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WoGF Review: The Vampire Tapestry by Suzy McKee Charnas
Guest blogger and WWEnd Uber User, Charles Dee Mitchell, has contributed a great many book reviews to WWEnd including his blog series Philip K. Dickathon and The Horror! The Horror! He can also be found on his own blog www.potatoweather.blogspot.com.
Suzy McKee Charnas published her vampire novel in 1980. That was four years after Anne Rice had beguiled the American pubic with her romantic and sexed-up vampires. Charnas’ effort must have seemed pretty dry stuff by comparison, but it garnered good reviews and has stayed stubbornly in print. And it is a remarkable piece of work: a vampire tale stripped of gothic trappings, sexual metaphors (although not of sex), and most all the traditional attributes writers attribute to undying bloodsuckers.
Dr. Edgar Wyland is not human. He lives by drinking the blood of his prey, and tracking that prey and overcoming that prey is his chief concern. Although he kills when he finds it necessary, he prefers to use the needle like projection under his tongue to take only what he needs to stay alive. His bite, even when fatal, does not produce new vampires. To his knowledge, he is the only one of his kind on earth. He has lived for centuries, and one of his greatest challenges is to learn, after a period of hibernation that may last for months or years, how to fit into the new society he encounters. The rapid advance of technology in the 20th century has made that transition trickier, but he does well for himself, taking on manual labor when nothing better presents itself.
