Take away food

Sir,

The eco-freaks are trying to kill me.

I live in a small suburban street and I usually cook human food each day and then flush it down the toilet. This was so that neighbours will smell my kitchen and to provide empty wrappers and cans to leave out for the dustmen to collect. They would then believe that I eat. Camouflage is everything.

No more.

The mortals in my city have recently discontinued the weekly collection of rubbish bags. There are now alternate weekly collections of trash for the dump, alternating with collections of recyclable materials such as glass, paper, card and plastic. I must try to fill an enormous wheelie bin the size of a teenager’s coffin with stuff or else people will begin to suspect that I never eat.

I am not a wealthy vampire. I can ill afford to waste cash on even more groceries. I have taken the pledge and gone non-lethal, but it means that I have to spend even more of my nighttime hours in seducing people to feed on. Mine is a pleasant and orderly neighbourhood at the edge of town. There just aren’t enough muggers for me to make a decent living stealing from and dining on them. Please don’t suggest drug addicts, Mr. Blackburn. I refuse to live off junk food.

I really don’t want to revert to predation as I would need to hunt quite far afield. We have very few homeless people here and hardly any illegal immigrants, so culling a few would not be an option as even a handful would be missed. I’d have to travel to the nearby cities in that case.

How am I to fill up these monstrous bins and blend into the background and still stay solvent?

Why were the old days so much simpler?

Regards,

Worried,
Alderley Edge, Cheshire, England.

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Sign of The Times

Sir,

I read with dismay in an archived page of the Times that the local council had been hoping to restrict human immigration into these islands from Romania. I abhor such a notion; the more fresh blood that is brought into this island the better. Old World, New World, and Emerging World: each has its distinctive character and appeal; to both nose and palate. I applaud, by contrast, the European government’s liberalisation of the movement of livestock in this way as travelling to châteaux abroad can be tiresome and hazardous. However, there is a hidden peril here, which I should draw to the attention of our kind.

Were it not for one particular Romanian immigrant, the cattle would have known less about our kind, and our existence would be safer. The creature was a savage. He was ignorant of the ways of this land. He knew nothing of property rights such as our established hunting grounds. Imagine; taking unmarried girls before they could breed and perpetuate the herd!

He was an exhibitionist, with his killing and appearing in public and so on. The dissembling that we were obliged to perform cost us all dearly, in effort and treasure. Enchanting his servant to fancy himself the author of a work of fiction was my idea, as you may know, but our existence and natures were made known to the common herd in ways that previous, less successful chronicles had not employed.

Suddenly the toxicity of garlic, the need for an invitation to enter homes, the timber stake and the problems with mirrors were common knowledge, and our food was forewarned. Unless our plot to stifle humans’ fear of vampires by portraying us as sympathetic, unpredatory victims of circumstance is successful, then I fear that the cattle will never again be gullible enough to put themselves willingly into our clutches.

And he was a convert to the Roman church! An idolater! An indecorous, strutting, foppish barbarian who placed our kind in the light of publicity forever. Without his tale being published worldwide, when a rogue infected the President both she and her meal could have been staked and beheaded and the killing put down to a lone madman. The mortal world would have been none the wiser. All the expensive foolishness of graphite bullets, interfering with the forensic evidence, enthralling witnesses and so on would have been unnecessary. It would have been forgotten in a decade or so. Instead there are those humans who will now never cease looking for the truth.

Let that be a lesson to you, boy. Publicity is rarely to our advantage, though I admire the dissimulation which our servants are achieving in the worlds of storytelling, the cinema and television.

I remain affectionately yours,

Prudence Skelton, Lady Mobberley.

Post scriptum.

I once had spawn of my own. A fine young man whom I stalked, drained, and killed. Then I brought him back to the world and to this life of ours. He was such a sweet child; always ready with an unkind word and ever willing to perpetuate such acts of cruelty as to make a mother’s heart stay stock-still with pride. I remember raising him as a whelp; weaning him off solid food and staying with him all night while he was teething. I wonder what became of the boy. Perhaps he is too busy now with his affairs amongst mortals; trying to be their friend. Perhaps some slip of a girl, a Papist and a free-thinker both, is more important than the dam who raised him from a grave that she had made for him herself? Well, eternal life here on Earth can only become everlasting loss and grief. Tell me, Mister internet vampire, how can a mother mend a heart broken, not by the preacher's stake or the Sun's cruel light, but by the one she loves the most in all the world?

