This is either the greatest treasury of vampire stories ever published or the greatest disappointment ever to hit the market. Or, maybe it's a little of both. It's hard to really judge a book like this unless you judge it as a whole and as a series of parts. The thing is that so many of the stories could easily have appeared in other categories than the ones that they appear in. "Replacements" by Lisa Tuttle could easily have appeared in the PSYCHIC VAMPIRES category just as well as the category that it does appear in. Ditto for "The Girl With The Hungry Eyes" which could have appeared in either PSYCHIC VAMPIRES or MODERN MASTERS. Dion Fortune's "Blood Lust" is just as easily a THIS IS WAR story as it is a LOVE . . . FOREVER story, and isn't "Place of Meeting" by Charles Beaumont a THEY GATHER story just as it is a HARD TIMES FOR VAMPIRES tale? And so forth and so on.
The problem isn't the quality of the writing of the stories, after all, if you don't like one, you can just move on to the next one. The main problem, amongst several others, is that this anthology is pretty much monothematic. The majority of the stories here follow a simple formula: Boy meets girl, girl turns out to be a vampire, girl seduces (or attempts to seduce) boy, then eats (or attempts to eat) him alive, or suck him dry. There can be a slight variation to this formula ("Camilla" and "Chastel" deal with lesbian vampires), but a slight variation still doesn't help much when this formula tends to repeat itself time after time after time until you can pretty much predict how any of the stories will progress. Even a feminist writer like Lisa Tuttle in "Replacements" makes the female a femme fatale of a sort. This leads to a feeling of misogyny to the whole book, and if I were a woman, I'd probably be offended by this seemingly one-note attack on women.
Then there are the few stories that break this formula, "The Living Dead", "Down Among The Dead Men", and "A Dead Finger" have nary a man-eating babe in them to support this formula. And Mary A. Turzillo ("When Gretchen Was Human") and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ("The Adventure Of The Sussex Vampire") take this "bad woman" formula and turn it on its head, giving this anthology two of its best stories.
Then there is the style of the writing. Sixty-five of the eighty-five stories here were published in 1940 or before. The problem with this is that there is a style of writing that most of these stories are written in from this time period that eventually gives the anthology a sense of dry sameness, the sense of sameness that often makes this anthology a grindingly slow read, as the stories begin to run together so that they eventually all seem to be written by the same person.
This leads to two separate problems: the first being that ALL of the stories here are either horror stories or weird stories attempting horror or a grim weird atmospheric feeling. The only story that attempts something different is "The Werewolf And The Vampire" (R. Chetwynd-Hayes) although this one ends badly, just like most of the stories here. This gives the impression that Penzler is an uncomprisingly conservative literaturist as despite the fact that vampire literature has changed and evolved over the years, Penzler just digs his heels in and basically serves the same meal over and over again. Are there any science fiction vampire stories here? How about vampire oriented romances? This may be that out of eighty-five stories, sixty-five were published in 1940 or before, or that of eighty-five stories here, ONLY FOUR were published after 2000, and that two of these came from the SAME original anthology, and there are NO stories reprinted here that were published post-2002.
What with Penzler's literary conservatism, and his insistence in ignoring anything that has happened in the last fifteen years of vampire literature, whether it be vampire gothic, horror, fantasy, fantastic adventure, science fiction, war, romance, super-hero, erotic, or detective stories, often makes this anthology a grindingly slow slog to read. It took me almost two months to read, and I still had to take time off to read other things to wash the sameness out of my mind, and there were times that I had to force myself to come back to continue reading it. Perhaps this book could have been broken into two volumes, 1940 and before, with the second being post World War II.
This would also have made "The Vampire Archives" a little more palatable as it also suffers from the fact that all of the serif font style here is shrunk down to an almost unreadable level, then printed on cheap dull paper that will also allow the ink to bleed through to the other side, and the poor choice by somebody to print the stories in two columns, makes "The Vampire Archives" very hard on the eyes. This caused me reader fatigue and kept giving me headaches, blurred vision, and kept causing my attention to wander. In the end, an anthology like this shouldn't be work to read, I shouldn't have to force myself to continue to read it, and at times this book WAS work, with only my obsessive/compulsive disorder making me continue.
