The Darkest Thirst: A Vampire Anthology - Softcover

The Darkest Thirst (put together by an unnamed editorial committee) is an anthology of 16 original vampire tales. They're organized under five subheadings. The first, Dark Histories, are stories set in the past, ranging from a pregnant vampire at the time of the Norman Conquest to a World War II story about soldiers in the Balkan Mountains. Edo van Belkom, a 1998 Bram Stoker winner, contributes a well-researched tale that asks "What if?" about Rasputin and his famous resistance to being murdered.

The second, Obsessions, contains a clever cyberspace tale in which TepesAllure and Raven meet each other in a chat room. The best in the collection is "Waiting for the 400" by Kyle Marffin, author of Carmilla: The Return. In this classic noir love story set in the 1950s, a sultry gal with dark red hair and a sleeveless dress to match gets off the train from Chicago and walks right into the heart of the man who runs the rural depot in northern Wisconsin. The outcome of their encounter is ambiguous, lingering in the reader's mind like an old blues song.

The third, The Hunted, features three action tales about vampires and those who pursue them. The fourth, Redemption, offers a heady dose of Catholicism, as nuns and priests both test and find faith in their encounters with the undead.

The fifth, Arts & Letters, has two tales about the aesthetic dimension of the vampire experience. Robert Devereaux's "Nocturne A Tre in B-Double-Sharp Minor" is a beautifully imagined variation on the erotic possibilities of a conductor's talent, and Deborah Markus's "For the Love of Vampires" finishes off the anthology with a witty, self-referential meditation on what authors who write about vampires really want.

Some of the stories are a bit predictable--black velvet cloaks, fog-shrouded mountain passes, the blood hunger burning in the veins--but the prose is rarely off-key. The Darkest Thirst is a classy and satisfying anthology. --Fiona Webster