Farewell, Adonais.

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Vampire slayers: good enough to eat?

I shall begin with a rant of my own to get this page started off.

Vampire slayers come in all manner of shapes, sizes, sexes, and species. They come in small, private-sector firms, and large, government-sized organisations and they come in disguise. They come in through the doors and the windows and down the chimney if they can.
Now, I have taken the pledge, like this lot, for the love of a wicked woman: my Dark Bride; the beat of my unbeating heart; milady Lucy Bountilaire. Her tender concern for our fellow bipeds is compelling. Human beings are people (of a sort), and it just doesn’t seem sporting to take their blood without their permission any more.
Sigh.
Okay. So one is obliged to ask permission (if only to keep this lot off one’s chest). It requires dinner and a movie to take a drink on draught. The rest is from the bag these nights, and one is told one must be grateful for that.
I try. I really do. I go to meetings.
The question is... what to do with the beggars when they arrive unexpectedly and uninvited?
It’s all very well arguing, as Lucy does, that humans’ mayfly lives are precious to them. However much turning to dust is inevitable for them, to take such a small gift from the poor creatures would be cruel. Fair enough. I can exist above the level of my thirst and practise good works, and enjoy a blissful marriage. As opposed to the other kind.
Only. Only they don’t all potter past us in the night; oblivious to our existence and the thirst that never ends. Slayers arrive equipped with a variety of baggage. Burglary tools. Holy objects and substances (often toxic). Righteous anger you could shave with. The generosity and gentle forgiveness of a first wife. Plans for cardiothoracic carpentry.

One morning you settle down to rest, pull the lid closed after you, and WHAM! Some dreary Van Helsing wannabe’s scratching the lacquer and jimmying off all the ornate carving that’s going to cost a fortune to have repaired. Your bleary eyes, pale and bloodless with exhaustion, stare up into the humourless face of someone prepared to Do The Right Thing, no matter how much it hurts you or stains the flagstones, so it’s up you get, hissing and clawing, dancing the light fandango around the cellar/loft/castle room/belfry, avoiding the light from the cracks in the curtains you left there in your hurry to get to sleep. It’s the drink, you know. The fight can go five ways. You can die. The slayer can die. You can flee, blanketed and gasping. The slayer can flee.
Or you can capture the slayer. What then? Lucy says you should let them go with a warning and an invitation to come back for a chat some night to see if there is room for you both to compromise. Note that ‘both.’ You were just minding your own business, sleeping it off and dreaming of the plastic delights of a reheated half litre of A+ and watching a game of floodlit football before off to the seedy end of town to find the special muggers with too much stolen cash and too little interest in folklore and horror films. You didn’t ask some skinny pubescent or overheated dhampir with a sense of grievance to burst you door down. You only come in when invited. But no! They have to turn up, disturb your sleep, and try to fit you with an ash wood aorta. What room to compromise is there? The slayer believes you’re a Hell-spawned monster fit only for a Tequila Sunrise without the tequila but with a side order of Special Ribs. You believe that they’re about a hundred pounds of meat soaked in the world’s finest marinade. Now that they know where you live the only way to avoid having to relocate and find another nest is to slip them the enamel syringe, glug glug, yum yum, and it’s off to the mortuary for them and it’s down to the Coroner’s house tonight for a spot of hypnotic suggestion for you.
It makes me mad. Okay, going against my nature and living off ready meals is just about acceptable. I can do it. I really can. But an English vampire’s castle is his home, and I say that if slayers break in with mayhem on their mind, then drinks are on the house, and hard luck to the hapless housebreaker.

What do you think, dead reader?

Adonais Blackburn

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Vampire Writers Welcome

Welcome to a place where vampire fiction fans and writers can showcase their original writing and critical talents, and link to their own sites elsewhere if they wish.

Our specialist sister pages are enabled for you to post criticism and reviews directly once you have sent your first email.*

Why an agony column?

Because it’s such a great idea. Alas, it is not mine. Nothing is new under the moon, of course, and I came across this one recently in a valuable and delightful series, by a hugely entertaining writer, MaryJanice Davidson. In Undead and Unreturnable her heroine, the marvelous Betsy, Queen of the US vampires goes along with the idea of writing an advice column for her more-and-less obedient subjects.

