1990s Vampire Stories by R Bloch, K Koja & B Malzberg and T Lee

Everybody loves vampires.  The vampire is the perfect metaphor: as a soulless monster who sucks your blood, leftists can see the vampire as a metaphor for business people and the capitalist bourgeoisie while right-wingers can see the vampire as a metaphor for the government and people who live off the taxpayers.  As an individual who has unusual interests and abilities and is hounded and hunted by the mainstream, the vampire can represent your favorite marginalized or oppressed minority.  And the vampire is sexy!  The vampire charms you by looking into your eyes and then puts his or her mouth on your neck and makes you his or her slave!  Hot!    

Whoever you are, the vampire speaks to you.  And so vampire stories flow from the pens of members of the literary class like a swarm of bats or a river of blood and the libraries and bookstores are stuffed with books that are full of vampire stories.  One of these books came to my attention recently--1997's Girls' Night Out, edited by Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg.  Messrs. Dziemianowicz, Weinberg and Greenberg, and their publishers, Barnes & Noble Books, market this anthology as a feminist blow against our patriarchal culture which, they say, sees the vampire as a male figure.  You have to wonder if D, W and G and B & N actually believe this, seeing as our popular culture has been full of female vampires for over a century: there are multiple female vampires in Dracula (1897), Vampira was on TV in the mid-1950s, Lily Munster (1964) is a vampire, Vampirella arrived on the scene in 1969, and female vampires appeared in many films before 1997.  

Well, I didn't buy Girls' Night Out in order to attack D, W and G for saying things they don't believe in order to sell copies of their anthology or stay in the good graces of college professors or whatever; I bought it because it contains 1990s stories by Kathe Koja and Barry Malzberg, Tanith Lee, and Robert Bloch that I can't seem to find on the internet archive, and it is these stories I will talk about today.

"The Scent of Vinegar" by Robert Bloch (1994)

Here's some MPorcius trivia: I'm one of those people who cleans everything with baking soda and vinegar because he's afraid of getting harsh chemicals on his sensitive skin.  There goes your vision of me as a rugged he-man!

As readers of this blog know, Robert Bloch never tires of telling us that Hollywood is sleazy and corrupt, and this undisputed fact is a major theme of this award-winning story.  The protagonist of "The Scent of Vinegar" is Greg, a cinema history buff and Hollywood trivia nerd who is also a drug addict and would-be blackmailer of rich Hollyweird has-beens.  When we meet him he is following up rumors of a long abandoned whorehouse in some out-of-the-way spot near Beverly Hills because he thinks there might be documents in this dump which he can use to squeeze money out of the place's former clients.  Bloch also exploits Westerners' fascination with the mysterious East (or as we used to call it, "the Orient"): when the brothel was abandoned it was being operated by an Asian madam who staffed the place with girls from places like Malaya and catered to clients interested in S&M, and Bloch makes the centerpiece of his story the penangallan, the monster of South East Asian folklore which I am sure many of my readers remember from the Fiend Folio.  Bloch structures "The Scent of Vinegar" like a hard-boiled crime story--Greg worms clues out of old guys with whom he gets into conversation, discovers the brothel, flees when he sees something horrible there, but then is forced at gunpoint to return to the whorehouse by a criminal more ruthless and competent than he is who requires a guide.  On this second trip to the place he swore he'd never return Greg runs a gauntlet of horror featuring a fountain of blood, a pile of skeletons, evidence of cannibalism and a hands-on experience of murder!      

This is a good story.  First of all, I want to tell you that Bloch doesn't waste our time with his psychological mumbo jumbo or his distracting puns, and he keeps the Hollywood references under control; those that do appear are pretty appropriate.  This restraint is what we in the sciences call "a necessary but not sufficient condition."  More importantly, Bloch does a great job with the descriptions of the old brothel, of Greg's climb up an unmaintained dirt track to the crest of the hill where sits the forgotten whorehouse, and of the penangallan and the bones and all that gross stuff.  Maybe today's readers will wince at how Bloch repeatedly describes Asian characters' eyes as "slanted" and their skin as "golden," and Greg's use of a slur for Asians that sounds like the name of Gwyneth Paltrow's snake-oil retailing enterprise, but Greg isn't working in the HR department at a small liberal arts college in 2020, he's a drug-addicted thief in 1990!  Cut this lowlife some slack and respect his lived reality!  (And it's not like the Asians don't get their revenge on him in the end!)      

Thumbs up!  I think Bloch's reputation is inflated, but sometimes he lives up to it, and he does so here.  "The Scent of Vinegar," after making its debut in the anthology Dark Destiny, won a Stoker award, and was included in the 1995 edition of Stephen Jones's Best New Horror and in the 2012 volume The Horror Hall of Fame: The Stoker Winners.

