A Vampire a Day: Daughters of Darkness: Victoria by W.J. May

There are a lot of vampire novels (or in this case, novellas) out there, and I realized I had about a bazillion of them on my Kindle. I decided to see how many I could read in a month. I'm aiming for one a day. Here's the first one.

This is a novella, which is exactly the bite-sized bit of story I was looking for today. I like the setup of the daughters of Vlad being scattered all over the place and so numerous that they don't necessarily know each other. That makes sense to me. After a couple of centuries, it would be easy to lose count of your progeny, particularly if you move around a lot.

The title character is a "hunter," and as the story opens, she's after a girl who's a witch. But complications ensue when she finds out that the witch is actually one of her (many) sisters. And then, it gets really complicated.

Victoria (or "Tori" as her hunting partners call her), is a tough chick in the obligatory skin-right black leather outfit. She doesn't have a lot of patience with humans or half-vampires who can't keep up. (But who does really?)

A lot of this feels like it's been filtered through the UNDERWORLD movie franchise (vampires versus werewolves), but that's not necessarily a bad thing.  I like adding the witch element, especially when we find out that the witch in question is untrained and having to "wing it" as her magic is activated with a heavy blood scent. I prticularly liked it when Tori corners her prey and the witchling's newborn powers seem to be fizzling out. Because you could see that happening!

Tori starts out with a little Katniss action (she's armed with a bow and arrow) and then switches to guns, but before the story's over, we get ultraviolet guns and gizmos. It's fun. The writer also gives us a sens eof a larger universe at work, with talk of "the Council."

Book Review Maps of the Edge by Ian Creasey

One of the writers I discovered during the 365 Day Challenge was Ian Creasey. Maps of the Edge is a collection of spec fic stories by Creasey published in 2011. (His novella, The Strawberry Thief, was published last October. I can't wait to read it.) Creasey identifies as a science fiction writer, but pigeonholing him into one genre really doesn't seem fair, especially after reading through this collection, which is a small sample of the more than 50-odd stories he's sold to magazines and anthologies.

The stories range over a wide spectrum of emotions. "Reality 2.0" is a hilarious riff on a new product from Microsoft, a re-imagination of math called "WonderNumbers" that takes all the hard work out of math, much to the dismay of mathematicians. "Now you can divide by zero" is the product's sales pitch for the software, which does away with a lot of inconvenient math concepts and formulae. "This is How it Feels" is a haunting story about loss and grief that describes the feeling as "a compost heap where rats endlessly gnaw over the scraps of your heart." 

"Cut Loose the Bonds of Flesh and Bone" is a story about a mother and a daughter that also touches on one of the core concepts and conceits of the collection, the persistence of personality in an electronic afterlife. Many of the stories are surrounded and shaped by conspiracy theories and there are references throughout to a Conspiracy Channel--the people who work there and some of the shows that appear. And who doesn't love a good conspiracy theory?

Creasey is not just a storyteller, he's an actual wordsmith--a term that's thrown around much too easily. (In the opening story, "Erosion," he describes clouds as looking like "celestial loft insulation" and the phrase is just perfect.)

You don't have to like science fiction to like Creasey's stories but if you do, you will love them.