A Vampire a Day: Of Saints and Shadows By Christopher Golden

I'm a fan of Christopher Golden's. I've mentioned that I'm an admirer of the illustrated novel Baltimore, which he wrote, and his Joe Golem: Occult Detective series is wildly entertaining and I love the world it's set in--a mostly drowned New York where the poor people live in the watery areas and the rich live uptown. I didn't know that there are actually multiple volumes of Baltimore, so hooray for that. (Here is a list of his books, if like me,  you don'thow many books he has for you to discover and enjoy.)
I love that Golden writes in multiple genres, and for teens as well as adults. I love that he writes video games and comic books as well as novels. (Is he the ultimate geek or what?  I'd love to run across him at #SDCC some time.) He's also very open to fans approaching him on his Facebook page and from his posts, he seems like a really decent guy.
I found Of Saints and Shadows in a used bookstore, captured by the cover, which uses familiar vampire tropes (crosses, daggers that look like fangs, red backdrops) in a way that seemed elegant and decadent and interesting.
I didn't know at the time that it was the first in a series--I'm not sure it WAS meant to be the first in the serie (it was published nearly 20 years ago), but it was urban fantasy of the first order. I LOVED his protagonist, Peter Octavian.
This novel has pretty much everything I crave. Golden has created a really rich world and mythos for his vampires (who lust after the "blood song") and the backdrop of the Venice carnival is particularly gorgeous. (Why should all the vampire stories be set in Paris?)
You will REALLY like this one and there are half a dozen sequels in the series to enjoy after this one.

A Vampire a Day: Anno Dracula by Kim Newman

In an alternate Victorian England, a vampire woman and the human man she comes to love investigate Jack the Ripper, who is killing vampire prostitutes.

Newman’s novel is very ambitious.  In addition to giving the Jack the Ripper tale a new spin—and who doesn’t like Jack the Ripper stories?—the book turns history on its ear, adding a potent element  by adding a vampire police state storyline  that results in anti-vampire riots and other conflicts and clashes.  Readers may be reminded of the graphic novels of Alan Moore, which include both V FOR VENDETTA and FROM HELL, also a Jack the Ripper tale. 

There is also the relationship between Charles and Genevieve, which has more nuance than the usual human/vampire interaction and is a lot more grown-up.  The characters here—and there are a LOT of them—vary in stages of development but a lot of them are really fine.  It’s not necessary to know that one character is real and another fictional in order to enjoy the story.  What we get is a feel for the inhabited world, a Dickensian abundance of people (and vampires) who overflow the pages and seem real.

A vampire a day: Baltimore by Michael Mignola and Christopher Golden

This illustrated novel is collaboration between Michael Mignola, who created Hellboy and Bram Stoker Award-winning novelist Christopher Golden.  The result is a stylish dark fantasy with enough literary trappings to entice readers who wouldn’t ordinarily be caught dead (undead?) reading a graphic novel.  It’s a character study featuring four distinctly different men with experience in the paranormal, all of whom have unique stories to tell.

We are in an unnamed European city, sometime during the years of Great War.  The battles still rage, but a plague born of vampire blood breath is abroad and inside the City, everything is dead.  In fact, the plague has reduced the war to a mere sideshow, fought only by those who cannot admit that it no longer matters. 

The men, who are strangers to one another, have been summoned by Captain (Lord) Henry Baltimore, whose friendship they have in common.  They arrive at their destination—a deserted inn—before Baltimore and pass the time by exchanging tales of horror.   

Heart of Darkness, the classic Joseph Conrad novella, begins with people telling stories too, and I doubt that's an accident. There are all sorts of "references" in this story, which is rich and layered. 

Two People You Wouldn't Expect to Have Written Vampire Novels/Stories

One of the least-known works by Theodore Sturgeon, the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning science fiction writer, is his short horror novel Some of Your Blood. Like Dracula, it's told in epistolary form, but it's more like Twelve O'Clock High in subject matter. The story is gritty and unsupernatural, and well worth checking out.

Neil Gaiman's short story "Snow, Glass, Aples" is a dark retelling of Snow White in which the stepmother is not the villain(ess). It's unlike much of his work and makes you long for more twisted fairy tales from his unique perspective. If you want to buy it stand-alone, it can be yours for a little under two thousand dollars (on Amazon here). It was collected in the anthology Love in Vein II, which is available for around $68.  (Look for it at your local independent book store.)

A Vampire a Day: Sunglasses After Dark by Nancy Collins

When I read this book, Sonja Blue was not yet the heroine of a series of books. I thought I was reading a one-off and was sad because I LOVED Sonja. I loved Sunglasses After Dark. They've redone the covers now that it's a series, and they're wonderfully retro, but the one I first read had the cover pictured.

Sonja's a vampire who hunts other vampires. That's not a particularly new idea (Blade, Vampire Hunter D), but I got a kick out of Sonja's particular brand of kick-ass. She stood out from all those katana-wielding, tramp-stamped hunter chicks  you see nowadays. Sonja is ... complicated.

Nancy Collins sounds like an interesting person too. I hope I run into her some time at SDCC.

