Blood Is Not Enough: Stories of Vampirism
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Blood Is Not Enough: Stories of Vampirism
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Overview
Renowned editor Ellen Datlow has gathered seventeen variations on vampirism ranging from classically Gothic to postmodern satire, from horrific to erotic. These stories reflect the evolution of vampire literature from Bram Stoker to Anne Rice and beyond, resulting in a deeper exploration of their inner lives. Expanding the concept of vampirism to include the draining of a person’s will or life force, Datlow’s collection transcends the traditional “black capes and teeth marks on the neck” to reinvent an eternally fascinating subgenre of horror.
In Harlan Ellison’s “Try a Dull Knife,” an empath stumbles bleeding into a nightclub, on the run from emotional vampires. A Broadway actress steals the emotions of her fellow performers in “. . . To Feel Another’s Woe” by Chet Williamson. And in “The Sea Was Wet as Wet Could Be,” Gahan Wilson offers his own surreal twist on Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” as two strangers on a beach lure intoxicated picnickers to a different kind of picnic . . .
Blood Is Not Enough includes contributions by Dan Simmons, Gahan Wilson, Garry Kilworth, Harlan Ellison, Scott Baker, Leonid Andreyev, Harvey Jacobs, S. N. Dyer, Edward Bryant, Fritz Leiber, Tanith Lee, Susan Casper, Steve Rasnic Tem, Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann, Chet Williamson, Joe Haldeman, and Pat Cadigan.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504058308 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 07/09/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 300 |
| Sales rank: | 8,192 |
| File size: | 12 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Ellen Datlow, an acclaimed science fiction and fantasy editor, was born and raised in New York City. She has been a short story and book editor for more than thirty years and has edited or coedited several critically acclaimed anthologies of speculative fiction, including the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series and Black Thorn, White Rose (1994) with Terri Windling. Datlow has received numerous honors, including multiple Shirley Jackson, Bram Stoker, Hugo, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards, and Life Achievement Awards from the Horror Writers Association and the World Fantasy Association, to name just a few. She resides in New York.
Dan Simmons, a full-time public school teacher until 1987, is one of the few writers who consistently work across genres, and perhaps the only one to have won major awards in all of them. He has produced science fiction, horror, fantasy, and mainstream fiction, and is now launching stunning works in the thriller category. His first novel, Song of Kali, won the World Fantasy Award; his first science fiction novel, Hyperion, won the Hugo Award. His other novels and short fiction have been honored with numerous accolades, including nine Locus Awards, four Bram Stoker Awards, the French Prix Cosmos 2000, the British SF Association Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Award.
In 1995, Wabash College presented Simmons with an honorary doctorate in humane letters for his work in fiction and education. He lives in Colorado along the Front Range of the Rockies.
Gahan Wilson’s cartoons may be what he was most famous for, but he was a master of macabre writing as well. His cartoons, which appeared primarily in Playboy and The New Yorker, were gathered in over twenty book collections through the years. He wrote and illustrated a number of children’s books, mystery novels, several anthologies, and a collection of his own short stories.
Wilson was honored with the Horror Writer’s Association’s Life Achievement Award in 1992 and the 2004 Life Achievement Award given by the World Fantasy Convention. He died in 2019.
Harlan Ellison (1934–2018), in a career spanning more than fifty years, wrote or edited one hundred fourteen books; more than seventeen hundred stories, essays, articles, and newspaper columns; two dozen teleplays; and a dozen motion pictures. He won the Hugo Award eight and a half times (shared once); the Nebula Award three times; the Bram Stoker Award, presented by the Horror Writers Association, five times (including the Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996); the Edgar Allan Poe Award of the Mystery Writers of America twice; the Georges Melies Fantasy Film Award twice; and two Audie Awards (for the best in audio recordings); and he was awarded the Silver Pen for Journalism by PEN, the international writers’ union. He was presented with the first Living Legend Award by the International Horror Critics at the 1995 World Horror Convention. Ellison is the only author in Hollywood ever to win the Writers Guild of America award for Outstanding Teleplay (solo work) four times, most recently for “Paladin of the Lost Hour,” his Twilight Zone episode that was Danny Kaye’s final role, in 1987. In 2006, Ellison was awarded the prestigious title of Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Dreams with Sharp Teeth, the documentary chronicling his life and works, was released on DVD in May 2009. He passed away in 2018 at the age of eighty-four.
