No doubt you recall our foray into The Mammoth Book of Erotica. There is a Mammoth Book of most everything at this point; we can probably look forward to The Mammoth Book of Coronavirus Tales someday. So let's seek our vampires in The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women, edited by the indefatigable Stephen Jones and first published in 2001, picking out tales by three people we have talked about before here at MPorcius Fiction Log, Poppy Z. Brite, Tanith Lee, and Melanie Tem. You won't be surprised to hear I am reading from a scan of the book available at the internet archive. If that check for $1,200 that just mysteriously appeared in your bank account is burning a hole in your pocket you can pick up a trade paperback copy on ebay for less than $6.00.
"Homewrecker" by Poppy Z. Brite (1998)
This story is like two and a half pages long, but it is chock full of stuff that is gross, like hints of incest, explicit nonconsensual sex, vomit, and animal blood. Brite also skillfully packs an entire traditional horror story plot into this tiny space while piling on the memorable (albeit gross) images.
Our narrator is a young boy who lives with his "Uncle Edna" (birth name Ed Slopes,) a crossdressing homosexual who works at a slaughterhouse killing pigs by day and wears lipstick and women's dresses at night. The narrator has to make sure Uncle Edna's perfumed bath is ready when he gets home or he gets beat--when Uncle Edna beats the narrator he (Edna) gets an erection.
An Uncle Jude used to live with Edna and the narrator, but a few years ago a woman, a Verna, somehow stole him away. Edna is still bitter about it, often ranting about that "bitch who stole his man" and banging the table and so on. One day the narrator hears that Verna is back in town (no sign of long lost Jude, though.) Fearing that Edna might murder Verna, the narrator provides oral sex to another kid in exchange for some Xanax, and uses the drugs to knock out Edna before he finds out the homewrecker is back in town. When the narrator goes to talk to Verna, in hopes of learning something about the whereabouts of Jude, we readers realize Verna is a vampire who gets her kicks from using her hypnotic powers to get gay men to have sex with her. She uses these powers on the teen-age narrator, and not only fellates him against his will (which he finds so sickening he vomits) but poisons his mind, filling his head with thoughts of the look, the smell, the feel of a woman's breasts and genitals--as a homosexual, he finds these thoughts disgusting, but, despite his professed inclinations, these obsessive thoughts physically arouse him to the point where he has to masturbate in public to relieve the pressure.
Brite is a good writer, and on a technical level this is a well-written piece, with good sentences and economical pacing and striking images and all the stuff I hope to find in stories. It is also a sort of switcheroo story; in the past it was common for heterosexual men to express disgust at gay men and their sexual practices, and it was common to express fear that gay men would seduce young boys into joining the gay subculture. Well, in this story we have gay men expressing their nausea at the thought of a woman's body, and we have a woman who seduces a gay boy into joining the straight culture (which in the story feels like a subculture, because all the male characters are sexually active gay men.)
(I guess I should point out, in case you don't know, that, since The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women was published, Brite has come out as a gay man and taken hormone therapy and prefers to be called Billy Martin.)
I often complain that switcheroo stories are lame, but "Homewrecker" works because it is a well-crafted story and because the switcheroo feels fresh (at least to me) and because Brite doesn't stack the deck by portraying the gay men as angels and their lifestyle as ideal--the narrator is beaten by his father figure and trades sex for drugs as a matter of course, after all.
(For another switcheroo story about a straight minority in a gay milieu, check out Charles Beaumont's 1955 "The Crooked Man.")
Thumbs up, but I can't say this story is for everybody--it is disgusting and potentially offensive (for example, Brite does that thing where you compare the scent of a woman's vagina to a fish market, which I feel might piss some women off.) But we read horror stories because we want to be shocked and speculative fiction in general because we want to be exposed to different ideas and learn about other points of view, don't we?
