Blood Sisters_ Vampire Stories by Women - Paula Guran Page 0,2

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 vampire 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