Fritz Leiber (1910–1992) was the highly acclaimed author of numerous science fiction stories and novels, many of which were made into films. He is best known as creator of the classic Lankhmar fantasy series. Leiber has won many awards, including the coveted Hugo and Nebula, and was honored as a lifetime Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America.
Tanith Lee (1947–2015) was born in the United Kingdom. Although she couldn’t read until she was eight, she began writing at nine and never stopped, producing more than ninety novels and three hundred short stories. She also wrote for the BBC television series Blake’s 7 and various BBC radio plays. After winning the 1980 British Fantasy Award for her novel Death’s Master, endless awards followed. She was named a World Horror Grand Master in 2009 and honored with the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2013. Lee was married to artist and writer John Kaiine.
Steve Rasnic Tem is a winner of the Bram Stoker, World Fantasy, and British Fantasy Awards. He has published five hundred short stories in his decades-long career. Some of his best are collected in Thanatrauma, Figures Unseen, and The Night Doctor & Other Tales. You can find him at www.stevetem.com.
Joe Haldeman began his writing career while he was still in the army. Drafted in 1967, he fought in the Central Highlands of Vietnam as a combat engineer with the Fourth Division. He was awarded several medals, including a Purple Heart.
Haldeman sold his first story in 1969 and has since written over two dozen novels and five collections of short stories and poetry. He has won the Nebula and Hugo Awards for his novels, novellas, poems, and short stories, as well as the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Locus Award, the Rhysling Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. His works include The Forever War, Forever Peace, Camouflage, 1968, the Worlds saga, and the Marsbound series.
Haldeman recently retired after many years as an associate professor in the Department of Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He and his wife, Gay, live in Florida, where he also paints, plays the guitar, rides his bicycle, and studies the skies with his telescope.
Pat Cadigan is the author of more than a dozen books, including two nonfiction titles, a young adult novel, and two Arthur C. Clarke Award–winning novels, Synners and Fools. She has won two Scribe Awards for a novelization of Alita: Battle Angel and an adaptation of William Gibson’s unproduced screenplay for Alien 3, along with three Locus Awards and a Hugo Award for her novelette “The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi.” Pat lives in North London with her husband, Chris Fowler.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
CARRION
COMFORT
Dan Simmons
What attracts me to this story (and intrigues me) is the southern gentility of these human monsters as they reminisce over the parts they played in the death of innocents. Most people have the ability to manipulate others by psychological gamesmanship — but what if you could do it by sheer force of will? Simmons has since expanded the novelette into a novel, as yet unpublished.
Nina was going to take credit for the death of the Beatle, John. I thought that was in very bad taste. She had her scrapbook laid out on my mahogany coffee table, newspaper clippings neatly arranged in chronological order, the bald statements of death recording all of her Feedings. Nina Drayton's smile was radiant, but her pale-blue eyes showed no hint of warmth.
"We should wait for Willi," I said.
"Of course, Melanie. You're right, as always. How silly of me. I know the rules." Nina stood and began walking around the room, idly touching the furnishings or exclaiming softly over a ceramic statuette or piece of needlepoint. This part of the house had once been the conservatory, but now I used it as my sewing room. Green plants still caught the morning light. The light made it a warm, cozy place in the daytime, but now that winter had come the room was too chilly to use at night. Nor did I like the sense of darkness closing in against all those panes of glass.
"I love this house," said Nina.
She turned and smiled at me. "I can't tell you how much I look forward to coming back to Charleston. We should hold all of our reunions here."
I knew how much Nina loathed this city and this house.
"Willi would be hurt," I said. "You know how he likes to show off his place in Beverly Hills — and his new girlfriends."
"And boyfriends," Nina said, laughing. Of all the changes and darkenings in Nina, her laugh has been least affected. It was still the husky but childish laugh that I had first heard so long ago. It had drawn me to her then — one lonely, adolescent girl responding to the warmth of another as a moth to a flame. Now it served only to chill me and put me even more on guard. Enough moths had been drawn to Nina's flame over the many decades.
"I'll send for tea," I said.
Mr. Thorne brought the tea in my best Wedgwood china. Nina and I sat in the slowly moving squares of sunlight and spoke softly of nothing important: mutually ignorant comments on the economy, references to books that the other had not gotten around to reading, and sympathetic murmurs about the low class of persons one meets while flying these days. Someone peering in from the garden might have thought he was seeing an aging but attractive niece visiting her favorite aunt. (I drew the line at suggesting that anyone would mistake us for mother and daughter.) People usually consider me a well-dressed if not stylish person. Heaven knows I have paid enough to have the wool skirts and silk blouses mailed from Scotland and France. But next to Nina I've always felt dowdy.