"Girl's Night Out" by Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg (1995)

In a recently released interview of Barry N. Malzberg by Alec Nevala-Lee (I heard about it through Joachim Boaz's twitter feed) New Jersey's own Barry says that his collaborations with Kathe Koja are among his very best work and talks at some length about how great it was to work with Koja.  I bought this book just in time!  This interview is like two hours long and covers a lot of ground, and if you are at all interested in Malzberg, Koja, John W. Campbell Jr., Dean Koontz, Robert Silverberg, Philip Roth, J. G. Ballard, Ted White, Poul Anderson, or Sol Cohen, or just want to hear a guy bitch that SF has never recovered from the influence of your favorite 1977 film, you should definitely give it a listen while washing the dishes or weeding the garden or whatever.

isfdb lists like twenty Koja-Malzberg colabs, and "Girl's Night Out" is, I think, the ninth listed.  It made its debut in Martin H. Greenberg's anthology Vampire Detectives and has not been printed anywhere else since its appearance here in the book for which it serves as the title story (give or take an apostrophe.)  After Barry's ringing endorsement of these stories I think the world needs a convenient collection of all the Koja-Malzberg collaborations, each with a long rambling intro from the authors--come on publishing world, make this happen!

"Girl's Night Out" is like 14 pages long, and it is a downer about not only the supernatural horrors no sensible person really believes in but the horrors of our everyday career and relationship lives that we wish we could forget!  The first paragraphs of the story are about how the main characters are getting old and fat!  

Annie is a 36-year-old police detective who has been dating Marvin, 42, for some years; her relationship with him is neither sexually nor psychologically satisfying--she doesn't have an orgasm when they have sex and he doesn't really support her in her career, instead pointing out how corrupt the government is and how her efforts to fight crime are pointless.  Marvin owns a copy shop, which he started with money he borrowed from Annie--$7,500!--and copies and replication are a theme of the story.

On a cold night (cold is another recurring theme of the tale) when she is particularly unhappy with her relationship with Marvin and with her job (in her youth she had wanted to be a botanist) Annie finds a pretty pale woman in a dumpster--she is cold and has an injury, and Annie assumes she is dead, but the woman then moves and her wound disappears.  Koja and Malzberg describe in a somewhat oblique manner how Annie becomes fascinated by this woman, Sylvia, has her move in with her, and then learns from Sylvia "the truth" about men and how to dominate them--in the final scene Annie lures Marvin to her apartment and kills him in a way that suggests rape and drinks his blood, repeating like a mantra "I am Sylvia."  I guess Sylvia has turned Annie into a murderous vampire (a copy of herself) and perhaps also a lesbian; maybe we are not necessarily supposed to see this (solely) as an imposition on Annie, as Sylvia enslaving Annie and turning her into a monster, but as Sylvia, like a radical revolutionary liberating a prole from his false consciousness and convincing him to take up arms against the bourgeoisie, winning Annie over to feminism and helping her strike a blow at the patriarchy, at the men who are the "real" vampires who use their superior strength to exploit women but have weaknesses bold women can use to destroy them.   

A good horror story with something disturbing on every page and enough ambiguity that different readers may disagree over what is exactly most disturbing about it. 

The marketing department wants me to provide you this list of Kathe Koja stories I've already written about here at MPorcius Fiction Log:

"Angels in Love"

"Ruby Tuesday" 

"What We Did That Summer" (with Barry Malzberg)

"Mysterious Elisions, Riotous Thrusts" (with Barry Malzberg)

"In the Greenhouse" (with Barry Malzberg)

"La Dame" by Tanith Lee (1995)

"La Dame" made its debut in Sisters of the Night, an anthology of stories about female vampires edited by Barbara Hambly and the very Martin H. Greenberg who was third editor on Girls' Night Out.  It would go on to be included in the 1996 edition of Ellen Datlow and Terri Wilding's The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror and the Lee collection Animate Objects.   

For the last fourteen years, 28-year-old Jeluc has been a soldier fighting in the interminable wars, living in the mud with bullets narrowly missing him, round shot killing his comrades, etc.  As a kid his grandfather had a fishing boat and Jeluc is still an able sailor, and now that he has been paid off by his regiment and left the soldiering life he wants to go to sea.  In a depressed fishing village he buys a small white vessel that one seaman can handle, La Dame, and sets out alone, only to find the little ship is haunted.  No bird will land on its single mast, no fish will bite at the lines he baits everyday.  His dreams and his days are full of visions of men, some whom he knew in the wars and were killed, others he has never met who seem familiar with La Dame, all of whom seem to be warning him, and of a woman, pale and blonde and skinny, "her face all bones," who seems to represent or to be La Dame or the sea, which Jeluc's grandfather had told him was female, a demander of sacrifices and a devourer of men.  Jeluc and La Dame become lost, no land in sight for days, and finally the woman of his visions appears to Jeluc clad in red and bites his throat and he is lost forever.

This twelve-page story is well-written, all the sentences and images being good, and the themes--a man so weary of war in the mud and trees that he wants to leave the land forever; woman as devourer of man--are also good, so I liked it.  But it does feel a little slight, I think because it moves in a straight line to where we always knew it was going without any twists or turns or surprises; La Dame sails forward with a sort of inevitability that leaves the reader wanting more.         

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All three of these stories are good, so I've definitely got my money's worth out of Girls' Night Out.  In our next blog post we'll double down and read three more stories from this volume, so stay tuned for more female vampire goodness.