Sisters of the Night

Rating:
Summary: Alluring, Dark, Deadly, Unique
Review: Among my large collection of vampire anthologies, this stands out. It took me a while to get to this one. I was thinking that this would be just another "girl power" anthology with cookie cutter female vampires. I'm glad that I was wrong.

The 14 stories featured in this anthology is full of unique, engaging female vampires. Not all the vampires are your typical Dracula cape and fang types. Some want a bit of your soul instead, some harvest the dead, and some aren't even easily recognizable as women, actually.

Most of the stories will have you hungering for more. The only one I really was bored with was Song of the Night People by Larry Niven. This is actually the first part of a novel and should have been left out of this anthology. It's 50 pages and doesn't really have any ending at all, so you don't know what happens unless you buy the book.

Still, if you want something different than the "normal" Dracula vampires and feel like reading something smart, funny, and original, than pick up a copy of this classic anthology.

Rating:
Summary: Something for every taste
Review: Fourteen original short stories by award-winning authors such as Tanith Lee, Jane Yolen, Larry Niven and Barbara Hambly explore a dark sisterhood of blood. The past, the present and the future are all stalking grounds for these women who hunt the night. Hambly and Greenberg have taken a rather simple subject - female vampires - and collected fourteen tales from a diverse group of authors, which seek to illuminate the life, if it can be called life, of the female of a deadly, and sensual species.

As Hambly says in her introduction, there was no way to know in advance what she would find. Would the stories sent by men be dramatically different in focus and treatment from those of the women writers? And in the end, it seems to me that for the most part, there is a kind of unity of thought expressed in these stories which are at the same time, all quite different from each other. That unity - a real sense of what it means to be female first and foremost - is the thread that truly makes this volume fascinating. These creatures are women first, and vampires second.

In this volume you'll find all manner of vampire. Michael Kurland checks in with the most familiar take on the subject in his old-world, but deliciously perverse "In the Blood." Diana Paxson gives us a myth with the feel of a Norse saga and Pat Cadigan scrapes nerve endings raw with a contemporary tale of life and death on the trash-heap in "Sometimes Salvation." Tanith Lee offers her special brand of slow, languid, gorgeous horror in "La Dame" and George Alec Effinger even manages to work in a little cyberpunk with "Marid and the Trail of Blood. To my way of thinking, though, the true stand-out in this book is the last, shortest story, a powerful, stark, wrenching piece entitled "Sister Death" by Jane Yolen. If any of the stories have you in tears by the end, it will be this one.

If you're a fan of vampires or of horror, this book is a good bet. There's something for every taste here, and the over-all theme is well served by the editorial choices. Buy it.

Rating:
Summary: A fascinating collection.
Review: If you are one of the vast number of people who are fascinated by vampire fiction, and do not have a particular prejudice against female lead characters, you will almost certainly find this an excellent read. There are a wide range of different concepts here, from the relatively traditional vampire in Barbara Hambly's "Madeline" and M. John Harrison's "Empty", to the very offbeat and high-tech "Song of the Night People" by Larry Niven. Along the way, we meet tormented souls struggling against their nature ("In the Blood", by Michael Kurland), kind and loving immortals little different from humans save for the fact that they don't age ("Tumbling Down The Nighttime", by Dean Wesley Smith), a light-hearted spoof ("Survival Skills", by Deborah Wheeler), and even a vampiric ship ("La Dame", by Tanith Lee). All of the stories are extremely well-written, and the collection as a whole is well-edited (I found only one copyediting mistake in the entire book, almost unheard-of these days).

Highly recommended for anyone with a liking (or even a lack of antipathy) for the subject matter. Some of the best vampire fiction I've read.

Rating:
Summary: Vampires...eh.
Review: You have to try pretty hard to convince me that anything new or interesting can be done with vampires.

SISTERS OF THE NIGHT is a collection of fifteen stories concerning female vampires, and for the most part, it doesn't try hard enough. Contained within are stories of vampires among the homeless, a dying elderly man who is visited by the vampire lover who left him decades before, a couple old world vampire tales and a detective story. There is also an excerpt from one of Larry Niven's RINGWORLD novels -- a questionable practice, as it invariably ends up looking like an advertisement for another book, as well as making it seem like the editor couldn't find enough new material to fill the page count.

There may be variety to an extent, but few of the stories are original enough or good enough to be memorable afterward. I often found myself bored as I paged through most of them. One exception is Tanith Lee's "La Dame," which offers something truly different by broadening the definitions of both "vampire" and "female." The other is Steve and Melanie Tem's "Mama," which is the type of perverse familial horror story at which both authors always excel.

If vampires in any form still fascinate you, you'll probably want to pick up this volume as you'll surely enjoy it. If, like me, you think the vampire subgenre should be laid to rest at last, pass on it or check out the above mentioned entries only. Note: Lee's story also appears in Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling's YEAR'S BEST anthology for 1995. Unfortunately, the Tems didn't make it.