A Vampire a Day: The Shiny Narrow Grin by Jane Gaskell

Jane Gaskell wrote her first novel, Strange Evil, when she was 14.  Nobody had ever seen anything like it. (You can still find copies around. Here it is on Amazon with illustrations by Boris Vallejo.) China Mieville has called the book the first example of "new weird," a genre he now owns. Gaskell worked as a journalist for a while, and continued to write fiction until 1990. According to Wikipedia, she is now a professional astrologer.

The Shiny Narrow Grin is Gaskell's vampire novel and it is soooooo 60s pubished in 1964). I have a friend, born in the 70s, who is fascinated by everything Swinging Sixties, and this is one of her favorite books. The Shiny Narrow Grin .  the book is almost impossible to find. But strangely, it's up at Wattpad. (Read it here.)

May Flowers....Tanith Lee's Blood of Roses

My first introduction to the writing of Tanith Lee was a double-novella compilation (Sometimes After Sunset) I got from the Science Fiction book club. (I loved mail orderbook clubs, especially those that would let you get 12 free books for joining.) The two novellas were Sabella, or the blood stone, a vampire tale, and the other was Kill the Dead.

I loved Tanith Lee's writing from the very start, her lush prose and gorgeous imagery just spoke to me and I embarked on a binge of Lee-reading, hoovering through the local library's collection of DAW paperbacks and then haunting used bookstores for copies of other books. Lee's a prolific writer but I still managed to catch up to her pretty quickly, and I've tracked her work ever since. I'm pretty sure I've read almost everything she's written in the last 20 years. Everything, that is, except for Blood of Roses.

Blood of Roses is another vampire novel and it is almost as hard to find as Jane Gaskell's legendary vampire novel Shiny Narrow Grin. Amazon sells used copies beginning at $30 and new copies for $88 and although I love me some Tanith, that's just a bit out of my price range right now. (Used to be I wouldn't think twice about dropping twice that much in a bookstore but these days I'm full-time freelance and $30 is a tank of gas, or a couple of printer cartridges or some other "mission-critical" item and I just can't justify spending that these days. So it's on the wish list for the days when my KDP royalties become more significant than they are now. Has anyone read it?  I'd love to know what you think.