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It’s true that few of us would choose the life of a zombie, mindlessly consuming every moving thing in sight as we rot and shrivel with decay. It’s also true that few of us would choose to become a ghost, dolefully watching the comings and goings of the living, unable to touch, to breathe, to feel them in a physical way. But, if given the chance to become a vampire, I think most of us would bite.

There is something elegant about an immortal, something transformative. The chance to keep a bit of ourselves after we shuffle off this mortal coil is alluring to those of us who fear the void. It matters little that the price of this immortality is that we must sustain it on the blood of the living. There are ways around the guilt of that. Simply take a tip from Dexter and kill only the guilty. Or a nod from more recent vampires of popular culture and survive off pig’s blood or sewer rats instead of people.

This romantic image of the vampire certainly has invaded our popular culture, and it’s not ironic that the very image we hold in our minds of the suave, blood-drinking ladies man originated in the Romantic literary period, a time rife with death and the supernatural. Today, vampires are sexually promiscuous, passionate creatures that stalk and sparkle and sometimes get back their souls.

It’s no wonder, then, that the concept of vampire has existed throughout our history. In the middle ages, European people lived under the very real threat of vampire invasion and responded to suspected vampires by unearthing their graves, decapitating and staking the shriveled husks found within. Sometimes, they’d even burn them quick as tinder. In other cultures around the globe, too, there are vampires popping up in folklore and history books. The Malaysians have their langsuyars, women who sustained their immortality on the blood of infants, and the ancient Greeks and Romans wrote of lamiae, serpentine women who drank the souls of men.

And, of course, there is no shortage of people who think they are vampires living among us even today. You need only visit the local Gothic club and scan the black-eye-lined faces for a few short minutes before you spot a pair of glue-on fangs poking out over the bottom lip of one of the club’s inhabitants. The stake-hards, of course, actually have their teeth chiseled into vampire-like fangs. And the truly pernicious night-stalkers take it to a whole new level, committing murder in the name of vampirism, though this crew is a significantly small percentage.

With all these people running around believing themselves to be vampires, it’s a wonder there aren’t more people stuffing stakes into their backpacks and Buffying up the local cemetery Van Helsing style. After all, if vampires have persisted in folklore, myth, history, and even now in our present day, shouldn’t there be more self-proclaimed vampire hunters out there?
But, it’s the real vampires that make our pulses quicken: whether they are the velveteen figures of Anne Rice or Bram Stoker, or the violent monsters of Stephen King, we don’t care. Not the hunters. Not the hopefuls. The real, blood-drinking, neck-biting fiends. Vampires are timeless because they are immortal. And the vampires in these pages may just come back to bite you in the end. These are stories you can really sink your teeth into. Promise.

 (FOREWORD BY ARAMINTA STAR MATTHEWS)

Voices Carry (TOM WORTMAN)

Fountain of Flesh (NICKY PEACOCK)

Dawn Hunter (EARL PARRISH)

Green Eyes and Chili Dogs (KEVIN DAVID ANDERSON)

Cosmina (CHRISTOPHER LEPPEK & EMANUEL ISLER)

Rite of Passage (LORI MICHELLE)

7 Hours (MAX BOOTH III)

Liquid Blue (DREW WILCOX)

Ordering Out (KENNETH W. CAIN)

To The Last Drop (ERIC GRAWE)

Sekhmet’s Daughters (C. W. LaSART)

Entangled (JENNIFER LEFSYK)

The Spy Who Bit Me (LORELEI BELL)

An Unusual Occurrence at Pointe Laurent (MARYKATHRYN GELISSE)

Tough Love (DAVID THOMAS)

The Taste of Love (RENEE PAWLISH)

State of Grace (TARA FOX HALL)

Transmogrify (RICHARD THOMAS)

The Key to Happiness (PENELOPE CROWE)