Fourteen years has been far too long to wait for another collection of novellas and short stories from Stephen Donaldson, who first came to our attention with his startling and epic anti-hero trilogies about Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. With Reave the Just and Other Tales, Donaldson proves once again that he is the quintessential fantasist and the true successor and heir to J.
R.
R. Tolkien. In this volume of eight tales, three of which have never before been published, Donaldson seems to be expunging some demons from his personal life (check his comments in the introduction), but does so in a strange and wondrous manner.
As we have come to expect in Donaldson stories, the design and plots are flavored with an Eastern philosophical, mystical bent, usually communicated with liberal amounts of gore, sex, and violence. Though it sounds contradictory, Donaldson, with the wisdom and style of a Zen master, succeeds in dazzling us on both intellectual and gut-wrenching levels, simultaneously.
Donaldson’s writing is particularly outstanding in developing the mythic dimensions of various cultural perceptions and their role in personal morality; this is best demonstrated in the story The Woman Who Loved Pigs. In The Djinn Who Watches over the Accursed, we view the perspective of both the victim whom a mage caught in flagrante delicto and the djinn the mage called down an adventure story that illustrates Ghandian principles of non-violent resistance. In Reave the Just, similar themes dominate as a brutal and sadistic bully encounters the force of an ideal embodied in a national hero, who understands personal honor in a tale of love, magic, lust, greed and deadly sins. This tale is a first cousin to the classic Princess Bride.
Don’t miss this truly outstanding book.
Larry Woods is an avid reader of science fiction.
Fourteen years has been far too long to wait for another collection of novellas and short stories from Stephen Donaldson, who first came to our attention with his startling and epic anti-hero trilogies about Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. With Reave the Just and Other Tales,…
You know you’re in for a wild ride with the shockingly inventive collection Shit Cassandra Saw when one of the first stories is a piercing tale of women in New York acquiring supernatural powers that allow them to move through the city without fear of sexual assault. This is followed by a story that’s a one-star Yelp review written by Gary F., ostensibly about a Maryland restaurant called Jerry’s Crab Shack, but really about the man’s deeply dysfunctional relationship with his wife.
Other standout entries include a poignant look at a high school softball team that is reeling from a recent school shooting, and the tale of a woman who is having an affair and being judged by the priggish Colonial ghost who lives in her neighborhood.
So it goes, in dazzling story after story in this debut book from Gwen E. Kirby, a creative writing instructor and associate director at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference at the University of the South. Through humor, ferocity and sometimes a healthy dash of surrealism, Kirby meditates on the fears, joys and pains of being a woman throughout the centuries. Every story feels unique, yet they’re tied together by Kirby’s mind-bendingly confident writing and her clear fascination with strong yet vulnerable women.
And boy, does she know how to create a sense of place so strong you can feel and smell it. In “We Handle It,” for example, we meet teenage girls who are “at a summer music camp, our fingertips sore from strings, our backs sticky with sweat, and when we reach the lake we shed our summer dresses and leap from a boulder into the water, which is deep and clean. Around the lake are tall pines and the heavy hum of Southern bug life.”
Shit Cassandra Saw is pure pleasure with something for everyone, especially readers interested in thinking deeply about womanhood from every possible angle. Kirby’s characters are sometimes sinners and never saints, as complex as the real-life women we know and love.
The female characters in Gwen E. Kirby’s collection are sometimes sinners and never saints, as complex as the real-life women we know and love.
If you have not yet read Jorge Luis Borges, you can find an absolute feast of his writings in the long-awaited Collected Fictions. Even if he is one of your favorite writers, this new book is cause for celebration. It’s the first collection of all of the Argentine master’s tales, and the first to be translated by the same person, Andrew Hurley. To have them all together and in a consistent voice is a delight. What are we to make of him? John Updike once asked of Borges. His stories are half fable and half essay, rich with gorgeous imagery and erudite (and sometimes fictional) allusion. Characteristic of Borges’s narrative maneuvering is the single-page tale in which Borges explains that it is Borges, the other one, that things happen to, and that the other Borges is turning all of the narrator’s life into literature. This sly meditation on the act of creativity ends with a confession: I am not sure which of us it is that’s writing this page.
