A Vampire a Day: Laurell K. Hamilton's "Anita Blake" series

The first book in the series, Guilty Pleasures, is the very first urban fantasy novel I ever read. I LOVED it, despite the cheesy cover. (I looked for an image of that original cover but could not find it, but more about covers in a minute.)

I loved that Anita lived in St. Louis and not in the over-used locations of New York and Los Angeles. I loved that Anita initially thought of all the creatures she encountered as monsters. (Well, she was willing to make an exception for Jean-Claude, the vampire master of the city.) Anita had a lot of powers. In addition to being a kick-ass vampire executioner, she could also raise the dead. And the series had a lot of intriguing supporting characters, which helped make her universe seem real.

I stopped reading the books about the time that Anita got "torn between two lovers." (The other is a werewolf.)  The writer was veering off from the kind of crime-type plots you see in other UF books (like Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden/Dresden Files series) and exploring other dimensions of the character. Anita's her character, Laurell K. Hamilton can do what she wants. But I was kind of disappointed. Because I loved Anita just the way she was. Sigh.

It wasn't just the stories that evolved, though. Hamilton's publishers put the series' covers through a series of upgrades. When I bought the first book, it had an illustrative cover and the vampire on the cover looked like someone had just drawn a couple of triangular fangs sticking out of his mouth. Seriously. I remember my brother making fun of the cover.

Once the books started to sell--and they've sold a lot, according to Wikipedia, the covers started looking a lot more uptown. check them out.

I like the cover font on the cover to the left but pretty much HATE the imag. the artsy one was the redo around the time the book Obsidian Butterfly came out, or at least, that's the first time I noticed the new covers. I thought they were elegant, very "lit fic" in feel.

I'll have to go back to the series sometime, just to catch up with Anita. I'll always be grateful to Laurell K. Hamilton for introducing me to urban fantasy, which wasn't even really a genre when she started chronicling Anita's adventurs among the undead.

A vampire a day: Auld Lang Syne by Katherine Tomlinson

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AULD LANG SYNE

I got a few quizzical looks when I signed in.  It’s possible some of the women working at the registration desk remembered me but I doubted it.  Back in high school I’d had lank brown hair, bad skin and had carried an extra 30 pounds.  I’d spent my four miserable years at Woodrow Wilson High School being invisible and dreaming of better times to come.  Better times had come.  I looked good for my age.

I spotted Alicia Cooper almost at once.  Alicia Womack, now.  Everyone had expected her to marry Tommy Womack ever since they’d been crowned king and queen at our senior prom.  I hadn’t gone to the prom.  I wasn’t asked.  I’d spent that night sobbing in my bedroom while my poor mother tried desperately to distract me with vanilla milkshakes.  I was inconsolable but I drank two of the milkshakes anyway.  I did things like that in those days. 

I never really thought I’d come to a reunion but as the years slipped by, the notion of making an appearance at my 50^th began to seem attractive.  I’d long ago lost touch with everybody, but the reunion committee had set up a group on Facebook, so I was able to get all the information I needed.  I sent in my reservation, made my travel plans, and bought a new dress. 

The banquet room at the Sheraton was decorated with huge black and white photographs blown up from our senior yearbook.  There wasn’t a picture of me.  I’d skipped school the day pictures were taken. 

A Vampire a Day: They Thirst by Robert McCammon

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a huge Stephen King fan. I think The Stand is a monumental book. I first read it while home sick from school with a horrible case of the flu and believe me, the chapters covering the spread of the plague scared the bejesus out of me.
But as much as I love The Stand, I think Robert McCammon's post-apocalyptic novel Swan Song is even better. I first read that while staying in a series of really awful motels during my first cross-country drive. I'd drive for 10-12 hours and then read until I couldn't read any more. I pulled into L.A. with a bad sunburn on my left arm--I didn't have air conditioning in my car--and about 100 pages left of the book.
They Thirst was the first of McCammon's books I ever read. Then I read Wolf's Hour, which is a Nazi/werewolf thing. I liked both of them. They were pulpy fun, the sort of horror novels you could read in a single sitting.
Like King, McCammon defies categorization. He writes horror, yes, but other things as well. I'm a big fan of his short stories, particularly one called "Night Calls the Green Falcon," which Birdman reminded me of a bit.
McCammon disappeared from publishing for nearly 20 years, and that's a shame. He has a new novel out as of last year and it's on the ever-growing TBR pile. 

For the TBR pile: Cobweb Bride by Vera Nazarian

"He came to them in the heart of winter, asking for his Cobweb Bride."  That's the first sentence of this book and that was all it took to hook me.

Cobweb Bride  is FREE today at Amazon and the cover called me. I liked it so much I did the "look inside" to see who designed it and turns out the writer herself is responsible. Good job Vera! I wish I had that skill.

This book sounds like it's just up my alley--a historical fantasy based on the Persephone myth, a story of a woman chosen to be Death's bride.  And bonus:  it's the first in a trilogy. I'm looking forward to reading it.

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. 

A Sequel is born! Daughter of the Midnight King

Not quite eighteen months ago, my novella, Bride of the Midnight King, was published. It was a retelling of the fairy tale Cinderella with a vampire gloss on it. I had a lot of fun writing it and to my surprise, a lot of people had fun reading it. It very quickly became my best-selling work to date. I had intended to write the sequel right away but life got away from me for a while--I moved to another state, I ended up writing a movie, I ghost-wrote a DIY book, I mid-wifed the birth of my best friend's own novel-writing career. So it took me a while. But now Daughter of the Midnight King is finally  out in the world. On to the next project!!!

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.)