"The Bat is My Brother" by Robert Bloch (1944)
Graham Keene awakens to discover he has been buried alive! A poor man, he was interred in a cheap unsealed coffin in a shallow pauper's grave, and manages to tear his way out of the casket and up out of the earth. Back on the surface, in the cemetery, Keene is greeted by a gray-haired wrinkle-faced man who welcomes him to his new life--as a vampire!--and introduces himself as his guardian--this guy is going to show Keene the ropes!
"The Bat is My Brother" is one of those stories that divorces vampirism from religion and the supernatural and tries to explain it scientifically. I am skeptical that this is really a good idea. Keene's new friend tells him vampirism is a disease, and spends quite a number of pages explaining to the new recruit to the ranks of the undead what "rules" of vampirism hold in this story: it is true that vampires cast no shadow or reflection, but the idea that they can change into bats or wolves is just superstition; a vampire really can't be killed by weapons, but he is not truly immortal, eventually, he will decay. And so forth. If we accept the existence of God and the Devil (or the deities of polytheistic religions), it is easy to accept that a guy might suffer the curse of having no shadow or reflection or be granted the power to survive getting shot full of holes, but it is hard to accept that a mere disease might thusly exempt you from basic physical laws.
This story is sort of pedestrian, though not actually bad. The best scene is when the old vampire explains in detail how to best kill and feed on a young woman, using your left hand to cover her mouth and your right to pinion her arms, etc., because this scene is chillingly cruel and disturbingly erotic while fulfilling the story's theme of applying science and logic and practicality to the essentially supernatural or allegorical idea of vampirism. Otherwise, "The Bat is My Brpother" is sort of bland.
Acceptable. "The Bat is My Brother" has been included in several anthologies, including Michel Parry's The Rivals of Dracula.
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| The contents page of the 1944 issue of Weird Tales in which it appears teases "The Bat is My Brother" with what we might call a social justice joke |
"Dayblood" by Roger Zelazny (1985)
"Dayblood" fits the Twilight Zone brand, with a twist ending and a snarky, smart alecky, attitude. A vampire has turned a local beauty into a vampire, and the woman's fiance forms a three-man posse with a priest and a physician and, armed with garlic and stakes, head to the ruined church where the vampire and his new companion are residing. Our narrator is a smart ass journalist who complains that the vampire was foolish to let these mundanes (you kids say "muggles") detect his work and track him to his lair. The reporter is waiting by the church when the three vampire hunters arrive.
The twist ending is that the journalist is a monster who feeds on vampires, so he ambushes the innocent Christians and murders them, preserving the two undead monsters so he can later kill them himself and gain sustenance from them. The narrator talks of an "underworld ecosystem" that needs to be balanced, explaining that vampires haven't multiplied so much that they could take over the world because if there were too many vampires there would be too few living people for them to feed on. Again we see scientific concepts applied to the fantastical idea of vampirism.
Acceptable. This story has been widely anthologized in some of the many vampire books out there.
"Something Had to Be Done" by David Drake (1975)
Captain Richmond has the unenviable task of visiting the families of personnel killed in Vietnam. He is accompanied on these visits by another officer, and on today's visit, to the Lunkowski family, it is a Sergeant Morzek, who served with the dead Private Lunkowski, who comes with him. Morzek is old and emaciated and covered in weird moles, and seems to be drunk!
Morzek isn't acting like people usually do on these generally sad and solemn visits, and the three surviving Lunkowskis also act in an odd fashion as Morzek talks to them about their son's service and death. Morzek's brief narrative and the Lunkowskis' reactions indicate that Private Lunkowski was a vampire, and so are the three people in the house here with Morzek and Richmond! Lunkowski started murdering his comrades to drink their blood, and when Morzek realized this, he killed Lunkowski (who had proven immune to rifle fire during an attack by "the dinks") with a phosphorus grenade. The Lunkowskis surround Morzek and Richmond and start closing in for the kill, but Morzek came with the specific purpose of cleansing the world of the Lunkowski menace and has brought another phosphorus grenade with him! He tells Richmond to jump out the window and then detonates the explosive, incinerating himself and the monsters.
Quite good. All the little details Drake includes as the story goes along that at first seem like window dressing or to hint at one thing in fact add to the tone or plot and end up hinting at something else--for example, because he is so sick-looking I initially thought Morzek might be a vampire, but in fact he has terminal cancer and the fact that he only has a few weeks to live has made easier his decision to die fighting the undead menace.
"Beyond Any Measure" by Karl Edward Wagner (1982)
Lisette is an American art student studying in London; she shares a room with Danielle, another tall, slender young American artist. Lisette has been having bad dreams, and Danielle arranges for her to meet a Dr. Magnus at a gallery opening--Magnus, she says, is an expert on dreams. Lisette begins going to Magnus's office regularly to be hypnotized; Magnus believes that past lives have an influence on our thoughts, through racial memory in our DNA or because of reincarnation of the soul, and he provides "treatment" to Lisette free of charge because he thinks her case can finally settle the questions of the reality of racial memory and the immortality of the soul. Under hypnosis Lisette relates memories of being a lady in the late 19th century, memories that all seem to have to do with coffins and graveyards and blood!