If you have not yet read Jorge Luis Borges, you can find an absolute feast of his writings in the long-awaited Collected Fictions. Even if he is one of your favorite writers, this new book is cause for celebration. It's the first collection of all…
Spanning the globe from a night market in Taiwan to New York City, Los Angeles and many places in between, Jean Chen Ho’s novel-in-stories weaves together the experiences of two young women, Fiona and Jane. We see their lives unfold together and apart, amid challenges with their parents, flirtations, relationships and financial concerns. Through it all, Fiona and Jane navigate the complexities of their friendship, allowing it to grow, change and reemerge with time.
Fiona and Jane is comprised of chapters that alternate between Jane’s first-person narration and Fiona’s third person. Jane describes growing up and navigating her sense of self, and she ruminates on the ways that her friendship with Fiona grounds and challenges her. Meanwhile, Fiona’s chapters feel more distant for their external narration. The decision to differentiate the two Taiwanese American women’s sections in this way becomes increasingly interesting and important as the story progresses. In fact, it becomes evident that this structure is essential to how the story must be told.
Time is a fascinating factor in the novel as well. The narrative unfurls in the present while moving the reader into snippets of backstory, filling in gaps at just the right moments. Ho also moves us through and across physical and cultural landscapes, revealing how a person can feel both resonance with and distance from one’s community and self.
Ultimately, though, Ho’s characters do the most compelling work. Fiona and Jane—both earnest, curious and heart-full—epitomize the realities of growing up in America as young women, as immigrants, as Asian Americans. Their arcs show how families complicate one’s life while also enriching it, how friends can become a found family, and how each choice can echo in and reflect a person’s whole life.
By the book’s end, readers will feel as though they carry some part of these women with them, as if Fiona and Jane are our friends, as if their stories might yet overlap with our own.
After reading Jean Chen Ho’s novel-in-stories, readers will feel as though they carry some part of Fiona and Jane with them.
The best of damn near everything Sometimes it’s nice to have someone else do the work for you. You can’t read everything. Various yearly anthologies try to save readers the trouble of filtering out the lesser nominees for our disposable income and spare time. Prominent among them are Houghton Mifflin’s Best Of series.
The Best American Essays 1998, edited this time by acclaimed practitioner Cynthia Ozick, is the feast of fine writing we’ve come to expect from this series. The 25 contributors range from the venerable William Maxwell on Nearing Ninety to John Updike’s lovely meditation on the art of cartooning. The Best American Short Stories 1998 ($27.50, 0395875153), guest-edited by Garrison Keillor, includes 20 stories by authors such as Meg Wolitzer, Carol Anshaw, and, inevitably, John Updike. Each of these stories surprised and delighted me, Keillor writes. He isn’t alone.
A newer series, The Best American Mystery Stories 1998 ($27.50, 0395835860), edited by the alphabetical Sue Grafton, offers 20 forays into crime and punishment. The authors range from old standbys like Edward D. Hoch, John Lutz, and Donald Westlake, to surprising additions, such as Jay McInerney.
The best of damn near everything Sometimes it's nice to have someone else do the work for you. You can't read everything. Various yearly anthologies try to save readers the trouble of filtering out the lesser nominees for our disposable income and spare time. Prominent…
Sometimes it’s nice to have someone else do the work for you. You can’t read everything. Various yearly anthologies try to save readers the trouble of filtering out the lesser nominees for our disposable income and spare time. Prominent among them are Houghton Mifflin’s Best Of series.
The Best American Essays 1998, edited this time by acclaimed practitioner Cynthia Ozick, is the feast of fine writing we’ve come to expect from this series. The 25 contributors range from the venerable William Maxwell on Nearing Ninety to John Updike’s lovely meditation on the art of cartooning. The Best American Short Stories 1998, guest-edited by Garrison Keillor, includes 20 stories by authors such as Meg Wolitzer, Carol Anshaw, and, inevitably, John Updike. Each of these stories surprised and delighted me, Keillor writes. He isn’t alone.
