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It’s true that few of us
would choose the life of a zombie, mindlessly
consuming every moving thing in sight as we rot
and shrivel with decay. It’s also true that few
of us would choose to become a ghost, dolefully
watching the comings and goings of the living,
unable to touch, to breathe, to feel them in a
physical way. But, if given the chance to become
a vampire, I think most of us would bite.
There is something elegant
about an immortal, something transformative. The
chance to keep a bit of ourselves after we
shuffle off this mortal coil is alluring to
those of us who fear the void. It matters little
that the price of this immortality is that we
must sustain it on the blood of the living.
There are ways around the guilt of that. Simply
take a tip from Dexter and kill only the guilty.
Or a nod from more recent vampires of popular
culture and survive off pig’s blood or sewer
rats instead of people.
This romantic image of the
vampire certainly has invaded our popular
culture, and it’s not ironic that the very image
we hold in our minds of the suave,
blood-drinking ladies man originated in the
Romantic literary period, a time rife with death
and the supernatural. Today, vampires are
sexually promiscuous, passionate creatures that
stalk and sparkle and sometimes get back their
souls.
It’s no wonder, then, that
the concept of vampire has existed throughout
our history. In the middle ages, European people
lived under the very real threat of vampire
invasion and responded to suspected vampires by
unearthing their graves, decapitating and
staking the shriveled husks found within.
Sometimes, they’d even burn them quick as
tinder. In other cultures around the globe, too,
there are vampires popping up in folklore and
history books. The Malaysians have their
langsuyars, women who sustained their
immortality on the blood of infants, and the
ancient Greeks and Romans wrote of lamiae,
serpentine women who drank the souls of men.
And, of course, there is no
shortage of people who think they are vampires
living among us even today. You need only visit
the local Gothic club and scan the
black-eye-lined faces for a few short minutes
before you spot a pair of glue-on fangs poking
out over the bottom lip of one of the club’s
inhabitants. The stake-hards, of course,
actually have their teeth chiseled into
vampire-like fangs. And the truly pernicious
night-stalkers take it to a whole new level,
committing murder in the name of vampirism,
though this crew is a significantly small
percentage.
With all these people running
around believing themselves to be vampires, it’s
a wonder there aren’t more people stuffing
stakes into their backpacks and Buffying up the
local cemetery Van Helsing style. After all, if
vampires have persisted in folklore, myth,
history, and even now in our present day,
shouldn’t there be more self-proclaimed vampire
hunters out there? But, it’s the real vampires that make our pulses
quicken: whether they are the velveteen figures
of Anne Rice or Bram Stoker, or the violent
monsters of Stephen King, we don’t care. Not the
hunters. Not the hopefuls. The real,
blood-drinking, neck-biting fiends. Vampires are
timeless because they are immortal. And the
vampires in these pages may just come back to
bite you in the end. These are stories you can
really sink your teeth into. Promise.
(FOREWORD
BY ARAMINTA STAR MATTHEWS)
Voices Carry (TOM
WORTMAN)
Fountain of Flesh
(NICKY PEACOCK)
Dawn Hunter (EARL
PARRISH)
Green Eyes and Chili Dogs
(KEVIN DAVID ANDERSON)
Cosmina (CHRISTOPHER
LEPPEK & EMANUEL ISLER)
Rite of Passage (LORI
MICHELLE)
7 Hours (MAX BOOTH
III)
Liquid Blue (DREW
WILCOX)
Ordering Out (KENNETH
W. CAIN)
To The Last Drop (ERIC
GRAWE)
Sekhmet’s Daughters
(C. W. LaSART)
Entangled (JENNIFER
LEFSYK)
The Spy Who Bit Me
(LORELEI BELL)
An Unusual Occurrence at
Pointe Laurent (MARYKATHRYN GELISSE)
Tough Love (DAVID
THOMAS)
The Taste of Love
(RENEE PAWLISH)
State of Grace (TARA
FOX HALL)
Transmogrify (RICHARD
THOMAS)
The Key to Happiness
(PENELOPE CROWE)
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