Blood Sisters Read online

  BLOOD SISTERS

  VAMPIRE STORIES BY WOMEN

  Other Anthologies Edited by

  Paula Guran

  Embraces

  Best New Paranormal Romance

  Best New Romantic Fantasy

  Zombies: The Recent Dead

  The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2010

  Vampires: The Recent Undead

  The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2011

  Halloween

  New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird

  Brave New Love

  Witches: Wicked, Wild & Wonderful

  Obsession: Tales of Irresistible Desire

  The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2012

  Extreme Zombies

  Ghosts: Recent Hauntings

  Rock On: The Greatest Hits of Science Fiction & Fantasy

  Season of Wonder

  Future Games

  Weird Detectives: Recent Investigations

  The Mammoth Book of Angels & Demons

  The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2013

  Halloween: Magic, Mystery, & the Macabre

  Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales

  Magic City: Recent Spells

  The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2014

  Zombies: More Recent Dead

  Time Travel: Recent Trips

  New Cthulhu 2: More Recent Weird

  Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep

  BLOOD SISTERS

  VAMPIRE STORIES BY WOMEN

  Edited by Paula Guran

  Night Shade Books

  An Imprint of Start Publishing

  New York, New York

  Copyright © 2015 by Paula Guran

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Start Publishing, 375 Hudson Street, 12th Floor, New York, NY 10012.

  Night Shade Books is an imprint of Start Publishing LLC>

  Visit our website at www.start-publishing.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN: 978-1-59780-576-6

  Cover design by Claudia Noble

  An extension of this copyright page can be found here.

  Printed in the United States of America

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: “Welcome to My House! Enter Freely and of Your Own Free Will!” by Paula Guran

  “A Princess of Spain” by Carrie Vaughn

  “Shipwrecks Above” by Caitlín R. Kiernan

  “The Fall of the House of Blackwater” by Freda Warrington

  “In Memory of …” by Nancy Kilpatrick

  “Where the Vampires Live” by Storm Constantine

  “La Dame” by Tanith Lee

  “Chicago 1927” by Jewelle Gomez

  “Renewal” by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

  “Blood Freak” by Nancy Holder

  “The Power and the Passion” by Pat Cadigan

  “The Unicorn Tapestry” by Suzy McKee Charnas

  “This Town Ain’t Big Enough” by Tanya Huff

  “Vampire King of the Goth Chicks” by Nancy A. Collins

  “Learning Curve” by Kelley Armstrong

  “The Better Half” by Melanie Tem

  “Selling Houses” by Laurell K. Hamilton

  “Greedy Choke Puppy” by Nalo Hopkinson

  “Tacky” by Charlaine Harris

  “Needles” by Elizabeth Bear

  “From the Teeth of Strange Children” by Lisa L. Hannett

  “Father Peña’s Last Dance” by Hannah Strom-Martin

  “Sun Falls” by Angela Slatter

  “Magdala Amygdala” by Lucy A. Snyder

  “The Coldest Girl in Coldtown” by Holly Black

  “In the Future When All’s Well” by Catherynne M. Valente

  Acknowledgments

  INTRODUCTION:

  Welcome to My House! Enter Freely and of Your Own Free Will!

  Paula Guran

  There are many great reference books and essays about vampire literature. This is not one of them. It’s only an extremely brief, overly simplistic, and far from complete history of vampire fiction that is (meaning no disrespect to the innumerable fine and hugely important male authors of such fiction) intentionally shaped to highlight women’s authorial role in such. It is based, in part, on the introduction to Vampires: The Recent Undead (Prime Books, 2011), an anthology I edited that focused on short vampire fiction published 2000–2010. (You can read the entire essay from which I am recycling some bits here at paulaguran.com/vampires-the-recent-undead-intro.)