A newer series, The Best American Mystery Stories 1998, edited by the alphabetical Sue Grafton, offers 20 forays into crime and punishment. The authors range from old standbys like Edward D. Hoch, John Lutz, and Donald Westlake, to surprising additions, such as Jay McInerney.
Sometimes it's nice to have someone else do the work for you. You can't read everything. Various yearly anthologies try to save readers the trouble of filtering out the lesser nominees for our disposable income and spare time. Prominent among them are Houghton Mifflin's Best…
When writing a novel set in our own world, authors can use shorthand to set the scene. Big Ben, San Marco, or the Arc d’Triomphe all conjure images regarding the architecture, food, language, and attitude of a place. Science fiction authors, however, must spend more time creating their setting and shaping their worlds. Author and editor Robert Silverberg has invited ten other science fiction authors to write new stories in some of the worlds they have already created. The result is Far Horizons, an anthology of 11 new stories set in some of the most popular science fictional worlds of the past 30 years. In addition to providing new readers with an introduction to these fictitious worlds and longtime readers a return ticket to their favorite universes, Far Horizons demonstrates the breadth of the science fiction genre.
More than just rocket ships and aliens, science fiction includes the soft sciences, as ably demonstrated by Ursula K. Le Guin’s story, Old Music and the Slave Woman, which tackles the issues of slavery and rebellion in very human terms. Orson Scott Card’s Investment Counselor leaves even the softer sciences behind as he sets up the relationship between his hero, Ender Wiggin, and Jane, the artificial intelligence which plays such a large role in the later books of his Ender saga.
Rocket ships and aliens, however, aren’t left behind. David Brin’s Uplift universe has always been filled with exotic creatures, and Temptation, his contribution, continues this tradition, telling his story through the eyes of enhanced dolphins. Brin’s colleague, Gregory Benford, looks at even stranger aliens in A Hunger for the Infinite. Benford’s aliens are mechanical creatures intent on destroying all biological-based life in the galaxy. More altruistic aliens and their spaceships may be found in Frederik Pohl’s The Boy Who Would Live Forever, a novella set among his Heechee novels. In this story, Pohl shows the boredom aboard a starship, as well as introduces creatures with almost godlike powers.
These stories, and the other six tales, provide an overview of what science fiction has become in the 1990s. While all of the authors have moved beyond the space operatic roots which spawned the genre, those roots can still be seen in several of the stories.
Steven Silver is a freelance book reviewer in Northbrook, Illinois.
When writing a novel set in our own world, authors can use shorthand to set the scene. Big Ben, San Marco, or the Arc d'Triomphe all conjure images regarding the architecture, food, language, and attitude of a place. Science fiction authors, however, must spend more…
Spanish novelist Carlos Ruiz Zafón, whose bestselling works were beloved by readers around the globe, died too young, at 55, in June 2020. Before his death, he collected a slim volume of stories as a parting gift for his fans. Varying from two to 40 pages in length, the tales in The City of Mist are filled with classic Ruiz Zafón elements: absorbing, old-fashioned storytelling, atmospheric settings and characters who exist in the margins between reality and imagination.
Ruiz Zafón’s fiction, exemplified by the Cemetery of Forgotten Books quartet that began with The Shadow of the Wind, draws freely on the conventions of many genres—gothic, fantasy, historical romance, noir. The 11 pieces in The City of Mist follow this pattern, tapping into a sense of ethereal mystery and otherworldliness. Some characters will be familiar to avid readers of Ruiz Zafón’s oeuvre, and most of the stories are set in the fictional version of Barcelona that has long been his literary terrain.
The final, posthumous work of Carlos Ruiz Zafón dwells in the familiar, fantastical literary terrain that he claimed as his own.
