November 2009 Global Vampire Community Discussion

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Global Vampire Community Discussion on Sunday, November 29, 2009 @ 7:00 PM Eastern US/ET (11:00 PM GMT). If you need assistance with time conversions refer to: http://www.timezoneconverter.com/cgi-bin/tzc.tzc The discussion will be held in the IRC channel #vampirevoices on Dalnet.



Topic: The Spiritual Side Of Vampirism



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Book Review: The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers

There are many fans of vampire fiction who have never heard of Tim Powers’ The Stress of Her Regard. Powers, like Stephen King (Salem's Lot) and Suzy McKee Charnas (The Vampire Tapestry) is not a “vampire author.” His oeuvre is a style of fantasy known as “secret history.” Powers begins with real life people and events and weaves alternate versions of their “official” stories, suggesting unknown, and usually magical or occult, influences at work behind the recorded facts. Powers is one of the original authors whose style inspired the “steampunk” genre which has become so popular, and which naturally overlaps with a great deal of vampire fiction set in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries.

But Tim Powers’ work defies easy categorization, and in many ways fits the newly recognized realm of Instititial Arts: creative work that combines, transcends or falls between standardized genre definitions. The Stress of Her Regard (reissue edition 2008, Tachyon Publications) is fantasy, horror, literary fiction, historical fiction and vampire novel all at the same time. Originally published in 1989, at the beginning of a massive revival in vampire fiction, it’s unquestionably one of the most unusual vampire tales written in the last six decades.

This is a literary novel in the classic sense: long, leisurely, meticulously crafted, and full of allusions to literature and cultural motifs. The plot spans six years and multiple countries, although the story, altogether, forms a sweeping epic beginning at the dawn of time. Powers never drops big expository boulders on his readers’ heads, though--the complicated mystery of the lamia, or Nephelim, whose “regard” for their beloved victims is so destructive, unwinds bit by bit as the tale progresses. Readers will need to pay attention and keep a good memory for small details, because even the tiniest may be an important clue.

The story opens in 1816, introducing Powers’ alternate universe versions of Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin, John Polidori, and Mary’s stepsister Claire Claremont. They’re in Switzerland on the lakeside summer get-away that so famously resulted in the penning of Frankenstein and “The Vampyre” by Mary Godwin and Polidori, respectively. However, it becomes apparent that Shelley’s greatest concerns aren’t literary. Twice he’s thrown into a panic by the appearance of a powerful, and evidently malign, phantom figure that resembles a woman. Shelley is being pursued by something very persistent, and he seems prepared to die rather than be overwhelmed by it.

We meet the book’s central protagonist, Dr. Michael Crawford, as he travels with several inebriated friends to his second wedding. Crawford, in his 30s, has a past marred by several deaths. Before long we have hints that the loss of his first wife in a fire occurred under suspicious circumstances, and that bitter memories are the least of the evils haunting her widower. When the wedding party stops at an inn, Crawford makes an unthinking mistake. He places his fiancée’s wedding ring on the finger of what he believes is a statue while he assists one of his friends. He loses the ring when the statue first changes position, then disappears. Like Victor in Tim Burton’s film The Corpse Bride, Crawford has unwittingly given Something Else reason to think he’s married to it.

The wedding takes place as planned, but the following morning, Crawford awakens next to the lifeless body of his bride Julia, who has been crushed to a pulp while Crawford slept. To avoid certain conviction for murder, Crawford flees. Disguising himself as a medical student in London, he meets John Keats. It’s Keats who explains the Nephelim, or lamia, to Crawford: an ancient race of vampires who attach themselves to selected individuals and jealously destroy their families and anyone else who might compete with the vampire for its loved one’s affections. The lamia’s feeding, through either blood-drinking or sex, conveys unearthly erotic euphoria. Keats introduces Crawford to the global underground network of lamia-addicts, or “Neffers” who will do anything to attract an encounter with a vampire. Like the slaves of Shambleau in C.L. Moore’s short story, the Neffers are recognizable and despised, but they’re also a tight community, like an organized secret society.

