiderwick Chronicles. The Spiderwick Chronicles were adapted into a film and released in February 2008. Black has co-edited three anthologies:
Geektastic
(with Cecil Castellucci, 2009),
Zombies vs. Unicorns
(with Justine Larbalestier, 2010), and
Bordertown
(with Ellen Kushner, 2011). Her first collection of short fiction,
The Poison Eaters and Other Stories
, came out in 2010. She has just finished the third book in her Eisner-nominated graphic novel series,
The Good Neighbors
, and is working on
Red Glove
, the second novel in
The Curse Workers
series, which will be released in April 2011.
White Cat
, the first in the series, was published in May 2010. The author lives in Massachusetts with her husband, Theo, in a house with a secret library.

Matilda was drunk, but then she was always drunk anymore. Dizzy drunk. Stumbling drunk. Stupid drunk. Whatever kind of drunk she could get.

The man she stood with snaked his hand around her back, warm fingers digging into her side as he pulled her closer. He and his friend with the open-necked shirt grinned down at her like underage equaled dumb, and dumb equaled gullible enough to sleep with them.

She thought they might just be right.

“You want to have a party back at my place?” the man asked. He’d told her his name was Mark, but his friend kept slipping up and calling him by a name that started with a D. Maybe Dan or Dave. They had been smuggling her drinks from the bar whenever they went outside to smoke—drinks mixed sickly sweet that dripped down her throat like candy.

“Sure,” she said, grinding her cigarette against the brick wall. She missed the hot ash in her hand, but concentrated on the alcoholic numbness turning her limbs to lead. Smiled. “Can we pick up more beer?”

They exchanged an obnoxious glance she pretended not to notice. The friend—he called himself Ben—looked at her glassy eyes and her cold-flushed cheeks. Her sloppy hair. He probably made guesses about a troubled home life. She hoped so.

“You’re not going to get sick on us?” he asked. Just out of the hot bar, beads of sweat had collected in the hollow of his throat. The skin shimmered with each swallow.

She shook her head to stop staring. “I’m barely tipsy,” she lied.

“I’ve got plenty of stuff back at my place,” said MarkDanDave.
Mardave
, Matilda thought and giggled.

“Buy me a 40,” she said. She knew it was stupid to go with them, but it was even stupider if she sobered up. “One of those wine coolers. They have them at the bodega on the corner. Otherwise, no party.”

Both of the guys laughed. She tried to laugh with them even though she knew she wasn’t included in the joke. She was the joke. The trashy little slut. The girl who can be bought for a big fat wine cooler and three cranberry-and-vodkas.

“Okay, okay,” said Mardave.

They walked down the street and she found herself leaning easily into the heat of their bodies, inhaling the sweat and iron scent. It would be easy for her to close her eyes and pretend Mardave was someone else, someone she wanted to be touched by, but she wouldn’t let herself soil her memories of Julian.

They passed by a store with flat-screens in the window, each one showing different channels. One streamed video from Coldtown—a girl who went by the name Demonia made some kind of deal with one of the stations to show what it was really like behind the gates. She filmed the Eternal Ball, a party that started in 1998 and had gone on ceaselessly ever since. In the background, girls and boys in rubber harnesses swung through the air. They stopped occasionally, opening what looked like a modded hospital tube stuck on the inside of their arms just below the crook of the elbow. They twisted a knob and spilled blood into little paper cups for the partygoers. A boy who looked to be about nine, wearing a string of glowing beads around his neck, gulped down the contents of one of the cups and then licked the paper with a tongue as red as his eyes. The camera angle changed suddenly, veering up, and the viewers saw the domed top of the hall, full of cracked windows through which you could glimpse the stars.

“I know where they are,” Mardave said. “I can see that building from my apartment.”

“Aren’t you scared of living so close to the vampires?” she asked, a small smile pulling at the corners of her mouth.

“We’ll protect you,” said Ben, smiling back at her.

“We should do what other countries do and blow those corpses sky high,” Mardave said.

Matilda bit her tongue not to point out that Europe’s vampire hunting led to the highest levels of infection in the world. So many of Belgium’s citizens were vampires that shops barely opened their doors until nightfall. The truce with Coldtown worked. Mostly.

She didn’t care if Mardave hated vampires. She hated them too.

When they got to the store, she waited outside to avoid getting carded and lit another cigarette with Julian’s silver lighter—the one she was going to give back to him in thirty-one days. Sitting down on the curb, she let the chill of the pavement deaden the backs of her thighs. Let it freeze her belly and frost her throat with ice that even liquor couldn’t melt.

Hunger turned her stomach. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten anything solid without throwing it back up. Her mouth hungered for dark, rich feasts; her skin felt tight, like a seed thirsting to bloom. All she could trust herself to eat was smoke.

When she was a little girl, vampires had been costumes for Halloween. They were the bad guys in movies, plastic fangs and polyester capes. They were Muppets on television, endlessly counting.

Now she was the one who was counting. Fifty-seven days. Eighty-eight days. Eighty-eight nights.

“Matilda?”

She looked up and saw Dante saunter up to her, earbuds dangling out of his ears like he needed a soundtrack for everything he did. He wore a pair of skintight jeans and smoked a cigarette out of one of those long, movie-star holders. He looked pretentious as hell. “I’d almost given up on finding you.”

“You should have started with the gutter,” she said, gesturing to the wet, clogged tide beneath her feet. “I take my gutter-dwelling very seriously.”

“
Seriously
.” He pointed at her with the cigarette holder. “Even your mother thinks you’re dead. Julian’s crying over you.”

Maltilda looked down and picked at the thread of her jeans. It hurt to think about Julian while waiting for Mardave and Ben. She was disgusted with herself, and she could only guess how disgusted he’d be. “I got Cold,” she said. “One of them bit me.”

Dante nodded his head.

That’s what they’d started calling it when the infection kicked in—Cold—because of how cold people’s skin became after they were bitten. And because of the way the poison in their veins caused them to crave heat and blood. One taste of human blood and the infection mutated. It killed the host and then raised it back up again, colder than before. Cold through and through, forever and ever.

“I didn’t think you’d be alive,” he said.

She hadn’t thought she’d make it this long either without giving in. But going it alone on the street was better than forcing her mother to choose between chaining her up in the basement or shipping her off to Coldtown. It was better, too, than taking the chance Matilda might get loose from the chains and attack people she loved. Stories like that were in the news all the time; almost as frequent as the ones about people who let vampires into their homes because they seemed so nice and clean-cut.

“Then what are you doing looking for me?” she asked. Dante had lived down the street from her family for years, but they didn’t hang out. She’d wave to him as she mowed the lawn while he loaded his panel van with DJ equipment. He shouldn’t have been here.

She looked back at the store window. Mardave and Ben were at the counter with a case of beer and her wine cooler. They were getting change from a clerk.

“I was hoping you, er,
wouldn’t
be alive,” Dante said. “You’d be more help if you were dead.”

She stood up, stumbling slightly. “Well, screw you too.”

It took eighty-eight days for the venom to sweat out a person’s pores. She only had thirty-seven to go. Thirty-seven days to stay so drunk that she could ignore the buzz in her head that made her want to bite, rend, devour.

“That came out wrong,” he said, taking a step toward her. Close enough that she felt the warmth of him radiating off him like licking tongues of flame. She shivered. Her veins sang with need.