Of course, serials did exist back then. Magazines like F&SF and ASIMOV'S published them every now and again, and general authors Steven King and Jackie Collins released thin paperbacks that were designed to form one novel when you read 'em all together. These stories weren't accessible to someone like me, though, and they remained out of my reach until ebooks came along and changed the literary landscape.
And until publishers began releasing them on the regular, to my unending delight.
And yet, I adored ANNA DRESSED IN BLOOD [Amazon | The Book Depository], a book that hits every beat of the BBP.
Theseus Cassio Lowood--better known as Cas--is the only person in the world who can kill ghosts. He sends them to the other side with the athame he inherited from his father; the athame that’s only a knife in anyone else’s hands. He and his mother move from place to place whenever someone in Cas’s network of informants gives him a promising new lead, and now they’ve ventured to Thunder Bay, Ontario, for the ultimate prize.
Anna Korlov became Anna Dressed In Blood after she was brutally murdered by an assailant who was never found. She’s spent the last sixty-odd years ripping people to shreds when they venture into the Victorian boarding house her mother once ran. And yet, she lets Cas leave unharmed.
Intrigued, Cas sets out to discover what makes Anna so powerful, and so different from every other ghost he’s ended.
You see the BBP there, yes? The parallels only strengthen as Cas settles in to his new home and allies himself with the usual suspects: a nervous yet personable young witch who’s also a social outcast, a Queen Bee who’s more than a stereotype, and a guy named Will Rosenberg.
Then, of course, there’s the dangerous entity he really should kill without hesitation, but with whom he forms a strong, and perhaps even loving, bond because she calls to him like no one else.
And somehow, it all works. Instead of shunting me out of the story as the BBP usually does, it pulled me further in and left to desperate to wallow in Cas’s world.
Fair warning: I’m about to use the phrase "religious experience."
I know, I know. It’s overblown and hyperbolic and it’ll prevent you from ever taking me seriously.
Worst of all, I mean it without a shred of irony or exaggeration. THE SANDMAN: OVERTURE [Amazon | The Book Depository | comiXology] was, for me, a religious experience from the second it was announced until the moment I read the last page of the deluxe edition’s extensive back matter.
This is partly because stories are at the very core of my religion, for reasons I'm never comfortable elaborating on in public. Whether we're talking sacred or secular, I'm forever fascinated with the way life-defining stories shift according to who’s doing the telling--and according to what comes to light, and what stays hidden from whom, as the story unfolds.
THE SANDMAN shares my preoccupation. It never loses its bone deep awareness of stories as a vital, ever-shifting, highly subjective force.
"Religious experience" is also apt because because SANDMAN was the first of what I think of as the comics; the ones that reach into my very soul because something in them calls to something in me. The world is never the same after I’ve discovered one of the comics. It hasn’t been the same since I discovered SANDMAN in the pages of a massive coffee table book about DC Comics, or since I scraped together $19.21--a hefty amount to Teenage Me--and ordered a steeply discounted1 copy of PRELUDES & NOCTURNES from Amazon’s fledgling Canadian operation.
I’ve returned to SANDMAN over and over in the decade and a half since then, and I can’t wait to reread it again with OVERTURE under my belt. Because this final/first volume casts everything that came before (or after) it in a new light.
Fourteen people survive the experience unscathed and are subsequently trapped inside the town by a barrier that kills all technology and renders all living creatures inert. Robbed of a way to communicate with the outside world and with no idea what’s truly happened to them, this small group of survivors bands together to get each other through--provided the strain of all doesn’t tear them apart.
At first glance, WAKE seems like your standard zombie story. Violence becomes the norm in the blink of an eye, with transfer potential at the forefront of the reader’s mind as the survivors try to evade infected individuals. We’re led to believe this is Elizabeth Knox’s unique take on a story we’ve all heard before.
It’s not, of course. Knox rarely takes the expected route in any of her fiction, and WAKE is no exception. As soon as the violence dies down, it becomes clear the infected weren’t zombies. So what were they? Why were the survivors spared? And how are they meant to cope with any of it?
Jodie is hosting an epic Female Villains Theme Week at Lady Business, and she invited me to stop by and talk about my very favourite villain. Whee! You'll find me over there today, gushing about Glory, the mad god who causes so many problems for the Scooby Gang during BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER'S painfully good fifth season.