Because Ruiz Zafón was a writer known for burly, sprawling narratives in a style hearkening back a century or two, it is interesting to see him working in miniature. The shortest stories here are mere whimsical episodes, and one senses that The City of Mist, which has the feel of a writer’s sketchbook, comprises nuggets the author intended for future exploration in novels. This fragmentary quality, however, in no way diminishes Ruiz Zafón’s storytelling charms, which are on full display especially in a number of the longer pieces. “The Prince of Parnassus,” the longest story and the one placed dead center in the volume, is an apocryphal tale within a tale about Cervantes, a journey to Rome to save a young woman and a Faustian bargain with a shadowy, devilish figure. “Men in Grey” cleverly makes use of noir tropes while following the exploits of a political assassin during the Spanish Civil War. In another story, the eccentric Barcelona architect Antoni Gaudí takes a voyage to Manhattan to meet with an elusive millionaire in hopes of securing financing to complete his legendary cathedral. One can only imagine, and lament, where Ruiz Zafón might have taken these conceits had he lived longer.
Ruiz Zafón luxuriated in an old-school narrative style and was an indisputable master of the form. If he had one blind spot as a writer, it may have been in his portrayal of female characters. The women in these stories, young or old, are likely to be either virginal or fallen (sometimes, oddly, both), serving as mysterious objects of veneration or temptation but rarely as multifaceted human beings. This omission or oversight often leaves the reader yearning for a little more depth. Nonetheless, for the legion of fans of this mesmerizing storyteller, The City of Mistt will not disappoint.
The final, posthumous work of Carlos Ruiz Zafón dwells in the familiar, fantastical literary terrain that he claimed as his own.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Stone Diaries and Larry’s Party wields her pen again and turns the mundane into the magical. In Dressing Up for the Carnival, Shields offers us a collection of stories, at turns wise and droll, that explore the question of identity, the very nature of our public and private selves.
In the title story, Shields places an average street scene under her microscope, looking into the lives of various people whirling about any given town on any given day. She picks up one strand, then the next, creating a living portrait of life’s rich pageantry. We meet a man who impulsively buys a mango having never tasted one, another who carries a bouquet of flowers to his unappreciative daughter-in-law, and a woman who imagines for herself a different life as she pushes an empty stroller.
Not surprisingly, artists (especially writers) and academics appear throughout the collection. In A Scarf, Shields turns a light silken object into a weighty image as she relates the story of a struggling author’s book tour. On a more playful note, The Next Best Kiss pokes fun at the bombast of academic discourse.
These are not stories with startling revelations, but with quiet discoveries. Mirrors, one of the best in the collection, involves a husband who marvels at how he and his wife can remain strangers to one another after years of marriage, while Eros explores a cancer survivor who remembers a lover from long ago. Other stories, like Flatties and Ilk are just downright whimsical and show Shields stretching her wings at her absurdist best. In Absence Carol Shields says of one of her characters, an author, . . . she wanted only to make, as she had done before, sentences that melted at the center and branched at the ends, that threatened to grow unruly and run away, but that clause for clause adhered to one another as though stuck down by velcro tabs. In this superb collection, Shields does just this with her unique, elegant prose. She is a master of the small detail, of the way it can offer a window into a life. And Dressing Up for the Carnival is a window worth looking into. ¦ Katherine Wyrick lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Stone Diaries and Larry's Party wields her pen again and turns the mundane into the magical. In Dressing Up for the Carnival, Shields offers us a collection of stories, at turns wise and droll, that explore the question of…
Lily King has been publishing fiction for more than 20 years, but in the last decade, she has earned a new level of acclaim and success with the two ravishing, highly praised novels Euphoria and Writers & Lovers. The latter landed on shelves two weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down bookstores (and just about everything else in the world), so she was unable to do much in the way of promotion. She has greater hopes—and a scheduled book tour—for her collection of 10 startling short stories, Five Tuesdays in Winter.
King’s new book takes the long view. The stories span the entirety of the 58-year-old writer’s career, and about half of them are new material, not previously published in magazines. In a call to her home in Maine, she explains that she fell in love with short stories in high school. She’s been keeping journals since fifth grade (and still has them all, lined up on three shelves in her office), but she didn’t dream of becoming a published writer until her discovery of the short story form.
“I hadn’t had a happy childhood, I hadn’t loved the cold. But here I am.”
