Vampire Books, Brian Lumley and Metamorphic Proto Flesh

So I was discussing vampire stories, in the wake of the latest Twilight movie, and realised that I've not read nearly so many of them as I thought. So let's get a couple of things out of the way. I've not read Anne Rice, Dracula, The Vampyre, Twilight, 'Salem's Lot or any of the others that I probably should have. That right there probably makes it illegal for me to discuss vampire stories, but never mind. It's after midnight and I'm running on fumes...

I'm currently reading The Evil Seed by Joanne Harris. Apparently it's her "haunting debut novel". I have to admit to being kind of disappointed when I realised it was another vampire story, but oh well. I'll keep at it on account of her prose being ridiculously readable.

When you mention George R. R. Martin people think of fantasy. Specifically, they think of his Song of Ice and Fire series and are likely to whine about the lack of the next book. Ignore them. Fevre Dream is better. It's got vampires on steamboats! The hero is ageing, overweight and anything but dashing. The story is filled with desperation and loss from start to finish. Just fantastic!

Richard Matheson wrote I Am Legend, a stonkingly good science fiction take on the vampire story. The last man on earth struggles for survival at night. During the day he hunts vampires and uses his powers of science to figure out what created them! There's also a dog. Apparently the movie adaptation sucked (never saw it myself) and was less than faithful to the original, going so far as to make the title pointless. In the book the title has a point! Read it!

Already Dead is the first book in a vampire noir series by Charlie Huston. It's set in Manhattan and stars Joe Pitt, a gritty renegade type who struggles to make a living, while avoiding joining any of the big vampire clans. It's dark, it's violent and it's a damned good read (all 1 day it'll take you per book). Oh also, the characters have no idea what makes them what they are, which means Huston can avoid all kinds of tedious discussions. Very good!

One of my writing tutors once told me that Brian Lumley is a very scary man. Judging by his Necroscope series (and it's sequels) you might be tempted to agree. But then I heard him read at Alt.Fiction the other year and he seemed very nice! But let's get this said. The Necroscope books are truly horrific. Yes I know they're horror, but damn these take it to an extreme. The first opens with a man torturing the dead for its secrets (using the dead guy's body as a "means of communication") and the fifth one features a character who "makes his own holes". That's before you get to the vampires. I hear a lot of people complaining that vampires have lost their teeth. Well look no further. Lumley's are monsters in every sense of the word. And yes they also have metamorphic proto flesh. They don't shapeshift so much as fleshcraft and create their own creatures (and houses!) from other people. This means you get to read a few rather bizarre sex scenes too! Harry Keogh, the hero, is a maths wizard who can talk to the dead! There's also psychic intelligence agencies fighting it out! And wormholes!

So if you know people stuck for interesting vampire literature, feel free to recommend any of these.

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Oh Dear… and Stuff

I kinda forgot my whole one or two posts a week rule for a while there. Can't say it'll change from here on out, but you never know. The whole purpose of this blog was to talk about writing, so when I don't have a lot to say about it...

We've started workshopping again, resurrecting the group (fortnightly on Wednesdays) that saw me through a year of fiction on the MA. We've two sessions under our belt now and I'm really enjoying it. The second session was particularly good, with people offering suggestions for improvement as well as the normal critique. I'm up next though... Should be interesting, if extremely humbling.

My own writing is very much stop/start. I've said this a million times before but there really aren't enough hours in the day. Most of them are filled with work and random house related jobs. I got another 3k words done on Hemlock Hex and started working on Breaking the Sequence again. This was "inspired by" NaNoWriMo, for which I've failed miserably to meet the average daily word count. But hey getting anything done is good right?

I bought a bike! I did have one already but it was broken down, crappy and would have required significant investment to make roadworthy. So I bought a new one through the Evans Cycles Ride2Work scheme. The voucher, that's meant to take two to three weeks to arrive, turned up two days after I placed my order, so this morning I rode in. Damn it was cold... But damn it was fun too!

We're now hurtling towards Christmas. I think I'm pretty much sorted for present buying, but there's still Christmas dinner to plan. Like fools we volunteered to host this year - it being our first Christmas in our own house - and I can feel lists of timings and alarms being planned. I've got three straight weeks booked off over the holiday too. Should be good!