The Nephelim are able to bestow artistic inspiration on their chosen partners, and it turns out that all of the Romantic poets in The Stress of Her Regard are their reluctant bridegrooms. Crawford leaves England for the Continent, tracked relentlessly by Julia’s vengeful twin sister, Josephine. He encounters Shelley and Byron in Switzerland and all three embark on a long journey, together and independently, to escape the Nephelim. Over time, Crawford gradually learns the history of the Nephelim, why they have a physical nature of stone and metal, how they came to walk the modern world as part humans, and how they cause human dead to return as “undead” vampires. Crawford’s medical specialty, obstetrics, will turn out to be uniquely suited to resolving his situation. Byron, meanwhile, joins the Carbonari, a group that history claims was devoted to Italian nationalism, but which, in this story, has a hidden role as resisters of the Nephelim and their predation.

The Stress of Her Regard brilliantly twists fantasy together with historical fact, and many details that sound like horror fiction are actually true. The original characters of Crawford and Josephine, whose rejection of her own identity leaves her vulnerable to the wiles of the lamia, are strongly drawn, complex and memorable. Powers’ framing of a vast, mysterious conspiracy, with ancient supernatural powers, hidden riddles and secret societies, rivals anything written by Umberto Eco, let alone Dan Brown. I only wish that I had read this book much sooner! Now that it’s back in print after fourteen years--with breathtaking cover art by Ann Monn--I urge all serious vampire fiction fans not to wait as long as I did. The Stress of Her Regard is an intelligent and original variation on the vampire theme.

Book Review: The Vampire Tapestry by Suzy McKee Charnas

The Vampire Tapestry was first published in 1980, at the end of the Carter recession and the cusp of the Reagan era. Americans were bored with vampires. Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976) and Stephen King's Dracula Americana, Salem's Lot (1975) had both been best-sellers. But Rice wouldn’t publish her second book, The Vampire Lestat, until 1985, and King never wrote another vampire-themed novel. The first two Saint-Germain novels by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro had been published, but attracted less attention than they deserved. The TV cult sensation, Dark Shadows, and Hammer Films' vampire series had fizzled. Science fiction and fantasy, led by Star Wars and Tolkien, dominated the pop culture zeitgeist.

The great vampire renaissance we’re seeing now began building in the mid-80s and exploded in the early 90s. Maybe this dry spell is why several books released around 1980 gave the vampire theme unusual and creative twists. Like Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954), also published at a low point of vampire popularity, Suzy McKee Charnas’ The Vampire Tapestry startled readers with its revisionist depiction of a blood drinking character. Charnas’ book still has a solid core of fans who state that it’s not only their favorite vampire novel, but the best vampire novel ever written.

Despite this high regard from some very estimable people, I had never read The Vampire Tapestry. I’d only read one of the novella-length chapters, anthologized separately as “Unicorn Tapestry.” I came to the new reissue edition of The Vampire Tapestry (2008: Tom Doherty Associates) with fresh eyes, but a different context than readers had in 1980 when vampire fiction was largely defined by Dracula. Today, fictional alternatives to the “traditional” supernatural vampire are many and varied. Matheson (and the 1945 movie House of Dracula) broke new ground in imagining vampirism as a biological disease rather than a spiritual one. Charnas was among the first writers to present vampires as natural and normal members of another humanoid species. (She was not the very first to use this idea, since it was also the premise of the comic book series Vampirella, but The Vampire Tapestry was the first novel to develop the concept.)

Dr. Edward Weyland is the sole remaining member of his race, as far as he knows. Infinitely old, he periodically enters a state of hibernation, from which he emerges with no memory of his past to create a new identity for himself. He has no conscious knowledge of how he came to exist, exactly what he is or why there are no others like himself. He is a casual predator of humanity, but he isn’t a random killer. Herein lies his contradiction, because Weyland is by no means a cold-hearted murderer who disdains human beings as mere cattle. Intelligent, sophisticated and civilized, Weyland becomes more involved with the prey who so resemble him than I expected. Anne Rice’s vampires are far more alien, murderous and dangerous, from a human being’s perspective, than Charnas’ anti-hero.

Weyland is a living being, but he shares several of the powers attributed to “supernatural” vampires, including enhanced strength (explained in anatomical terms), resistance to injury (he survives a direct gun shot) and accelerated healing. Many readers are especially impressed by Weyland’s unique method of feeding. He uses a sort of dart under his tongue to pierce his victim’s skin, rather than fangs. But in 1980, long canine teeth fangs were a comparatively new vampire convention, which only started appearing in movies in 1958. Prior to that, fiction sometimes described puncture wounds but was vague about the physical mechanism that inflicted them. Weyland’s stinger is reminiscent of the grooved underside of a vampire bat’s tongue, which may have been Charnas’ inspiration for the idea.