“Short stories are much harder [to write] than novels,” she says. “They can be more satisfying because you get to the end faster and don’t have to carry the despair for years and years. If you don’t like them, you can walk away from them. But you can’t make the mistakes that you can make in a novel. You can’t have those weird little spasms that a novel allows.”
The stories here are layered, incisive, sometimes dark and often funny. The opening tale, “Creature,” is about 14-year-old Carol, a nascent writer who is hired by a wealthy woman who lives in a mansion on a rocky New England coastal promontory. For two or three weeks in summer, Carol is to be the live-in babysitter for the woman’s very young grandchildren. Carol’s services are meant to free up the children’s mother, Kay, to spend more time with her own mother. Even before the arrival of Kay’s ne’er-do-well brother, Hugh, Carol observes the silences between mother and daughter.
“Creature” exposes the divisions within families, the flinty coldness and deliberate, doting blindness of a certain kind of parent. In its surprising conclusion we understand the hard shift in awareness that will inform Carol’s future as a writer. But is it autobiographical?
Not quite, explains King, though it is set in the town where she grew up: Manchester, Massachusetts, renamed Manchester-by-the-Sea in 1989. “I feel I was straddling a lot of different worlds,” she says of those days. “My parents got divorced. My mother and I were in an apartment downtown without a lot of money. My father was up in the house on the point. Then my father remarried and remarried again. My mother remarried and we moved to a different part of town in a big house. I was both a babysitter trying to make money and then a person who sometimes lived in a big house.”
King’s experiences with this class dichotomy burn through this story collection, as do strong impulses instilled by years of babysitting, which she began at age 11 and continued until she was 32. “You step into somebody else’s family, and you have to intuit their whole ethos,” she says. “I’m interested in fitting in and not fitting in. How a situation in a house becomes very fraught. About the power, about everybody’s dysfunction.”
For the past few years, King and her family have lived in Portland, Maine, but the pandemic hit shortly after their move, so she still doesn’t feel completely settled. They previously lived in the smaller town of Yarmouth, but when her older daughter went off to college, her younger daughter lobbied for the family to move to Portland, “the big city.”
Now their house is on a hill, and King’s top-floor office gives her an expansive view of city rooftops and the Atlantic Ocean. Her husband, a writer and fine arts painter, has a studio on the top floor as well. His mother, also an artist, painted the vivid work that constitutes the cover art of Five Tuesdays in Winter. The full painting graces King’s living room.
Even after 20-plus years in Maine, King still expresses surprise to be living in New England. “When I left Massachusetts at the age of 18, I thought I would never, ever live in New England again,” she says. “And I didn’t for a long time. But I just kept kind of circling back and then leaving again and coming back.”
King’s life has taken her all over the U.S. and even to Valencia, Spain, but starting a family with her husband helped her make the decision to return. “It just seemed that I had to raise my kids with seasons,” she says. “With winter, with snow. I didn’t think it could happen because I hadn’t had a happy childhood, I hadn’t loved the cold. But here I am.”
The author of Euphoria and Writers & Lovers takes us into the memories that inspired a story in her terrific first collection.
Lily King has been rightly praised for two terrific recent novels, Euphoria and Writers & Lovers. But who knew she was such an exceptional short story writer? Maybe a few readers of Ploughshares or O Magazine, where a couple of the stories gathered in Five Tuesdays in Winter first appeared. But about half of these stories are new. All of them flash with brilliance.
King’s stories are mostly situated in New England in the 1980s, and her characters are often in adolescence, revealed at their moments of emerging into adult life and consciousness. Three tales are about would-be writers whose experiences shape them: a teen girl just beginning to consider writing, a woman in her early 20s trying to figure out her life, and, in the collection’s exhilaratingly surreal final story, “The Man at the Door,” a married mother being confronted about her audacity in thinking she has the right to write.
King places these lynchpin stories at the beginning, middle and end of the collection. But four other stories are from the perspectives of young men. This includes the astonishing “When in Dordogne,” in which a boy’s wealthy and neglectful parents leave their house in the care of two college students for the summer. “As I came with the house, these two college boys were obliged to take care of me, too,” the son observes sardonically. A disaster in the making, right? As it turns out, no. The college boys are funny, sensitive and caring. The story is a soulful exploration of male sensitivity and love.
