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Ann K. Schwader lives and writes in Westminster, Colorado. Her poems have recently appeared in Weird Tales, Magazine of Speculative Poetry, Talebones, Speculon, Twilight Times, and elsewhere. Her Lovecraftian poetry collection, The Worms Remember, was published by Hive Press this spring. She is an active member of both SFWA and HWA. Her previous poem in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive.
Tombstone Tapestries
By Sandra J. Lindow
1/14/02
At Our Lady of Perpetual Memory,
funereal fads can be followed for centuries.
Nineteenth century watch houses
and mortsafes are slowly replaced
by lasercut urns and polished stones.
Twenty-first century tombstone
tapestries of digital memories
line well-kept cobblestone walkways,
holographic reproductions
of deceased loved ones set in stone.
The holograms move in silence except
for wind gossiping with Arbor Vitae,
but push a button and poignant recollections
clamor for attention, though a virus
of virtual moss grows over their mouths.
Copyright © 2001 Sandra J. Lindow
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During the fall of 2000, Sandra Lindow and her family lived with four other families and 80 college students in Dalkeith House, a seen-better-days palace in Scotland. Her rambles through old cemeteries inspired this poem. Her previous poem in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive.
Cryogenica
By Lee Ballentine
1/21/02
were any blooms open this morning?
did the radio come on?
a small lunch, salad and peas
the waitress takes moonbeams into her mouth
but Pico is subtle with the peas
he grimaces and knifes them
temperatures begins to fall
the mayonnaise is crystalline and dangerous
little lines run crazy across the lettuce
at home something is wrong
streetcars rolling uphill again
old women rip their hair
the stairs are white with noble gases
there in the arms of the furnace repairman
Molly bares her breasts sunward
Copyright © 2001 Lee Ballentine
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Lee Ballentine edited Poly: New Speculative Writing, an Anatomy of Wonder Best Book, and was the art editor of World Fantasy Award Finalist High Fantastic. He publishes Ur-Vox, a journal of surrealist poetry and photography. His books of poems include Dream Protocols and Phase Language. He lives in Colorado. Visit his Web site for more about him.
Had Been There
By Gustavo Alberto Garcia Vaca
1/28/02
The red of the unseen blaze
covered a concreteness
then a gasp then a laugh at her own fright.
She smiled as one does when experiencing mortality.
The boulevard of broken glass glistened between footsteps.
Bursting is how she found it,
bursting into itself as night draped above.
A fire of my expectation
and the brightening of an eye, she thought.
Black leaves stretched over her—
quiet and walking and smiling
with teeth and pleasure shameless across her face.
An instinct rose within
and she began to spin herself in her dress of yellow, summered silk.
Circle over circle,
she felt her skin against coolness.
The whirling calmed and the yellow glowed
as it does when one remembers a day of laughing during a game under the sun.
She stepped forward, knowing she had been there before.
Copyright © 2001 Gustavo Alberto Garcia Vaca
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Gustavo Alberto Garcia Vaca is a published writer/poet and visual artist. His poetry has appeared in literary journals including Dark Planet, Rattle, The Bilingual Review, El Colombiano and Urban Latino. His artwork has been exhibited in art galleries in New York City, Los Angeles, and Mexico City.
Humans Are My Food: The Blood-Sipping Exploits of Edward Lewis Weyland in Suzy McKee Charnas’s The Vampire Tapestry
Reviewed by Amy O’Loughlin
1/7/02
Dr. Edward Lewis Weyland is handsome, “in a sour, arrogant way.” He’s tall, “lean and lonely-looking,” with intense eyes, a “stubborn jaw,” and “vigorous iron-gray hair.” Women are drawn to him. Men regard him jealously.
A cultural anthropologist of some scholarly repute—he’s authored the book, Notes on a Vanished People, which was a “stupendous find for anthropology”—Weyland is a professor at Cayslin College in upstate New York. He heads the school’s sleep research lab, recording volunteers’ dreams in a new kind of research called “dream mapping.”
Being a bastion of the young, the college provides Dr. Weyland with an ample supply of fresh, supple participants for his research. But Dr. Weyland doesn’t just observe their sleep patterns and record details of their dreams. No, he uses his volunteers for other, more malevolent purposes.
He feeds on them.
