Review-Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead



Posted: Monday, August 02, 2010

by Paul Lappen

Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead, Nancy Kilpatrick (ed.), 2010, ISBN 9781894063333

This is an anthology of new stories from Canada all about vampires, that mainstay of horror literature.

In the 21st century, Vampires are people, too (so to speak). They go on Oprah, they have teenage daughters (with a unique set of problems in school) and they run for public office. They are jazz and blues musicians, and they have to deal with the fathers of some of the women they have killed. Their bodies can filter out a major blood disease that is ravaging mankind. They breed humans for their flesh, and siphon their blood. When they are born, they need to feed on human flesh, usually the mother's.

They go to clubs, looking for victims, and sometimes run into bored young people who think that being bitten by a vampire will turn them into a vampire, which is not the case. They construct sets of mirrors that allow them to be exposed to the sun, and actually get a tan, without worrying about burning up. Sometimes, they have to deal with demon-hunters, complete with wooden stakes (an occupational hazard for a vampire), who don't always know what they are doing. Occasionally, they appear to bored city workers on public transit (no one else can see them) and convince them that, to become a vampire, they have to murder someone and drink their blood, which is also not the case. There are also vampire vigilantes, who help out people in trouble at night, but who have their own ulterior motives.

Here is a first-rate bunch of stories. I am not much of a horror reader, so I was glad to see that the horror part of these tales was not overwhelming. This is very much worth reading.
Paul Lappen is a freelance book reviewer from Connecticut whose web site http://www.deadtreesreview.com  contains nearly 700 book reviews on all subjects, concentrating on small press books.
This Article has been viewed 174 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
No comments yet.
We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.