The very satisfying title story is about the fairly rigid owner of a used bookstore, his teenage daughter and the bookstore’s sole employee, who agrees to teach Spanish to her boss’s daughter. Over five Tuesdays, a tentative and then quite wonderful relationship develops among the three of them.
King’s observations are both sharp and generous. Five Tuesdays in Winter is a collection worth dipping into again and again.
King's sharp and generous observations make for a story collection worth dipping into again and again.
Writer Owen King makes his fiction debut this summer with the publication of We're All in This Together, a collection that includes the novella of the title and four short stories. Ranging from serious to hilarious, from blunt to delicate, the volume showcases King's accomplished storytelling style. Here, he reflects on the people and places that have inspired his writing.
I sometimes worry that living in New York City will eventually jade me to eccentricity after all, everyone who lives here, who sleeps behind paper-thin walls, and who packs into the subway and rides ass-to-ass for an hour on a daily basis, has at least contemplated the possibility of descending into some florid, screaming insanity. As a New Yorker, when you see a man with a tie knotted around his head, goose-stepping around and around the statue of Gandhi in Union Square Park, cackling to himself and rapping Havah Nagilah, your best instinct is to keep right on going straight ahead and never look back. If you live in this city long enough, proximity teaches you to cut as wide a berth as possible. One realizes that another refrigerator leak, a few more sleepless nights on account of the stud operation next door, another evaluation without a raise, and that could very easily be you doing the Gandhi circuit.
For better or worse, however, I'm sure that it's no anomaly that as a writer I tend to be inspired by exactly that kind of self-displacement: What was that man doing two years ago? Does someone love him? How long will he keep going? Where does he go when he's finished? Why Gandhi, for God's sake? That is to say, I tend to start with a situation, or even just an image, and then use the story to try to figure it out: how did this happen, who was involved, in what ways did it change them.
For instance, in my new book, the story Wonders germinated from a (possibly apocryphal) anecdote about the great Red Sox outfielder Jim Rice: one game, as a pop fly took Rice to the edge of the stands, a fan reached out, took the hat right off Rice's head and went running. Then, the story went, the entire Red Sox team barreled into the stands to get the hat back. I had no idea if the story was true, but I wanted it to be, and although the scene it inspired turned out to be the end of Wonders, that was how I began.
I like to think that the bucolic hometown of my youth, Bangor, Maine, was rich in the peculiar episodes and individuals that make for promising fiction. (In the interest of full disclosure, I have to concede that by bucolic Maine town standards, my own family is as peculiar as any. My parents, Stephen and Tabitha King, are both authors, and during daylight hours, my father actually dozes in a large, leathery cocoon suspended from the rafters of the barn.*)
We're All In This Together, the novella that accounts for the bulk of my collection, was primarily inspired by my own feelings about the results of the 2000 election—I wasn't happy but the motor of the narrative belongs to the owner of Bangor's only billboard, a roughly 10×10 piece of miter board. This monument near the corner of Union Street and West Broadway stands angled on a brief, privately owned patch of grass in order to, somewhat charmingly and somewhat inexplicably, remind passersby of the seasons.
In the spring, the billboard will usually be covered with something like a rendering of frolicking puppies, along with the legend, SPRING. In the fall, we might get a tow-headed boy chasing a kite through a couple of swirling leaves, and in case that didn't fully explain it, the title FALL. While I've never learned the identity of the seasonal billboard artist, or if he or she means to convey some larger point about the dangers of forgetting the seasons, at some point in 2002, I had a daydream about getting my own billboard and writing down my feelings about the current administration in BIG BLACK LETTERS for everyone in the neighborhood to see. Of course, that was just a daydream; it wasn't something I would actually do. . . . But who would put up a sign that said all the angry things that I and so many people I knew were feeling about the direction of our country? Why would he do it? How would it change him?
