Sixteen tales of the undead's darkest thirsts...and darkest desires. Eerie, thought provoking stories by some of the genre's finest writers and emerging new talents, including Robert Devereaux, Edo van Belkom, William R. Trotter, Rick R. Reed, Barb Hendee, Margaret Carter, Sue Burke, Scott Goudsward, d.g.k. goldberg, Thomas J. Strauch, Michael Arruda, Kyle Marffin, Paul McMahon, Deborah Markus, Julie Anne Parks and Stirling Davenport.
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
The Darkest Thirst (put together by an unnamed editorial committee) is an anthology of 16 original vampire tales. They're organized under five subheadings. The first, Dark Histories, are stories set in the past, ranging from a pregnant vampire at the time of the Norman Conquest to a World War II story about soldiers in the Balkan Mountains. Edo van Belkom, a 1998 Bram Stoker winner, contributes a well-researched tale that asks "What if?" about Rasputin and his famous resistance to being murdered.
The second, Obsessions, contains a clever cyberspace tale in which TepesAllure and Raven meet each other in a chat room. The best in the collection is "Waiting for the 400" by Kyle Marffin, author of Carmilla: The Return. In this classic noir love story set in the 1950s, a sultry gal with dark red hair and a sleeveless dress to match gets off the train from Chicago and walks right into the heart of the man who runs the rural depot in northern Wisconsin. The outcome of their encounter is ambiguous, lingering in the reader's mind like an old blues song.
The third, The Hunted, features three action tales about vampires and those who pursue them. The fourth, Redemption, offers a heady dose of Catholicism, as nuns and priests both test and find faith in their encounters with the undead.
The fifth, Arts & Letters, has two tales about the aesthetic dimension of the vampire experience. Robert Devereaux's "Nocturne A Tre in B-Double-Sharp Minor" is a beautifully imagined variation on the erotic possibilities of a conductor's talent, and Deborah Markus's "For the Love of Vampires" finishes off the anthology with a witty, self-referential meditation on what authors who write about vampires really want.
Some of the stories are a bit predictable--black velvet cloaks, fog-shrouded mountain passes, the blood hunger burning in the veins--but the prose is rarely off-key. The Darkest Thirst is a classy and satisfying anthology. --Fiona Webster
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Variety is the spice of an anthology,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Darkest Thirst: A Vampire Anthology (Paperback)
Now, this is how an anthology should be done. The current trend toward hyper-specialized anthologies has resulted in a whole slew of books that contain one or two good variations on exact same theme and 10 or 12 crappy ones ("15 original stories about lesbian zombies in turn-of-the-century New Orleans" or "12 shared-world science fiction tales about John F. Kennedy's left nipple" -- I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to come up with good titles for those two; if you can, you're welcome to pitch them to White Wolf). The Darkest Thirst, on the other hand, apparently had only one editorial requirement: tell a good vampire story. The result is one of the best horror/dark fantasy/whatever-you-want-to-call-it anthologies in years. All the stories are good; the best one of the lot is William R. Trotter's Bram Stoker Award-nominated "The Bleeding of Hauptmann Gehlen" -- in fact, it's the best short vampire story I've ever read. In addition to being a twice-nominated horror writer, Trotter is also a respected, award-winning military historian, and he's very good at working loads of convincing details into a story without ever falling prey to the dreaded "look-how-much-research-I-did" syndrome that torpedoes so much historical fiction. The result is that "The Bleeding of Hautpmann Gehlen," set in World War Two Romania, feels more convincingly real than most present-day vampire stories. It's great stuff. If you're a member of the Horror Writers of America and will be voting on this year's awards, read this story -- or your unshriven soul will languish forever in Hell. Seriously. Oh, and most of the other stories are quite good, too.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An all around great book,
By Adam (Falls Church, Va) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Darkest Thirst: A Vampire Anthology (Paperback)
The book The Darkest Thirst was an amazing book. The thing I like about it the most was the fact that it was a collection of stories and didn't have one specific author. I find I liked that a lot because then you never know what the next story is going to be like. Most books about vampire that I have read have their low and high spots, where this book was totally interesting from beginning to end due to the fact of the different authors. IF you are a lover of vampire novel like myself you probably have a certain "kind" of vampire story you like. This book is divided five sections: Dark Histories, Obsessions, The Haunted, Redemption, and Arts and Letters. Each section has its strong and weak stories. A few example of the strong ones that I liked where "Waiting for the 400" about a female who convinced her obsessed lover to kill someone who she claimed was a vampire, when it turns out SHE was the vampire. One of the weak stories in my opinion was "Before a Fall" about a mother who was attached by vampires and kill the leader to save her son. All in all, the book was really well written. I think the variety between the different stories of this book is what made it what it is. You can buy this book to read it for a specific section or read it all and enjoy every minute of it. I was high pleased with this book and I think everyone else will be.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Fine Vampire Anthology,
This review is from: The Darkest Thirst: A Vampire Anthology (Paperback)
This is a pretty good vampire anthology, with a collection of stories that range from the "fantastic! this is why I read these books!" to "really strange, but pretty good, I guess." Some of the highlights were "Before A Fall," "Waiting for the 400," and "The Alberscine Vigil." A few others were not quite as good ("The Debauched One" and "On Line" come to mind). The final story, "For the Love of Vampires," wraps up this anthology nicely. The stories are all a good length, long enough to be fully developed, short enough to be still considered "short stories." All in all, I was quite satisfied with this collection.
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