  ***

  The idea of the vampire has probably been around since humanity first began to ponder death. In Western culture the vampire has been a pervasive icon for more than two centuries now, but the image of the vampire as something other than a disgusting reanimated corpse was profoundly reshaped in the early nineteenth century by a group of British aristocrats.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Percy Shelley, Matthew Lewis, Lord Byron, and Byron’s physician, Dr. John Polidori, decided to amuse themselves one damp summer 1816 evening in a villa on Lake Geneva by writing ghost stories. Mary Godwin (who later married Shelley) created a modern myth (and science fiction) with Frankenstein, or Prometheus Unbound. Polidori picked up a fragment of vampire fiction written by Byron on that fateful night and eventually produced a novelette based on it: “The Vampyre.” It featured the charismatic Lord Ruthven: a seductive refined noble as well as a blood-sucking monster who preyed on others. Ruthven was obviously based on the already notorious “bad boy” Byron.

  “The Vampyre” became wildly popular, particularly in Germany and France. The theatres of Paris were filled by the early 1820s with vampire-themed plays. Some of these returned to England in translated form. As for fiction: “The Vampyre,” Brian Stableford has written, was the “most widely read vampire story of its era … To say that it was influential is something of an understatement; there was probably no one in England or France who attempted to write a vampire story in the nineteenth century who was not familiar with it, one way or another.”

  Polidori’s story was certainly the inspiration for the serialized “penny dreadful” Varney the Vampire or, The Feast of Blood (1845-47) by (most likely) James Malcolm Rhymer. Varney appealed to the masses, but was of even less literary merit than the short story to which it owed so much.

  It took Sheridan le Fanu to craft a true literary gem with his novella “Carmilla,” published in 1872. The tale of a lonely girl and a beautiful aristocratic female vampire in an isolated castle also brought steamy sub-textual lesbian sexuality into the vampire mythos.

  But it was Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897) that became the basis of modern vampire lore: Dracula was a vampire “king” of indefinite lifespan who could not be seen in mirrors, had an affinity to bats and aversions to crucifixes and garlic. He had superhuman strength, could shapeshift and control human minds. Stoker’s vampires needed their native soil and the best way to kill one was with a stake through the heart followed by decapitation. There were humans who, like Abraham Van Helsing, hunted vampires … etc.

  Of course, Dracula did not leap solely from Stoker’s imagination to the page, nor did le Fanu’s “Carmilla” or Polidori’s earlier vampire. Their influences were many, but all were also products of the Gothic genre—the first truly popular literature … and the first genre to be written mostly by women.

  The Gothic mode originated with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). Walpole, at first, published the novel as the translation of a medieval manuscript. This deception made the work critically acceptable. Once Walpole admitted authorship, however, the literati generally spurned i
t as superstitious romantic trash.

  Clara Reeve made the Gothic somewhat more tolerable to the pundits by introducing eighteenth-century “realism” and downplaying the more fantastic elements used by Walpole in her novel The Old English Barron (1798).

  Ann Radcliffe, used the technique of the “explained supernatural”—all sorts of scary uncanny things might occur, but most were ultimately revealed to have natural causes (rather like Scooby-Doo plots)—to write Gothic novels. With her fourth work, Radcliffe produced the first bestselling novel: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794).

  As with popular novels today, a flood of imitative novels followed and most of them were written by women. These may not have been vampiric, or even very good, but they still bit into the same public vein.

  As for the vamps—before Stoker (and possibly before le Fanu), there were vampire stories written by women as well as men. Some are lost due to pseudonyms and intentional anonymity, but known examples include:

  •Eliza Lynn Linton’s “The Fate of Madame Cabanel,” published in 1880. It portrays provincials who label a stranger among them—the innocent Fanny Cabanel—as a vampire due to their superstition, bigotry, and ignorance (of, among many other things, proper drainage and sanitation).

  •“Let Loose” (1890) by Mary Chomondeley is an odd, but effective, story of a man who wears high collars looking for a crypt in which there is a fresco painted by his father. Deaths coincide with his appearance and scars on his neck do not match those of the dog he claims bit him.

