Friday, July 9

Poppy Z. Brite: Love in Vein-Tales of Vampire Erotica

From the back of the book-
Beyond fear, beyond horror, beyond temptation, there is a realm of the senses that only the boldest may enter. An acclaimed master of the dark fantastic, author Poppy Z Brite has brought together the genre’s most powerful and original writers to reinvent the literature of the macabre and give it a distinctly erotic spin.
A shameless celebration of unspeakable intimacies, the stories within explore out most sinister and irrepressible hungers, those that even lovers are forbidden to share.
The fact that it has taken me ten years to complete this collection of twenty short stories says more about what I think of them than any words could.
To be fair I have only vague memories of the first part of the collection but I didn’t find any of the offerings piqued my interest enough to follow up on any particular author. The same can be said of the final third of the collection which is fresh in my mind.
I think part of my disappointment in this book comes from the liberal definition of vampire. I was hoping for the traditional blood sucking monster, however, here the term vampire is used to describe any parasitic feeding from a human. While it’s not unheard of to use the term in this way it still skewed my expectations and lead to disappointment.
Also erotica, like humour, is personal and while I wasn’t surprised or offended by this collection, neither did I find it titillating. It simply wasn’t to my taste.
For me this was a ho-hum anthology that left me just a little flat.-Lynn

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