This day she wore an elegant, light-blue dress that must have cost several thousand dollars. The color made her complexion seem even more perfect than usual and brought out the blue of her eyes. Her hair had gone as gray as mine, but somehow she managed to get away with wearing it long and tied back with a single barrette. It looked youthful and chic on Nina and made me feel that my short artificial curls were glowing with a blue rinse.
Few would suspect that I was four years younger than Nina. Time had been kind to her. And she had Fed more often.
She set down her cup and saucer and moved aimlessly around the room again. It was not like Nina to show such signs of nervousness. She stopped in front of the glass display case. Her gaze passed over the Hummels and the pewter pieces and then stopped in surprise.
"Good heavens, Melanie. A pistol! What an odd place to put an old pistol."
"It's an heirloom," I said. "A Colt Peacemaker from right after the War Between the States. Quite expensive. And you're right, it is a silly place to keep it. But it's the only case I have in the house with a lock on it and Mrs. Hodges often brings her grandchildren when she visits —"
"You mean it's loaded?"
"No, of course not," I lied. "But children should not play with such things ..." I trailed off lamely. Nina nodded but did not bother to conceal the condescension in her smile. She went to look out the south window into the garden.
Damn her. It said volumes about Nina that she did not recognize that pistol.
On the day he was killed, Charles Edgar Larchmont had been my beau for precisely five months and two days. There had been no formal announcement, but we were to be married. Those five months had been a microcosm of the era itself — naive, flirtatious, formal to the point of preciosity, and romantic. Most of all, romantic. Romantic in the worst sense of the word: dedicated to saccharine or insipid ideals that only an adolescent — or an adolescent society — would strive to maintain. We were children playing with loaded weapons.
Nina, she was Nina Hawkins then, had her own beau — a tall, awkward, but well-meaning Englishman named Roger Harrison. Mr. Harrison had met Nina in London a year earlier, during the first stages of the Hawkinses' Grand Tour. Declaring himself smitten — another absurdity of those times — the tall Englishman had followed her from one European capital to another until, after being firmly reprimanded by Nina's father (an unimaginative little milliner who was constantly on the defensive about his doubtful social status), Harrison returned to London to "settle his affairs." Some months later he showed up in New York just as Nina was being packed off to her aunt's home in Charleston in order to terminate yet another flirtation. Still undaunted, the clumsy Englishman followed her south, ever mindful of the protocols and restrictions of the day.
We were a gay group. The day after I met Nina at Cousin Celia's June ball, the four of us were taking a hired boat up the Cooper River for a picnic on Daniel Island. Roger Harrison, serious and solemn on every topic, was a perfect foil for Charles's irreverent sense of humor. Nor did Roger seem to mind the good-natured jesting, since he was soon joining in the laughter with his peculiar haw-haw-haw.
Nina loved it all. Both gentlemen showered attention on her, and although Charles never failed to show the primacy of his affection for me, it was understood by all that Nina Hawkins was one of those young women who invariably becomes the center of male gallantry and attention in any gathering. Nor were the social strata of Charleston blind to the combined charm of our foursome. For two months of that now-distant summer, no party was complete, no excursion adequately planned, and no occasion considered a success unless we four were invited and had chosen to attend. Our happy dominance of the youthful social scene was so pronounced that Cousins Celia and Loraine wheedled their parents into leaving two weeks early for their annual August sojourn in Maine.
I am not sure when Nina and I came up with the idea of the duel. Perhaps it was during one of the long, hot nights when the other "slept over" — creeping into the other's bed, whispering and giggling, stifling our laughter when the rustling of starched uniforms betrayed the presence of our colored maids moving through the darkened halls. In any case, the idea was the natural outgrowth of the romantic pretensions of the time. The picture of Charles and Roger actually dueling over some abstract point of honor relating to us thrilled both of us in a physical way that I recognize now as a simple form of sexual titillation.