  •“Good Lady Ducayne,” published in 1896 by Mary Elizabeth Braddon is a “scientific” variant on the legend of Elizabeth Báthory, a Hungarian countess who allegedly killed hundreds of girls between 1585 and 1610 to obtain their virginal blood believing she would retain her youth if she bathed in the vital fluid. In Braddon’s novella, the wealthy aristocratic Lady Ducayne’s sinister doctor, Parravicini, performs “experimental surgery” on girls in her employ to obtain blood he then injects into her ladyship to prolong her already long life.

  •In “A Mystery of the Campagna” (1886) by Anne Crawford (Baroness von Rabe) the bloodless corpse of the narrator’s friend is found after being seen with a lovely woman. A sarcophagus is found in an ancient vault in which the remarkably healthy-looking occupant is the same woman. Helpfully, among the Latin inscriptions naming her as Vespertilia, is one in Greek that translates as “The blood-drinker, the vampire woman.” A wooden stake to the heart is inevitably employed.

  Stoker also acknowledged an 1885 essay by Emily Gerard on “Transylvanian Superstitions”—later part of her 1888 book The Land Beyond the Forest—as important to his research. He “borrowed” some elements: the term nosferatu and information about a “Devil’s school, the Scholomance, where the members of the Dracula family learned the secrets of the ‘Evil One.’”

  [Note: The claim that “The Skeleton Count, or The Vampire Mistress,” allegedly written by Elizabeth Caroline Grey and published in 1825 or 1828—thus supposedly making it the first known published story by a woman—has been, at best, debunked as unproven and, at worst, a complete hoax.]

  Having acknowledged some of the influence eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women had on Bram Stoker, we must now admit that the Dracula-type vampire popularized by the novel, as well as stage productions and films that followed, heavily dominated authors’ and readers’ minds for many years.

  Fantasy, the “weird,” and science fiction in the first half of the twentieth century was primarily written in the short form, so the vampire appeared in stories rather than novels. In those days genre writing of that type was produced predominately by men. But women managed to be published, and a few wrote vampiric prose.

  One of the most notable vampiric works by a woman in the early twentieth century is the ambiguous but eerie “Luella Miller” (1902) by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. Freeman’s character was a type of “psychic vampire,” a schoolteacher who seemingly draws the life out of anyone close to her. No one, including Luella, is really sure this deadly effect is either intentional or evil.

  Whether C. L. (Catherine Lucille) Moore’s “Shambleau” (1933) is a vampire story may be open to question, but one can make a good argument that the alien Shambleau is a form of vampire. At first assumed by the hero to be an attractive human women unjustly victimized by a Martian mob, she turns out to be a creature who sucks the life-force out of others with her wormlike “hair” while placing her victims in an addictive ecstatic state.

  Various vampiric attributes and powers were added or subtracted in films and short stories produced during the first five decades of the last century. The vampire thrived in those two media, but no notable vampire novels were published until 1954 when Richard Matheson contributed the idea of vampirism as an infectious disease with apocalyptic consequence in his novel I Am Legend.

  By the 1960s, short form vampirism was also mixed with other science fiction tropes such as being an inherited genetic condition. Vampires were even rendered in a sympathetic light—as long as it was acknowledged they were, by nature, evil and chose (as humans could) to resist their monstrosity and to be “good.”

  Evelyn E. Smith’s vampire, Mr. Varri, in “Softly While You’re Sleeping” (1961) is courtly and gentle. Unlike her human beaus (and earlier fictional vampires) Varri neither attempts to force or compel Anna, the young woman in the story. However, she knows the vampire’s love will still destroy her, so she chooses to reject him.

  The early 1970s brought an onslaught of novel-length vampirism. Men wrote most of these novels but, again—in that era—the preponderance of any type of science fiction, fantasy, or what became the horror genre was authored by men.

  In one landmark work, Stephen King’s 1975 ’Salem’s Lot, the author downplayed vampiric eroticism, upped the level of terror, and focused on the vampire as a metaphor of corrupt power. King also updated vampirism by placing his vampires in small-town America.