This sort of intense, regular reading has one major drawback: it wasn’t long before I had the entire series all but memorized. I couldn't quote them wholesale or anything, but key lines, all the beats, and the emotional tone were as familiar to me as my own mind. And, as such, they became... well, not stale, but less compelling than something I couldn't mouth along to.
Horrified, I decided to take a little break. I’d let the Vampire Chronicles rest for a year or three so I could once again approach them with the love and enthusiasm they deserve.
That was nine years ago.
Oops.
I mean, it’s not like I totally ignored Anne Rice during that almost-decade. I’ve mostly kept up to date with her new releases (I still need to get to OF LOVE AND EVIL and THE WOLVES OF MIDWINTER), and I’ve dipped back into her bibliography here and there. I used INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE to help me ease back into the regular reading world after I discovered Sarah Monette’s Doctrine of Labyrinths series in 20081, and I devoured THE MUMMY just last year2. I also revisited the first two Vampire Chronicles on audio, with many thanks to Simon Vance for his excellent performance3.
I had such a good time with the audios of IWTV and TVL that I wanted to experience THE QUEEN OF THE DAMNED the same way, but my library doesn't own the production. So I dithered around until I absolutely needed to read something awesome and wallowsome and familiar.
I plucked THE QUEEN OF THE DAMNED off the shelf not quite at random, but with less foresight than one might expect. These days, I try to read from my TBR as much as possible so I can get to a place where I feel free to pluck books off the shelves whenever I please. (TBRs have their good points, but they do tend to expand at an alarming rate unless you keep on top of them.) As soon as I peeked inside the front cover and discovered it'd been nine years since my last reading, though, my course was clear. To hell with la TBR; I had to reread THE QUEEN OF THE DAMEND next.
Best. Decision. EVER.
Thankfully, I got over it. These days, I'm up for any and all interpretations of the myth. Give me vampires, be they televised or in print, and I'm a happy girl indeed.
There’s one trope that consistently bugs me, though. Pick a franchise, any franchise, and you'll find at least one vampire who spends an ungodly amount of time wringing their hands and wailing about their lost humanity.
These vampires who’d rather not be vampires annoy me.
I mean, I sort of get it. Vampires are literal monsters who eat (er, drink) people, so becoming one requires a pretty major adjustment to your self-image. It’s probably hard to control your insane thirst around tasty human-types, too. It’d be like trying to make friends with the juiciest, most delectable bacon cheeseburger in all the land.
But y’see, I’m pretty sure I could be friends with a bacon cheeseburger, just so long as the bacon cheeseburger could talk. And vampirism’s many advantages could very well be enough to counteract the whole self-image issue.
That said, the whole thing depends an awful lot on what kind of vampire we’re talking about. There's a pretty big difference between the life of a bumpy-faced Buffy vamp, one of Anne Rice's virtually indestructible immortals, and Stephenie Meyer's sparkly undead family.
Therefore, I've decided to use SCIENCE to conduct a franchise-by-franchise evaluation of how much being a vampire sucks compared to how much it rocks.
Ain't no arguing with SCIENCE.
This is non-exhaustive, of course; I’m not familiar with every vampire story out there (though I’m working to remedy that). Please feel free to chime in on any vampires I’ve missed, or to add your own pros and cons to the lists below.
While I love TV an awful lot, this sort of all-out immersion doesn’t happen too often. I live in keen anticipation of the next show that’ll sweep me off my feet.
At the start of 2013, it’d been a couple of years since I found one. I’d watched some great stuff, yeah, but nothing I loved anything like as much as I love VERONICA MARS, the last series that totally floored me. Two particular shows called to me, though. A few friends had recommended them, and they sounded totally up my alley.
So of course, neither one was readily available, given my resources. Bummer.
Then, last spring, the stars fell into place. Both shows came within my grasp. And grasp them I did, with the expected results.
I intended to cover them both in a single post, but things got, um, lengthy. Let’s talk about SUPERNATURAL this week, with my thoughts on AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER coming your computer screen next Thursday.
I’ll warn you: this is gonna be long and tangential and gushy. There’s liable to be gifs, too, starting with a flashing one right after the cut.
While I don’t intend to write about television on anything like regular basis, I can’t resist taking some time away from the usual Thursday focus on food to gush about a few of the shows that moved me most. Let’s kick things off with four offerings I adored on DVD (or on YouTube, as the case may be), reserving my two favourites and my current viewing schedule for subsequent weeks.
