Blood Sisters_ Vampire Stories by Women - Paula Guran Page 0,4

womb, and lots and lots of blood, sex, drugs, cheap wine, and Twinkies.” But that’s also a pretty accurate description of what became a cult classic for a generation of alienated youth. The sex is bi- or homosexual, occasionally incestuous and usually graphic; the use of drugs may well have established a new metaphor for vampirism. Brite’s vampires were a separate species who do not turn humans into vampires, although they can interbreed with them. (Vampiric infants kill their mothers of either species at their gory births.) Most fed on blood, but some found sustenance otherwise. The oldest (close to four hundred years old) is fanged, is sensitive to sunlight, and cannot imbibe in human food or drink. Younger (only about a century old) vampires filed their otherwise normal teeth to points, could tolerate the sun, and eat and drink. Like more traditional vampires, they healed easily, were very strong, and had superhuman senses. They evidently lack other commonly portrayed paranormal powers. Destroying the heart or brain (or giving birth) could kill Brite’s vampires.

In another debut novel, AfterAge (1993) by Yvonne Navarro, vampires took over the world and wiped out most of humanity. Running low on their food supply, the vamps started capturing and breeding people like cattle. Although the tropes of vampirism having a scientific basis and bloodsuckers conquering Earth echoed Matheson’s I Am Legend, Navarro played the plot more like a war novel with a stalwart band of survivors defeating conquering invaders with savvy, spunk, and science.

Toward the end of the last century—sometime after the release of Laurell K. Hamilton’s fourth Anita Blake Vampire Hunter fantasy novel, The Lunatic Café (1996), perhaps during the second (1997-1998) or third (1998-1999) season of television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and just before Christine Feehan’s romance Dark Prince (1999)—the first of her Dark series—was published, vampires started getting “hot.”

The “good guy” vampire—usually sexy, often romantic, sometimes redeemed or redeemable, sometimes ever-heroic—started to dominate pop culture. So did sexy-but-empowered female vamps and kick-ass vampire hunters.

Paranormal romance and “urban fantasy”—the terms and their applications were not always clearly delineated—became extremely popular for about a decade. The demand for these types of books gave many women new opportunities to offer their versions of the vampire mythos to the public in both novels and short fiction.

The romance genre is not really this anthology’s territory. One practical reason is that romance does not lend itself to short fiction well; another is that I intentionally wanted a diverse mix of stories. Yes, the romantic is definitely an element in some of these tales of speculative fiction, but it is not the central theme. And a romance is a romance—that is its theme.

Novels—like those pioneered by Lee Killough and Tanya Huff—that mixed the supernatural with detection/mystery and romantic relationships are, however, our turf. Primarily fantasies, these plots are set in alternate versions of a contemporary or near-future world much like our own in which the supernatural (including vampires) is present either publicly or hidden from most of humankind. And, for practical purposes, you frequently find this type of fiction (often as extensions of or additions to novel series) in the short form.

Anita Blake’s adventures, related in Laurel K. Hamilton’s series, assume a world in which vampires and were-creatures have gained legal rights. Beginning with Guilty Pleasures in 1993, the twenty-first Anita Blake novel will be published in 2015.

Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mystery series (now usually referred to as the Sookie Stackhouse novels) also posits a world in which vampires have “come out of the casket” and established themselves legally. The central character, a psychic waitress, solves mysteries in each outing. Starting with Dead Until Dark (2001) and ending in 2013 with the thirteenth Sookie Stackhouse novel, Dead Ever After, the series gained even more widespread popularity when True Blood premiered on HBO in 2008. The television show, both a critical and financial success, ran seven seasons, ending in 2014.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, numerous series featuring vampires—both good and evil—became bestsellers. But Twilight (2005)—a vampire fantasy/romance for teens by Stephanie Meyer—its three sequels and consequent films, propelled the blandly romantic, pretty boy/man vampire hero to stratospheric levels of popularity.

Although generally disdained critically and considered more of a romance than a fantasy, Twilight’s “sparkly vampires”—so named because her immortal bloodsuckers can live in sunlight; they avoid it because their cold, hard bodies sparkle “like thousands of tiny diamonds” in bright sunshine—may have served a vampiric purpose beyond the commercial. Meyerpires had a keen emotional affect on