"Venus Rising on Water" by Tanith Lee (1991)
The old city has been almost entirely abandoned, many of its buildings crumbling, its walls covered in vines and creepers, its streets and squares choked with trees and shrubbery. Only a few nutcases live in the city, but the once beautiful metropolis, centuries ago home to aristocrats and artists in powdered wigs and elaborate masks, has been left to decay instead of torn down so it can serve as a kind of museum--every month a boat travels between the modern apartment buildings on the other side of the lagoon to the old ruin, and sometimes a scholar or journalist is on the boat. Our heroine, 25-year-old Jonquil Hare, is one such writer who explores the city alone. (Jonquil was Fritz Leiber's wife's name, which may or may not be significant.)
Jonquil, equipped with SF devices like an inflatable mattress and a machine that cooks fine meals for her, sets up camp in a glorious old pile called The Palace of the Planet which centuries ago was home to an astrologer named Johanus who claimed to have observed the surface of Venus. She has an appointment with a caretaker who gives her a sort of remote control called a manual--by manipulating the buttons on the manual she can project holographic films in the palace which purport to show the now decayed edifice as it looked in its heyday, complete with costumed actors who act out masked balls.
Jonquil finds a chest, one that has not been opened in three centuries or more, one which the scholars who compiled the data in the manual believe is no chest at all, but a faux chest (a "jester chest,") an empty decoration. Impelled by a dream about the chest, Jonquil figures out how to open it, and discovers a full-sized portrait of a boyish woman. (A blurring of gender roles is one of the minor themes of the story.) Jonquil, an expert on art and architecture, assesses the find and decides it must be a painting by Johanus the astrologer. She begins having dreams of Johanus in which she learns that he believed that his long observations of the surface of Venus had opened up a path between the two planets which some Venerian creature used to travel to Earth, to this very palace. This creature is like a cloth or large piece of paper or piece of skin that travels by inching along the floor or floating through the air. Jonquil also has dreams, thrilling dreams, of the woman in the painting climbing atop her and bringing her to orgasm.
"Venus Rising on Water" is only about vampires if you are using the most liberal definition of what a vampire is, but it is a very good horror-SF piece; Lee's descriptions of the palace and city and the chase are quite fine. It is kind of like one of Clark Ashton Smith's Mars stories, say "Vault of Yoh-Vombis" or "The Dweller in the Gulf" but with a rapey lesbian sex scene thrown in. Who would gainsay that recipe?
Recommended.
"Venus Rising on Water" was first printed in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and would go on to be included in a 2019 collection of Lee tales published by Immanion Press, which has been printing collections of Lee's late work.
"Lunch at Charon's" by Melanie Tem (2001)
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| The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women includes several decorations by Randy Broecker, this one among them |
The narrator of "Lunch at Charon's" is a vain forty-something woman who is always working out and doing yoga and having plastic surgery and so on in order to maintain her looks and keep in shape--she talks a lot about whether or not her breasts are sagging, whether or not her finger nail polish is chipped, and about how her friends' fat bodies or unfashionable nail polish disgusts her. This woman is a real jerk! It soon becomes clear that one of her strategies for maintaining her looks is sucking the life force out of her friends! Worse than a jerk, this woman is a god-damned vampire!
This story is apparently meant to be humorous--the narrator's obsession with her and her friends' appearances goes way overboard and Tem's learned references ("Charon's" as the name of a fancy restaurant, "Alighieri" as the name of one of the narrator's friends) are in-your-face obvious. You know I often complain about joke stories, but this one is actually sort of funny, so good on Tem.
As for plot, the narrator chronicles how all her friends get old and die before their time because she is stealing their life force under the guise of giving them massages and hugging them and so forth. One of her friends is a lonely lesbian college professor with an adopted Chinese baby--after the narrator sucks the life out of the horny prof through a kiss, she plots to make friends with the woman who is the newly orphaned baby's guardian, in hopes of feasting on the child's young and innocent life!
Not bad.
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I really thought these stories were going to be about more or less traditional vampires, but it turns out that the common thread running through them is homosexuality. Fortunately these stories are all entertaining, so, no harm, no foul, right?
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