Monthly Archive for September, 2011

Ah, short story collections. How I love to complain about them. Regular readers will recall that for me it’s more a matter of attention span as it is anything else. When you reach my age, the days fly. A monster wants long books, and better yet, long sequels to those long books. At the same time, a good short story collection can be like a box of assorted chocolates. There’s the one with a cherry inside, another with two colors of nougat, a couple with caramel, the chocolate filled with that crap white stuff with nuts in it. What is that stuff? If you’re like me and have a flying monkey army, there’s always one that some insensitive dolt bit into and then returned to the box. If you get a good assortment, most of them are good. I’m happy to report that in the chocolate assortment that Ellen Datlow has assembled in Blood and Other Cravings, we’ve got a good mix. And so that one chocolate with the cherry in it? It’s a good one.

As the title might suggest, Blood and Other Cravings is a collection of short stories on the subject of vampirism. So you’ve got some of the standard vampires that don’t have reflections, drink blood, and have to be invited in; some vampires who feed on the control that they have over their victim’s lives; other vampires that breathe and put their pants on one leg at a time like you and I do; and some vampires that might just be sucking your soul out of the hole that you call “memory.”

Stories that Stand Out to Me Are

All You Can Do is Breathe by Kaaron Warren – a believable story of a simple man who, simply by accident, falls into a void in the world. The kind of void that people refuse to look at.

Needles by Elizabeth Bear – a conventional “American Gods in the SouthWest” kind of adventure story that reads like a chapter out of a bigger, probably very interesting novel.

Baskerville’s Midgets by Reggie Oliver – must be read to be believed. Warring factions of little people and an unhinged lady innkeeper. Ever have somebody warn you about something, and you ignore the warning because it just doesn’t make sense? Then, much later, you see what they were trying to tell you? Ah ha ha. If you haven’t done that, you haven’t lived! Anyways, this story has something like that happen. The Baskerville’s Midgets is simultaneously hilarious, imaginative, and creepy.

Keeping Corky by Melanie Tem – reminiscent of Azimov’s stories. The ones where you hope it doesn’t go where you think it’s going and then it goes there and then somewhere worse. Then you think about it later and it’s like pushing a sore tooth with your tongue? Like that.

Miri by Steve Rasnic Tem – That vampire I mentioned above that might be sucking your soul out of the hole we call memory.

Mrs. Jones by Carol Emschwiller – Completely different from, but in effect like Baskerville’s Midgets: funny, imaginative, and creepy. Three flavors that go great together.

And then for me it was kind of a long slog before that one story that’s the chocolate with the cherry in it: The Siphon by Laird Barron. A gainfully-employed psychopath with a cigar box of kill trophies in his closet discovers a magical alternate world where he is not important.

Here is where I would usually provide some numbers, or a vampire classification chart, but neither makes any sense with a collection of stories. I think this is a good collection of stories, and if you’re looking for something to get you in the MOOD for October, Blood and Other Cravings would be an excellent place to start.

Blood and Other Cravings edited by Ellen Datlow – Tor Books – 2011
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Many thanks to Tor Books for the review copy of this book.