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juushikaTitle: Love in Vein
Editor: Poppy Z. Brite
Published: New York: HarperPrism, 1994
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 397
Total Page Count: 169,153
Text Number: 495
Read Because: fan of the editor, purchased from Powell's
Review: An anthology of twenty tales of vampire erotica. Or, at least, it's meant to be. Brite's arrangement is strong, but the quality of the selections leaves much to be desired. There are a cluster of decent stories from Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Christa Faust, Douglas Clegg, and Brian Hodge, and Gene Wolfe's "Queen of the Night," an oblique dreamscape of ghouls and fairy queens, was my favorite. But there's just as many mediocre stories, and three that I couldn't even bring myself to finish. Brite's introduces the vampire as taboo breaker, as "the mutant ... considered beautiful even as it is feared," but here dark sexuality often means child abuse, rape, and sex work, peppered with unappealing brute pornography—more grimdark than taboo breaking, distinctly tiresome and never erotic. The vampires fair better, but only barely: they're varied, but most stories are slave to their concepts, summaries of the vampiric figure with not much in the way of independent plot or characters. Give this a miss. I adore the intent, but the execution is a disappointment.
Editor: Poppy Z. Brite
Published: New York: HarperPrism, 1994
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 397
Total Page Count: 169,153
Text Number: 495
Read Because: fan of the editor, purchased from Powell's
Review: An anthology of twenty tales of vampire erotica. Or, at least, it's meant to be. Brite's arrangement is strong, but the quality of the selections leaves much to be desired. There are a cluster of decent stories from Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Christa Faust, Douglas Clegg, and Brian Hodge, and Gene Wolfe's "Queen of the Night," an oblique dreamscape of ghouls and fairy queens, was my favorite. But there's just as many mediocre stories, and three that I couldn't even bring myself to finish. Brite's introduces the vampire as taboo breaker, as "the mutant ... considered beautiful even as it is feared," but here dark sexuality often means child abuse, rape, and sex work, peppered with unappealing brute pornography—more grimdark than taboo breaking, distinctly tiresome and never erotic. The vampires fair better, but only barely: they're varied, but most stories are slave to their concepts, summaries of the vampiric figure with not much in the way of independent plot or characters. Give this a miss. I adore the intent, but the execution is a disappointment.