The story I wrote ballooned to touch upon subjects ranging from organized labor to softcore television to fathers and stepfathers, but the seed was in that eccentric little billboard near the corner of Union and West Broadway.
* Kidding.
Writer Owen King makes his fiction debut this summer with the publication of We're All in This Together, a collection that includes the novella of the title and four short stories. Ranging from serious to hilarious, from blunt to delicate, the volume showcases King's accomplished…
“Would you like to edit a vampire anthology?” the editor asked me.
“Vampires?”
“Victorian vampires,” George clarified.
“I’m your man.” Fresh from writing my fourth book about natural science, I jumped at the thought of a holiday jaunt across misty moors.
The whole project was fun, but the best part was merging the two channels of my career: writing about nature and editing anthologies of fiction. After two collections of Victorian and Edwardian crime stories, this was my first venture into supernatural tales. I planned to include the stories that mark the moment when European writers turned folklore into a mythology of aristocratic decadence and the betrayal of innocence. In the vampire Bible, this collection would be Genesis.
To make this work I realized I had to write a natural history of vampires. So cousin Fritz is coming back from the grave to drink the blood of his widow— This idea did not come out of nowhere. Which natural phenomena were misinterpreted as supernatural evidence of vampires?
First, what can we say about vampires?
1) They’re dead. 2) Despite this considerable obstacle, they’re coming back from the grave. 3) So therefore they’re not really, exactly, precisely dead—not, you know, totally dead dead. 4) They vant to drink your blood.
All the rest varies. Some vampires are very pale, but then so is Taylor Swift, and she’s not a vampire. Probably. Some flee from a cross the way Superman dodges kryptonite, but others could march into a Baptist revival and not blink an eye. Many have a serious case of death breath, but clearly some sparkly tousled young boy vamps do not, or moody teenage girls would not be so eager to kiss them.
Death now is sanitized. How often do you see a dead body except on CSI? But until the last century this wasn’t the case. Often a vigil was held over the dear departed before the corpse—in those days before embalming—was hustled off to the grave. Traitors and murders were executed in public and their bodies left hanging on a gibbet. Rival religious factions might dig up each other’s dead and feed them to their dogs. Back then practically everybody could have whispered, “I see dead people.”
Often they saw corpses again after burial. Cemeteries were overcrowded, bodies stacked and spilling out, causing rampant disease, as well as insomnia-inspiring glimpses of your deceased Aunt Inga. People had strong ideas about what was normal in the grave, but like most of our ideas they had very little basis in reality. Any variation from this mythical norm was weighed as possible evidence of vampirism, in a thoughtful analysis reminiscent of this scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
What if you saw blood around a corpse’s lips? Often bodies were buried upside down, and because they were buried soon after death the blood pooled at the lowest points, which included the mouth. What about skin that seems to be glowing with life? Decomposition can cause skin to look flushed again after it loses its outer layer. What if you knew someone who couldn’t take sunlight? Perhaps he had porphyria, some kinds of which cause light sensitivity. What if dead hands looked like claws? Skin pulls away from the nails, making them look longer. The list goes on and on.
The most important thing I learned—feel free to take notes—is how to predict who might come back as a vampire. The list includes murderers, their victims, battlefield dead, the drowned, stroke victims, the first person to fall in an epidemic, heretics, wizards, and people who talk to themselves. And alcoholics. And grumpy people. And don’t forget women of ill repute. Oh, and redheads.
Michael Sims collects tales of the vampires throughout literature in the anthology Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories. He has brown hair.
“Would you like to edit a vampire anthology?” the editor asked me.
“Vampires?”
“Victorian vampires,” George clarified.
“I’m your man.” Fresh from writing my fourth book about natural science, I jumped at the thought of a holiday jaunt across misty moors.
The whole project was fun, but the best…
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Maria Ressa’s book is a political history of the Philippines and an intimate memoir, but it’s also a warning to democracies everywhere: Authoritarianism is a threat to us all.
Sean Adams has dialed down the dystopian quotient from his first satirical novel, The Heap, but that element is still very much present in The Thing in the Snow.