Because Dr. Weyland is a vampire: a centuries-old monster, a predator who amuses himself by playing with his prey.
Suzy McKee Charnas’ The Vampire Tapestry is a smart, sexy, successful, and suspenseful vampire tale. Originally published by Simon & Schuster in 1980, The Vampire Tapestry has recently been released in eBook format by ElectricStory, a Washington-based publisher of new and reprint books in electronic form.
Charnas, author of The Holdfast Chronicles; The Sorcery Hall Trilogy; the children’s book, The Kingdom of Kevin Malone; Music of the Night (also available from ElectricStory); and a memoir due out this year, My Father’s Ghost, writes in a diversity of genres. Science fiction and fantasy are Charnas’ specialties, and she’s collected awards for her notable supernatural fiction, including a Nebula (given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) and a Hugo (bestowed by the World Science Fiction Society).
The Vampire Tapestry’s stylishness, imagery, and originality of plot illustrate Charnas’ reputation as a fabulist of uncommon talent. It’s a novel divided into five parts, each of which has Weyland encountering a new array of characters and the humanity of his “despised victims.” “Humans are my food,” Weyland declares. “I draw the life out of their veins. Sometimes I kill them. I am greater than they are. Yet I must spend my time thinking about their habits and their drives, scheming to avoid the dangers they pose—I hate them.”
As Charnas herself wrote, her vampire chronicle is not a lurid Anne Rice rip-off, nor is Charnas’ Dr. Weyland a hackneyed or reworked version of Count Dracula. Hardly. Weyland scoffs at Stoker’s “meandering, inaccurate” novel, and he especially dislikes the Count’s “absurd” fangs. Weyland is “at base one quite different from your standard strolling corpse with an aversion to crosses,” or your “blood-sipping phantom who cringes from a clove of garlic.”
In fact, Dr. Weyland’s favorite pastime is to zoom around the countryside in his much-loved Mercedes-Benz. But, he’s only able to do this for a short time. While at Cayslin, Weyland plays the serious, broodingly intelligent scholar, considered a genius by some and a “ruthless, self-centered bastard” by others. He also complacently underestimates the intuition of Katje de Groot.
Katje de Groot is onto Weyland. The fiftyish, widowed-faculty-wife-turned-campus-housekeeper sees through his finely manufactured façade. A native of Africa, where she viewed life “from the heights of white privilege,” Katje longs to return to her Boer way of life. An avid and adept hunter, trained to stalk and kill game since girlhood, Katje senses Weyland’s predatory nature. Her instincts are roused, and she realizes “with a nervous little jump of the heart” that she has become involved in “stalking a dangerous animal.” She knows Weyland as the merciless predator that he soon shows himself to be.
An incident occurs between Dr. Weyland and de Groot, resulting in Weyland’s sudden disappearance from Cayslin College. It is here that Charnas ends Weyland’s Cayslin days and takes readers on to Part II, and Weyland’s next set of malicious feedings: “My hunger is so roused I can scarcely restrain myself,” Weyland drones, “A powerful hunger, not like yours—mine compels.”
Weyland-the-vampire’s survival and safety depend upon a sophisticated set of precepts. If he fails to follow them, he faces certain detection and danger. The ingenuity of Charnas’ Vampire-Rules-to-Live-By truly brings her novel—and the vampire, for that matter—into the realm of the realistic, modern, and elegant monster-tale. Charnas imbues Weyland with the ability to endure and prosper throughout the centuries. Her basis for Weyland’s staying power seems plausible, inspiring the bristling feeling that urbane vampires might very well walk among us:
The corporeal vampire … would be by definition the greatest of all predators, living as he would off the top of the food chain. Man is the most dangerous animal, the devourer or destroyer of all others, and the vampire preys on man.
He would learn to live on as little as he could—perhaps a half liter of blood per day—since he could hardly leave a trail of drained corpses and remain unnoticed. Periodically he would withdraw for his own safety and to give … [society] time to recover from his depredations. A sleep several generations long would provide him with an untouched, ignorant population in the same location.
… [U]pon each waking he must quickly adapt to his new surroundings, a task which, we may imagine, has grown progressively more difficult with the rapid acceleration of cultural change since the Industrial Revolution…. [A] perpetually self-educating vampire would always have to find himself a place in a center of learning in order to have access to the information he would need….