A Vampire a Day: The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

A curious young woman investigates her diplomat father’s past and stumbles across the true history of “Drakulya.”

I loved this book. My review of it read, in part:This book has close kinship with the wonderfully evocative period mystery IN THE NAME OF THE ROSE.  The story is atmospheric and densely fragrant, with details that anchor us in time and space even as the story spins its magic across the centuries.  The characters are rich and dimensional, drawing us into the outlandish tale one step at a time.  

The book garnered all kinds of praise for its literary excellence and no one seemed to mind that it was really a vampire novel. 

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.)

A Vampire a Day: FOREVER KNIGHT: Intimations of Immortality by Susan Garrett

I knew Susan Garrett. She was a friend of a friend of mine and soon after we met I realized that Susan was a friend to everyone. She was warm and generous and lovely and when she died a few years ago, even though I hadn't known her long or known her well, I felt bereft.
Susan was active in the fan fic community, writing stories in several different universes, including Forever Knight, the Canadian television show that has attained cult classic status. She and I shared a fondness for Forever Knight. (My best friend is a dead ringer for actor Geraint Wyn Davis, who played the vampire lead.)

The powers-that-be producing the show read some of Susan's fan fiction and invited her to write one of the tie-in novels. I think there were three, but this is the only one I ever read. It was a lot of fun, and can be read as a stand alone, even if you never saw the show. It preserves the struction of the television episodes, which involve a modern-day story taking place in an unnamed city (clearly Toronto because you can see the CN tower in most of the exterior shots) and then flashing back to a time in the main protagonist's past life.

The book was a mass market paperback published in 1997 and you can still get copies on Amazon for a penny and postage (around $4). If you like vampires with a side-order of romantic angst, you'll love this book. And you'll love Susan's writing too. A lot of her fan fic is still online, so if you liked this story, you can find shorter works she wrote.

A Vampire a Day: Bent Steeple by G. Wells Taylor

Horror writer G. Wells Taylor (his new book, The Night Once More is a genre-bending, phantasmagorical noir-horror-thriller), hit an absolute home run with Bent Steeple, a stand-alone vampire book set in the Canadian north woods. If you like Stephen King (and I do, a lot), you will LOVE this book. The characterizations are absolutely first rate, from a doctor who sees what's happening before anyone else, to a disabled kid. (Fergus will break your heart.) this is another vampire book that is for readers who prefer their horror to be just that--horrific. Taylor is also the author of the Dracula of the Apes trilogy, a masterful mashup of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Bram Stoker. (You'll never look at Tarzan the same way again.)

Bonus:  I love this cover. Stark. Graphic. Eerie-looking. So much subtler than the usual black and red  with creatures.

Fever Dreams

I have spent most of the last week in bed, which would be great if the rest of that sentence involved a tall dark stranger and a hotel room in the South of France. Alas it has more to do with waking up at midnight with an atrophied tongue, a lump of fleshy stone as scaly as the bottom of fishing boat at the end of a season. Pretty much the only time I've left my cave of sheets and blankets is to rehydrate--chicken noodle soup has lost any appeal it ever had--and to make more slippery elm tea. If ever there was a substance that made you glad you've lost your sense of taste, it's slippery elm tea.
Orange Cat is delighted.
His goal in life is to sleep 23 and a half hours out of every day and the only reason he doesn't pursue this goal more fervently is that he gets lonely. There's no one to pet you while you sleep, or play with the laser pointer or tell you you're a good boy.
The only good thing about this whole cold/flu thing is the dreams.
I have been having big, huge, technicolor dreams.
Which is unusual.
I rarely remember my dreams.
I was not a kid who had nightmares. I can remember only one nightmare in my whole childhood and it was more a series of images that caused me anxiety than anything else.
Those anxiety dreams everyone has in college?
I had one.
Once.
And even as the dream was unspooling in the Cineplex of my mind--a narrative involving signing up for an advanced math class and never going and having to take a final in it--I was saying to myself, "You would never sign up for an advanced math class."
About a decade ago, following some event--probably 9/11--I had a series of truly awful dreams involving earthquakes and blood. In one I was roaming the halls of what I knew to be my high school in Richmond but it was in Burbank. Classes were in session and my mother turned a corner and told me I needed to tell everyone to get out, there was going to be a quake and the building was going to collapse. "They're not going to listen to me," I protested. "Tell them your mother said so," she said. "Tell them your mother is dead." Which at that point she had been for 15 years or so.
There was also a dream involving me asking my best friend to kill our two cats because they were hungry and we couldn't feed them.
I am mostly glad I don't remember my dreams.
But this week my dreams are so bizarre that they're notable. I was Brad Pitt and Anjelina Jolie's nanny in one. In another, I dreamt the whole plot of a story I've been working on. I remembered everything when I woke, but the distance from the bed to the nearest pencil was just too far. By the time I woke again, the story was long gone.
I'm about one day away from feeling completely human again and I hope to have a dream I can turn into a story like some of my friends do. But in the meantime, I am rereading George R. R. Martin's wonderful vampire novel, Fevre Dream. It's the first book of his I ever read.