It would have been harmless except for the Ability. We had been so successful in our manipulation of male behavior — a manipulation that was both expected and encouraged in those days — that neither of us had yet suspected that there was anything beyond the ordinary in the way we could translate our whims into other people's actions. The field of parapsychology did not exist then; or rather, it existed only in the tappings and knockings of parlor-game seances. At any rate, we amused ourselves for several weeks with whispered fantasies, and then one of us — or perhaps both of us — used the Ability to translate the fantasy into reality.
In a sense, it was our first Feeding.
I do not remember the purported cause of the quarrel, perhaps some deliberate misinterpretation of one of Charles's jokes. I cannot recall who Charles and Roger arranged to have serve as seconds on that illegal outing. I do remember the hurt and confused expression on Roger Harrison's face during those few days. It was a caricature of ponderous dullness, the confusion of a man who finds himself in a situation not of his making and from which he cannot escape. I remember Charles and his mercurial swings of mood — the bouts of humor, periods of black anger, and the tears and kisses the night before the duel.
I remember with great clarity the beauty of that morning. Mists were floating up from the river and diffusing the rays of the rising sun as we rode out to the dueling field. I remember Nina reaching over and squeezing my hand with an impetuous excitement that was communicated through my body like an electric shock.
Much of the rest of that morning is missing. Perhaps in the intensity of that first, subconscious Feeding, I literally lost consciousness as I was engulfed in the waves of fear, excitement, pride — of maleness — emanating from our two beaus as they faced death on that lovely morning. I remember experiencing the shock of realizing, this is really happening, as I shared the tread of high boots through the grass. Someone was calling off the paces. I dimly recall the weight of the pistol in my hand — Charles's hand, I think; I will never know for sure — and a second of cold clarity before an explosion broke the connection, and the acrid smell of gunpowder brought me back to myself.
It was Charles who died. I have never been able to forget the incredible quantities of blood that poured from the small, round hole in his breast. His white shirt was crimson by the time I reached him. There had been no blood in our fantasies. Nor had there been the sight of Charles with his head lolling, mouth dribbling saliva onto his bloodied chest while his eyes rolled back to show the whites like two eggs embedded in his skull.
Roger Harrison was sobbing as Charles breathed his final, shuddering gasps on that field of innocence.
I remember nothing at all about the confused hours that followed. The next morning I opened my cloth bag to find Charles's pistol lying with my things. Why would I have kept that revolver? If I had wished to take something from my fallen lover as a sign of remembrance, why that alien piece of metal? Why pry from his dead fingers the symbol of our thoughtless sin?
It said volumes about Nina that she did not recognize that pistol.
"Willi's here," announced Nina's amanuensis, the loathsome Miss Barrett Kramer. Kramer's appearance was as unisex as her name: short-cropped, black hair, powerful shoulders, and a blank, aggressive gaze that I associated with lesbians and criminals. She looked to be in her mid-thirties.
"Thank you, Barrett dear," said Nina.
Both of us went out to greet Willi, but Mr. Thorne had already let him in, and we met in the hallway.
"Melanie! You look marvelous! You grow younger each time I see you. Nina!" The change in Willi's voice was evident. Men continued to be overpowered by their first sight of Nina after an absence. There were hugs and kisses. Willi himself looked more dissolute than ever. His alpaca sport coat was exquisitely tailored, his turtleneck sweater successfully concealed the eroded lines of his wattled neck, but when he swept off his jaunty sports-car cap the long strands of white hair he had brushed forward to hide his encroaching baldness were knocked into disarray. Willi's face was flushed with excitement, but there was also the telltale capillary redness about the nose and cheeks that spoke of too much liquor, too many drugs.
"Ladies, I think you've met my associates, Tom Luhar and Jenson Reynolds?" The two men added to the crowd in my narrow hall. Mr. Luhar was thin and blond, smiling with perfectly capped teeth. Mr. Reynolds was a gigantic Negro, hulking forward with a sullen, bruised look on his coarse face. I was sure that neither Nina nor I had encountered these specific cat's-paws of Willi's before. It did not matter.
"Why don't we go into the parlor?" I suggested. It was an awkward procession ending with the three of us seated on the heavily upholstered chairs surrounding the Georgian tea table that had been my grandmother's. "More tea, please, Mr. Thorne." Miss Kramer took that as her cue to leave, but Willi's two pawns stood uncertainly by the door, shifting from foot to foot and glancing at the crystal on display as if their mere proximity could break something. I would not have been surprised if that had proved to be the case.