She does so hoping to civilize her subjects into drinking only from willing donors who are then allowed to survive. In her world, you don’t have to murder to feed. Predation is out – love and voluntary exchange are in.Her first effort is to advise a lonely vamp to contact his ageing parents before it is too late, and how to do it tactfully and without inviting suspicion and - presumably - incoming woodwork…

So I write short varied pieces as part of the ‘Dear Vlad’ column. I have fun with my secret history of the many vampire conspiracies. My readers, if any, who want to show off their own stuff or rave about their favourite vampire or related fiction are invited to provide questions and comments, but it’s not compulsory. Vampire prose only, please for ‘Dear Vlad’.

Dear reader, what do you think of the new lines in sun blocks this year? Good enough for twenty minutes free from agonizing noonday pain, or just a cosmetics industry con trick? Let us know, and also show us what other vampire thoughts you have.

Do you have difficulty fitting in at your local church, what with the hissing and the cringing and the frankly careless way the priest flings the holy water about?

What do you think about Renfields today: too twitchy, needy, and unreliable? Is Contract Henchmanship the way to go? Is there an easy solution to the domestic help problem, or are we all going to have to be nice to the werewolves again?

Let’s see what you’ve got, midnight scribes.

Yours.
The late Adonais Blackburn.

* I need your email address to give you posting rights with blogger.com. You will need a Google account to post thereafter.

Book, television and film reviews can be posted directly by enthusiasts here and here and here.

I hope to add specialist as time allows and demand prompts.

I might not think that a post, thread, or link is suitable for a fun blog. I’ll be putting links to such work in an overflow blog, suitably flagged with warnings. If you do me the favour of writing something vampirish and it’s not actually illegal, the least I can do is let your work be seen, and linked to. Excessively political, religious, technical, abusive and sexual stuff will go there. (Basically stuff I wouldn’t want my daughter to read until she’s eighteen.)

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Vampire Secret History

All vampire fiction is true.

All the books, films, television shows, graphic novels and games which are commonly sold as entertainment somehow reflect the real underworld where vampires exist and prey on mankind. Vampires have many different kinds of political organisations and overlapping jurisdictions and are often unknown to each other and in secret conflict amongst themselves. Don’t even get me started on the American South.

The wreck of the Demeter still attracts scuba divers off the coast of Whitby each summer and the Czech government has not yet discovered the cause of the massacre in the European Health Consortium's head office building in Prague. There really is a New England town where the people disappeared and a crater in California where the town just disappeared.

There are two kinds of vampires; traditionalists and the Peace Movement.

Traditionalists are predatory raptors who regard humanity as food and of no intrinsic worth otherwise. They are monsters and through a variety of organisations and plots threaten the freedom of human beings. They mean to take over the world. Fortunately, they are divided amongst themselves, and haven’t managed to take control yet. But they’re working on it. Traditionalists promote vampire fiction to discredit witnesses who might try to ‘out’ their existence, and to spread the message to would-be slayers that vampires are a pushover, so why bother organising?

The Peace Movement are far less numerous than the traditionalists, and are similarly disunited, and represent a wholly unrepresentative minority of the vampire nation as a whole. They pursue a variety of strategies in order to live peacefully with their human neighbours. They are considered to be traitors and milksops by the traditionalists, and are hated and targeted by the bloodsuckers more fiercely than they even attack slayers.

Slayers, too, are divided amongst themselves, with the Vatican having at least three separate and mutually unknown groups, who can therefore not produce a common front against the predators. The military and security apparatus of various countries have anti-vampire units within them, but since such organisations are founded on both obedience to authority and secrecy, they rarely if ever co-ordinate together. Then there are the private sector and voluntary slaying organisations…Some slayers can accept the existence of non-lethal vampires, but other refuse to believe that leopards can change their spots and pursue a-stake-them-all-and-let-God-sort-them-out policy.

I, Adonais Blackburn, a modern-day vampire in Lancashire have taken the pledge to live Eternity Without Cruelty out of affection and respect for my Dark Bride; Lucy Bountilaire. I am a British representative to the IV League, one of the international groupings of the Peace Movement. As part of my commitment to bringing the two species together, and to help his fellow vampires to survive in a confusing, changing world, I run an agony column at Dear Vlad.

I welcome queries and problems from vampires, slayers and the preyed-upon of all sorts, in the hope both of making life better for my fellow vampires and more long-lasting for my human neighbours.

You are very welcome to mail your queries to ab dot negative at yahoo dot co dot uk and to add your comments to any of the postings.

Your agony uncle,

(The late) Adonais Blackburn