The book’s title is descriptive. Although labeled a novel, The Vampire Tapestry consists of five long chapters that are connected, but can each be read as a free-standing and independent story. This gives the book an episodic narrative line--a “tapestry” of stitched together tales. The first three chapters focus on protagonists whose paths cross Weyland’s for very different reasons. These character studies are drawn with detail and skill, and each character is as memorable as Weyland himself. In “The Ancient Mind at Work,” Katje is an older white woman who was born and raised in colonial Africa and now works at the college where Weyland is a professor. She perceives him for what he is, with violent results. The second chapter, “The Land of Lost Content,” is told from the point of view of Mark, a teenager whose neglectful parents foist him off on his sleazy uncle Roger. Roger’s association with some very unsavory people leads to his having Weyland in captivity in his apartment for some time, and Mark forms an alliance with the vampire. The third chapter, “Unicorn Tapestry,” introduces Floria, a burned-out psychotherapist who reluctantly takes on Weyland as a client, and eventually crosses professional boundaries with him.

The final two chapters center on Weyland himself, and develop his character in ways that surprised me. I had often heard The Vampire Tapestry praised for its unsentimental depiction of vampires--Weyland, I was told, was a cold predator, not a mushy romantic hero. The final chapter of the book, however, belies this generalization. Weyland has deeper emotional tangles than he wants anyone to know.

The Vampire Tapestry has a few weaknesses. Some of the supporting characters, and some of the events, strained my credulity, especially in the second chapter. The narrative style contributed somewhat to this. Charnas apparently wanted to avoid using the authorial voice as much as possible. This means that all the exposition is done in the form of dialogue among the characters, and that means that most of the characters do too much explaining. Even Weyland ends up being the biggest vampire blabbermouth after Rice’s Louis, because he has to explain himself if there is no omniscient author to do so. It doesn’t seem to fit his personality or his precarious situation. Weyland needs about a pint of blood a day, which he obtains, without usually killing, from humans through all different kinds of subterfuge. Just for his own protective camouflage, you wouldn’t think he would talk about vampirism quite so much. The stories were written at the end of the 70s and are framed as simply, “the present,” so the assumptions and details are a bit dated now.

These are minor quibbles, however. The Vampire Tapestry is an entertaining and well-crafted book. It stands out from the vast sea of vampire fiction as one of the very few that achieves true originality. Its greatest disappointment is its lack of any sequels (or prequels). Weyland is a character whose longevity and history would lend themselves to an almost endless number of stories. Many questions about his species and origins are left unanswered, especially the two biggest ones: why are there no other vampires, and how did Weyland survive for so long? Alas, readers will simply have to speculate about these mysteries. However, Weyland does appear again in a novelette, “Advocates,” co-written with Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, which is anthologized in Under the Fang (Pocket Books: 1991), edited by Robert R. McCammon.

Book Review: Vampyres of Hollywood by Adrienne Barbeau and Michael Scott

The most obvious bit of satire in Vampyres of Hollywood (St. Martins: July 2008) is the suggestion that the great stars of the Golden Age of Cinema are literally, not just figuratively, “immortal.” But the entire novel, written by actress Adrienne Barbeau (Swamp Thing, The Fog) and author Michael Scott (The Alchemyst, The Magician) is really one enormous in-joke, on many levels. So pulpy that it should be printed on yellow paper, so formulaic that it should be filmed by Roger Corman, Vampyres of Hollywood stands in homage to the B horror flicks for which its heroine Ovsanna Moore and its co-author Barbeau are famous. In the best hack cinema tradition, Barbeau and Scott drench the scenery with blood, innards and ichor, borrow from every source that can’t run away fast enough, and finish with an outrageously over-the-top finale. It’s not great literature, but as every B-movie fan knows, the mess is all part of the fun.