  Fred Saberhagen’s novel The Dracula Tape was published the same year as ’Salem’s Lot. The Count himself narrated Saberhagen’s far more obscure, but still significant, novel. He relates his side of Bram Stoker’s story and, naturally, portrayed himself in a favorable light.

  About six months later, in May1976, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire was published. Rice radically revised the icon of the vampire, albeit more fully with the second of what became her Vampire Chronicles, Lestat, which didn’t come along until 1985. The first novel was set among vampires of varying characters—who, unlike Dracula, sought out others of their kind to form communal and even “family” groups. The aristocratic Lestat de Lioncourt echoed Lord Ruthven more than the comparatively dreary Count Dracula; the middle-class Louis de Pointe du Lac clings to his bourgeois morality: a vampire with a conscience (and considerable angst).

  Interview was not an immediate success. It attained bestseller status a year after its first publication when Ballantine released a paperback edition.

  The second Vampire Chronicle novel, Lestat, proved how the audience for Interview had grown when it became an instant bestseller. In it, the character of Lestat refuted Louis’s claims and characterization presented in the initial novel; more of the vampire universe is revealed. The formerly androgynous characters became more sexualized and earlier subtler homoeroticism more overt. Lestat is not exactly evil, but rather a complex personality—even a rebellious antihero—whose complexity has grown over the course of (currently) eleven novels.

  Rice’s two New Tales of the Vampire novels (Pandora, 1998, and Vittorio the Vampire, 1999) and the six Lives of the Mayfair Witches novels also share and expand the vampire universe of the Chronicles.

  Interview with the Vampire revitalized interest in vampire fiction; Lestat did much to revise the archetype itself. Some have suggested that Rice has even supplanted Bram Stoker as the most important author of vampire fiction.

  Chelsea Quinn Yarbro is not as well known as Rice, but her vampire, the Count Saint-Germain, has had a profound influence on vamp
ire fiction.

  Hôtel Transylvania (1978) introduced the character of Le Comte de Saint-Germain. Cultured, well traveled, articulate, elegant, and mysterious, he first appears in the court of France’s King Louis XV. Since then, Yarbro has presented—in a non-chronological manner and with name variations suitable to language, era, locale, and circumstance—the Count’s life and undeath from 2119 BC and (as with the novella included here) into the twenty-first century. (Roger, his “servant” in “Renewal,” became the vampire’s right-hand ghoul in Rome in AD 71.) The books and stories of the Saint-Germain Cycle—currently twenty-seven novels and shorter fiction enough to fill two collections—combine well-researched and detailed historical fiction, romance, and horror.

  Saint-Germain was the first genuinely romantic and heroic vampire. Although he must take blood to survive, it is an erotic experience for his partners and does no harm. And, though immortal, he seeks out the company of humans and assists them. During his long publishing life, Saint-Germain has been portrayed in many historical periods and settings; in each, it is humankind, its actions and prejudices, that provides the horror.

  In the 1980s and 1990s vampires appeared in all varieties in literature (and other media) as traditional monsters, heroes, detectives, aliens, rock stars, psychic predators, loners, tribal, erotic, sexless, violent, placed in alternate histories, present in contemporary settings … the vampire became a malleable metaphor of great diversity in many forms, even—first in Lori Herter’s Obsession (1991)—in the romance marketing category.

  A number of outstanding vampiric novels were published in the eighties and nineties, but Anne Rice continued to make the firmest impression on the masses as the bestselling queen of vampire novelists.

  Works by other women during this period may not have been as widely read as Rice’s, but they contributed a great deal to the expansion of the vampire mythos.

  Tanith Lee’s Sabella or The Blood Stone (1980) is a short but powerful—and often overlooked—science fiction vampire novel. The titular character is a “vampire” who lives on a future colonized planet. Sabella is unknowingly taken over by a member of an extinct alien race of bloodsuckers as a child. In Lee’s signature poetic and sensual style, Sabella gains knowledge of herself while the author metaphorically explores a number of issues including post-colonialism, religion, and ecology.