Of the eight-five stories here, Hume Nisbet, Tanith Lee, Algernon Blackwood, Clark Ashton Smith, Frederick Cowles, Manly Wade Wellman, and E. F. Benson all have two stories apiece, with M. R. James having THREE stories. Perhaps a rule of only having one story per author would have forced Penzler to give the anthology a more varied contents. It would also have helped if all of the stories included here were vampire stories. Several were just ghost stories or something else. We could have had Robert Silverberg's "Warm Man", or stories by Octavia Butler, Jewelle Gomez, or Jack Ritchie, or by new authors like Charlaine Harris, Marjorie M. Liu, or Caitlin Kittredge. Which leads to a final complaint, virtually all of the stories here are either extremely serious, grim, or horrific. How about a couple of stories with a sense of whimsy or that have some real humor to them? R. Chetwynd-Hayes tries to give his story a sense of whimsy but eventually screws it up, and the Brown and King stories are essentially gag stories. Brown's works because it is only one page long, but King's doesn't because it suffers from King's typically sloppy plotting, turning his story into a mediocre revenge fantasy.
Of the eighty-five stories here, three are full-length novellas.
Carmilla: A Tragic Love Story By J. Sheridan Le Fanu still pretty much holds up,
The Parasite by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle just dates badly, and
Midnight Mass by F. Paul Wilson shows Wilson's conservatism in his inability to think outside the box; that while his novella has extreme violence, his vampires are also extremely clichéd, unimaginative, and seemingly racist as Wilson picks out the Jews for some particularly vicious derision.
I'm giving this anthology only three stars because of its monothemism, the conservative unimaginativeness in "Vampire Archive"'s contents. On the other hand horror archivists may raise it a star or two because it DOES reprint a lot of rare material, and it is a good reference tool. The bibliography alone is almost worth the price of the book.
Nowhere here is there listed what the contents of this book are. So below is a listing of all of the stories in "The Vampire Archives". An asterisk before a story means that I found it to be the best, or among the best in that category. Two asterisks mean that this story is among the best in the anthology. Words in all capitals are the categories that all of the stories are separated into, and the story's authors are in parenthesizes.
PRE-DRACULA: **Good Lady Bucayne (M. E. Braddon), *The Last Lords Of Gardonal (William Gilbert), *A Mystery Of The Campagna (Anne Crawford), **The Fate Of Madame Cabanel (Eliza Lynn Linton), Let Loose (Mary Cholmondeley), The Vampire (Vasile Alecsandria), *The Death Of Halpin Frayser (Ambrose Bierce), Ken's Mystery (Julian Hawthorne), **Carmilla (J. Seridan Le Fanu), The Tomb Of Sarah (F. G. Loring), Ligeia (Edgar Allan Poe), The Old Portrait (Hume Nisbet) & The Vampire Maid (Hume Nisbet).
TRUE STORIES: *The Sad Story Of A Vampire (Eric Stenbock), *A Case Of Alleged Vampirism (Luigi Capuana) & An Authenticated Vampire Story (Franz Hartmann).
GRAVEYARDS, CASTLES, CHURCHES, RUINS: *Revelations In Black (Carl Jacobi), *The Master Of Rampling Gate (Anne Rice), The Vampire Of Cathedral History (Frederick Cowles), **An Episode Of Cathedral History (M. R. James), Schloss Wappenburg (D. Scott-Moncrieff), *The Hound (H. P. Lovecraft), **Bite-Me-Not Or, Fleur De Fur (Tanith Lee), *The Horror At Chilton Castle (Joseph Payne Brennan), *The Singular Death Of Morton (Algernon Blackwood) & *The Death Of Ilalotha (Clark Ashton Smith).
THAT'S POETIC: The Bride Of Corinth (Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe), The Giaour (Lord Byron) & La Belle Dame Merci (John Keats).
HARD TIME FOR VAMPIRES: Place Of Meeting (Charles Beaumont), **Duty (Ed Gorman) & A Week In The Unlife (David J. Schow).
CLASSIC TALES: *Four Wooden Stakes (Victor Roman), **The Room In The Tower (E. F. Benson), *Mrs. Amsworth (E. F. Benson), Doctor Porthos (Basil Copper), For The Blood Is Life (F. Marion Crawford), Count Magnus (M. R. James), When It Was Moonlight (Manly Wade Wellman), **(The Drifting Snow (August Derleth), *Aylmer Vance And The Vampire (Alice And Claude Askew), Dracula's Guest (Bram Stoker), *The Transfer (Algernon Blackwood), *The Stone Chamber (H. B.
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