Capitalizing on last summer’s Hugh Jackman big-screen monsterfest was Jeanne Cavelos’ unrelated anthology THE MANY FACES OF VAN HELSING, in which a couple dozen authors provide their own take on Bram Stoker’s original vampire slayer. The stories span the complete range of Van Helsing’s life – young and old, weak and strong, heroic and syphillitic.

Despite the lack of recognizable names (all but maybe Christopher Golden, Thomas Tessier, Tanith Lee and Thomas F. Monteleone were unknown to me), the book was pretty enjoyable, especially for a blind, impulse buy. Best known for FINISHING TOUCHES, Tessier offers the wonderfully morbid “The Infestation at Ralls,” in which Prof. Van Helsing investigaes a strange pregnancy at an all-girls’ school, whereas J.A. Konrath’s “The Screaming” has a crackhead meet a withered Van Helsing shackled in the basement of an abandoned house.

For ingenuity’s sake, it’s difficult to beat Chris Roberson’s “So Far from Us in All Ways,” in which our hero battles Asian hopping vampires alongside the fiendish Dr. Fu Manchu! A couple of stories fall flat, but I pretty much expected that. Overall, a solid good read and more enjoyable than the ill-fated feature film.

BONUS XXX-CERPT! In Rita Oakes’ “Poison in the Darkness,” Van Helsing gets some: “She unfastened his coat, helped him shrug out of it. She passed her hand over his groin lightly, teasingly, before she unbuttoned and dropped the front of his breeches, fishing the blind snake within free with practiced fingers. She spat upon her palm and coaxed his member to reluctant life. She drew him to the bed and hoisted her petticoats. He stared. He’d never seen a woman’s privates before. There was hair between her thighs. His erection wilted. She stroked him back to stiffness, guided him inside the coarse thatch between her legs. She pressed his face to her breast. He spent himself quickly.”