"Beyond Any Measure" is long, almost 50 pages in Vampires: The Greatest Stories, and it feels long because Wagner fills it with long conversations and long descriptions of people's clothes and bodies that do little to move the plot or generate emotion in the reader. Wagner seems to be trying to make his story sexually arousing, so in every scene we have to hear all about about what clothes Lisette and Danielle are wearing and how their attire shows off their bodies, and Lisette's dreams and recovered memories always mention that her hair or rain water or blood or whatever is running over her breasts. One of Wagner's themes in the story is the indulgence and license of the cultural elite, so in a scene at a masked ball where everybody snorts cocaine (which they call "toot") we get verbose descriptions of half a dozen people's BDSM outfits.
Lisette and Danielle are lesbian lovers, though their relationship is not very convincing or interesting--they don't act like any couple I have ever met or like any lesbians I have ever met; in most scenes they just act like casual friends, so when they suddenly started having sex in the shower I was taken by surprise. "Beyond Any Measure" has three lesbian sex scenes, all of which end in blood. In the first Lisette performs oral sex on Danielle, who hasn't realized she is on her period, so that when Lisette stands up sees herself in the mirror with blood on her face--you know, like a vampire!--and faints. In the second a character introduced in the second half of the story, Beth Garrington, a wealthy woman who looks just like Lisette, murders Danielle after tricking her into thinking she is Lisette.
Then comes a long plodding explanation of what Dr. Magnus turned up by hypnotizing Lisette and by scouring old newspapers and public records. In short, in the 19th century an aristocratic woman became a vampire. When you become a vampire your soul leaves your body, but the soul is immortal, so the lost soul of this vampire lady--who now goes by the name Beth Garrington-- reincarnated in the body of Lisette when she was born. Driven by the subconscious desire for justice and revenge that lies buried in her soul, without knowing what she was doing, Lisette came to London and sought out her former, now vampiric, body. (I think.)
Beth Garrington, intrigued by Lisette's physical similarity to her, lures Lisette to her estate, where she starts having sex with the student and then bites her neck to drain her blood. But, because they are, in some way, one person, this, for some reason, kills both of them. Dr. Magnus arrives at the estate to find the two nude bodies, one still young and beautiful, one like a dried up mummy, intertwined in death.
Have to give "Beyond Any Measure" a thumbs down. The plot is complicated and limp; the characters don't demonstrate drive or motivation, none of them seems to have any ambition or love or hate or fear, they act listlessly, like leaves in a gentle breeze. The story feels very long and slow; there are repetitive and superfluous scenes and repetitive and superfluous sentences within scenes. The whole time Wagner seems to be trying too hard, piling on the descriptions of clothes and boobs in an effort to be sexy, describing drug use and punk rock attire in an effort to be edgy, trying to get horror fans on his side with his name-checking of Psycho, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Edgar Allen Poe.
I must be some kind of outlier because this mess won a 1983 World Fantasy Award for Best Novella. What did people like about it? Maybe all the talk of people snorting cocaine, dropping acid, wearing black leather S&M outfits, and having lesbian sex was considered "with it," "an update of the vampire for the '80s?"
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| Two Karl Edward Wagner collections from Centipede Press. Left: 2011's Karl Edward Wagner: Master of the Weird Tale Right: 2012's Where the Summer Ends |
This is a competent though somewhat pedestrian story in the twist-ending-Twilight-Zone mold, though suited for Playboy with its inclusion of nudity and a sexual element. In a Romanian town full of superstitious peasants lives a doctor and his beautiful wife in a fancy house with a bunch of servants--the doc and the missus have separate bedrooms. One morning the wife wakes up with her night dress pulled down, her bare breasts covered in blood! The doctor finds two tiny holes in her neck! Obviously a vampire has attacked!
The doctor and the brave butler (the other servants flee) do all they can with garlic and crosses to fortify the house, but to no avail--every morning, even when the sawbones stays in his wife's bedroom all night long, she wakes up having been further drained. The doctor writes to their friend in another town, and he comes to help. When he joins the doc to sit up all night with the wife we get our twist ending--the doc has been faking the vampire attacks by drawing his wife's blood with a syringe (don't worry, folks, she will recover...physically, at least.) His wife having cheated on him with this friend when they went to visit him last summer, the doctor has been plotting a terrible revenge! He drugs the friend, puts him in a coffin in the basement, and arranges it so that the heroic butler finds the "vampire" and kills it with a stake through the heart.
Acceptable.
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The Drake is the big winner here--his story is economical, striking, and "brings the vampire into the modern world" in a way that is interesting. The Wagner is the polar opposite, long and tedious, and, by sticking a vampire in the middle of a bunch of coke-snorting punk rockers and lesbian art students, "updating" the vampire in a way that is lame and boring.
We'll be orbiting Mother Earth in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log, reading an early '80s SF novel by a SFWA Grandmaster.
Have you been watching WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS, the vampire comedy, on FX Network? It won't appeal to the broad masses, but discerning viewers will find a lot to like.
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