Remember two years ago, when Otto Penzler gave the world THE BLACK LIZARD BIG BOOK OF PULPS, containing more than 1,000 pages of some of the greatest tales ever told, all for $25? It was the bargain of the year, and the same goes for the equally lengthy, equally wonderful THE VAMPIRE ARCHIVES: THE MOST COMPLETE VOLUME OF VAMPIRE TALES EVER PUBLISHED.
In case you haven’t emerged from your cocoon, vampires are hotter than hot right now — perhaps even hawt; witness the success of TWILIGHT, TRUE BLOOD and THE VAMPIRE DIARIES. But Penzler largely ignores — rightly, I’d argue — the swooning, sparkly emo bloodsuckers and go straight for … well, the jugular.
Vampires were invented as objects as horror, and that’s what this outstanding collection delivers most. Since the book is organized by thematic categories, you do get bunches of stories that are more humorous in nature, and a few more romantically inclined, but through and through, ARCHIVES seeks to return the vampire from its current namby-pambiness to its rightful place of menace.
It begins with a large helping of tales that predate Bram Stoker’s DRACULA, with Ambrose Bierce, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia” and Sheridan Le Fanu’s lesbian-tinged “Carmilla.” Post-DRACULA, there’s M.R. James’ “Count Magnus,” Manly Wade Williams, Algernon Blackwood, Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth and Stoker himself, with the excised chapter “Dracula’s Guest.”
That’s just scratching the surface — one that also houses Clive Barker, Anne Rice, Stephen King, Robert Bloch, H.P. Lovecraft, Brian Lumley, Dan Simmons, Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, F. Paul Wilson, Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, David J. Schow, Ed Gorman, Roger Zelanzy, Harlan Ellison, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — hell, even D.H. Lawrence! And many, many more, each properly introduced by Penzler.
To me, the mix is a nice balance between revisiting classics; catching up on stories I’ve always heard about, but never read; and being exposed to new ones. I’ll be working on this one through the New Year. It’s probably best that way — if you tried to read this cover to cover without some breaks for other books in between, your blood sugar would go wonky.
A book this meaty deserves three introductions (oh, you could call it a foreword, a preface, if you want), and they’re provided by Kim Newman, Neil Gaiman and Penzler himself. And until it came along, the year’s best vampire anthology was Night Shade Books’ BY BLOOD WE LIVE, edited by John Joseph Adams. He’s quickly emerged as an expert anthologist — witness THE LIVING DEAD and WASTELANDS, and now this. (I just wish the margins of Night Shade’s books weren’t so darned wide.)
Its LOST BOYS-esque cover depicts a wide range of vampires, from the classic and the punk to the creature and the child. That’s a good representation of what’s inside, too. While it has several authors in common with ARCHIVES, there’s almost no overlap in terms of tales among its 500 pages.
Adams includes some less established authors — but by no means lesser talents — such as David Wellington and John Langan, as well as names one doesn’t normally associate with horror, such as thriller writer Eric Van Lustbader. Further demonstrating its difference, Adams also allows a few examples of the ever-popular paranormal genre, with such current bestselling stalwarts as Kelley Armstrong, L.A. Banks, Lilith Saintcrow and Carrie Vaughn.
Don’t worry, as you also get your servings of Rice and Gaiman and King, and even King’s son, Joe Hill, whose Van Helsing story “Abraham’s Boys” was the first-ever work I had read by him. There’s room for everyone among these two big books, and the horror fan in you deserves both. —Rod Lott
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Well I know of one book I’ll be getting with my gift card this birthday
This is being awfully picky, but I suspect this book is the same size as the “Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps”, and I found that awfully hard to read–it was just too big and bulky and heavy to settle down in any sort of comfortable way to read it. Maybe not everyone reads the way I do, so perhaps it’s not a problem for most people. For me, it would have been a lot better divided up into 2-3 smaller volumes, but probably more expensive, too. I know, picky, picky, picky.