"Jense!" Willi snapped his fingers. The Negro hesitated and then brought forward an expensive leather attache case. Willi set it on the tea table and clicked the catches open with his short, broad fingers. "Why don't you two see Mrs. Fuller's man about getting something to drink?"
When they were gone Willi shook his head and smiled apologetically at Nina. "Sorry about that, Love."
Nina put her hand on Willi's sleeve. She leaned forward with an air of expectancy. "Melanie wouldn't let me begin the Game without you. Wasn't that awful of me to want to start without you, Willi dear?"
Willi frowned. After fifty years he still bridled at being called Willi. In Los Angeles he was Big Bill Borden. When he returned to his native Germany — which was not often because of the dangers involved — he was once again Wilhelm von Borchert, lord of dark manor, forest, and hunt. But Nina had called him Willi when they had first met in 1931 in Vienna, and Willi he had remained.
"You begin, Willi dear," said Nina. "You go first."
I could remember the time when we would have spent the first few days of our reunion in conversation and catching up with one another's lives. Now there was not even time for small talk.
Willi showed his teeth and removed news clippings, notebooks, and a stack of cassettes from his briefcase. No sooner had he covered the small table with his material than Mr. Thorne arrived with the tea and Nina's scrapbook from the sewing room. Willi brusquely cleared a small space.
At first glance one might see certain similarities between Willi Borchert and Mr. Thorne. One would be mistaken. Both men tended to the florid, but Willi's complexion was the result of excess and emotion; Mr. Thorne had known neither of these for many years. Willi's balding was a patchy, self- consciously concealed thing — a weasel with mange; Mr. Thorne's bare head was smooth and unwrinkled. One could not imagine Mr. Thorne ever having had hair. Both men had gray eyes — what a novelist would call cold, gray eyes — but Mr. Thorne's eyes were cold with indifference, cold with a clarity coming from an absolute absence of troublesome emotion or thought. Willi's eyes were the cold of a blustery North Sea winter and were often clouded with shifting curtains of the emotions that controlled him — pride, hatred, love of pain, the pleasures of destruction.
Willi never referred to his use of the Ability as Feedings — I was evidently the only one who thought in those terms — but Willi sometimes talked of The Hunt. Perhaps it was the dark forests of his homeland that he thought of as he stalked his human quarry through the sterile streets of Los Angeles. Did Willi dream of the forest, I wondered. Did he look back to green wool hunting jackets, the applause of retainers, the gouts of blood from the dying boar? Or did Willi remember the slam of jack-boots on cobblestones and the pounding of his lieutenants' fists on doors? Perhaps Willi still associated his Hunt with the dark European night of the ovens that he had helped to oversee.
I called it Feeding. Willi called it The Hunt. I had never heard Nina call it anything.
"Where is your VCR?" Willi asked. "I have put them all on tape."
"Oh, Willi," said Nina in an exasperated tone. "You know Melanie. She's so old-fashioned. You know she wouldn't have a video player."
"I don't even have a television," I said. Nina laughed.
"Goddamn it," muttered Willi. "It doesn't matter. I have other records here." He snapped rubber bands from around the small, black notebooks. "It just would have been better on tape. The Los Angeles stations gave much coverage to the Hollywood Strangler, and I edited in the ... Ach! Never mind."
He tossed the videocassettes into his briefcase and slammed the lid shut.
"Twenty-three," he said. "Twenty-three since we met twelve months ago. It doesn't seem that long, does it?"
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Blood Is Not Enough"
by .
Copyright © 1989 Ellen Datlow.
Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction Ellen Datlow,
Carrion Comfort Dan Simmons,
The Sea Was Wet as Wet Could Be Gahan Wilson,
The Silver Collar Garry Kilworth,
Try a Dull Knife Harlan Ellison.,
Varicose Worms Scott Baker,
Lazarus Leonid Andreyev,
L'Chaim! Harvey Jacobs,
Return of the Dust Vampires S.N. Dyer,
Good Kids Edward Bryant,
The Girl with the Hungry Eyes Fritz Leiber,
The Janfia Tree Tanith Lee,
A Child of Darkness Susan Casper,
Nocturne Steve Rasnic Tem,
Down Among the Dead Men Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann,
... To Feel Another's Woe Chet Williamson,
Time Lapse Joe Haldeman,
Dirty Work Pat Cadigan,
Contributors' Notes,
Acknowledgments,
A Biography of Ellen Datlow,