Ovsanna Moore is a five hundred year old Vampyre with an attachment to the film industry. She loves it so much, in fact, that she has faked her own death twice and now poses as her own granddaughter carrying on three generations of movie stardom. She’s a one-woman version of the Barrymores. In the present day, Ovsanna runs a film company, Anticipation Studios, producing and usually starring in gory schlock horror films. As the novel begins, life is imitating Ovsanna’s art: actors and other people connected to Ovsanna’s film business are being found murdered in intensely gruesome ways (most of them being “found” in more than one spot). As the “Cinema Slayer” racks up a body count and terrorizes Tinseltown, world-weary Detective Peter King of the Beverly Hills P.D. pursues an investigation that quickly leads him to Ovsanna Moore’s doorstep. He ends up learning more about the “underworld” of Hollywood than he ever dreamed might exist.

That’s about all the plot that Vampyres of Hollywood can boast of. As more and more people around her turn up slaughtered (and usually sliced, diced and julienned), Ovsanna puzzles over the motive for the killings. Meanwhile, Peter King interviews various individuals without getting much closer to a resolution of the case. Finally, Ovsanna “follows a hunch” to another city and a possible explanation that is never foreshadowed in any way. Detective King trails after her to enable him to be part of the pull-out-all-the-stops-and-sit-on-the-keyboard climax.

I don’t care for first-person narrators, as a rule, and Vampyres of Hollywood has two of them. The chapters alternate between Ovsanna and Peter, with an icon on the chapter heading to identify who is talking. The icons are useful, because except for the content, there is absolutely nothing to differentiate the two characters’ narrations. Ovsanna and Peter think alike, talk alike, appear to have identical attitudes, moods, and outlooks on life, and their narrative voices are indistinguishable. They even are both currently celibate with a preference for female partners. I had to pay close attention to keep track of whose adventures I was following in the chapter I was reading.

Because of the skeletal storyline and the dual narration, the chapters are stuffed with expository padding. Ovsanna constantly cuts to a sidebar to explain to us readers details about Vampyrism in general and her past specifically. Peter King rambles off only slightly less often on tangents about his mother’s connection to the film industry and his experiences as a Beverly Hills cop. There are a lot of clever jokes--Ovsanna seems to have known everyone who ever wrote literature or made movies even slightly related to vampires and had a front row seat for every major historical event. She even tells us something we didn’t know about the real fate of Jack the Ripper. But all the explanation becomes tedious, and I found myself skimming chunks of digression to get back to the story.

Like a low-budget horror movie, Vampyres of Hollywood is filled with flagrant contradictions it disdains to reconcile. Ovsanna is the “Chatelaine of Hollywood,” but she seems relatively powerless when the other Vampyres of Hollywood appear at her home and warn her to resolve the situation or else. The Vampyres in the story are supposedly born as they are, yet at the same time, they can “turn” human beings into Vampyres. The relationship between Ovsanna and the murder victims is inconsistent, and sometimes tenuous. When we finally learn who is behind the killings, they still don’t make a lot of sense. Ovsanna is warned that she is putting Vampyres at risk of exposure, but nothing she does could possibly attract more attention than a string of horrendous homicides. Contradictions like this tend to haunt derivative stories. Vampyres of Hollywood owes a heavy debt to author Kim Newman (Anno Dracula, The Bloody Red Baron) and the fictional universe of Vampyres: The Masquerade and its “vampire clans.” I also detected loud pounding echoes of the movies Death Becomes Her (1992), Fright Night (1985) and Quentin Tarantino’s repellent From Dusk Till Dawn (1996).

But critiquing a book like this one too closely is like printing nutritional information on a tub of movie popcorn. Vampyres of Hollywood follows the predictable roller-coaster ride of every low-budget creature feature, especially the ending. If you’re knowledgeable about vampires and movies, you’ll enjoy collecting the trivia references and sly jokes. You probably won’t want to read this one on your lunch break, but if you have a beach vacation coming up, Vampyres of Hollywood is lively, undemanding entertainment.

The Lost Boys 2: The Tribe

The website Shock Till You Drop has an interview with Hans Rodionoff, the screenwriter for Lost Boys 2: The Tribe, currently in post-production. Twenty years after Joel Schumacher's The Lost Boys redefined the cinematic vampire and launched the "punk vampire gang" motif, a sequel has finally been made. Warner Brothers has not yet decided whether the movie will get a theatrical release or go straight to DVD.

Shock Till You Drop reports, "Tad Hilgenbrink and Autumn Reeser star as Chris and Nicole, respectively, son and daughter of Michael and Star (Jason Patric and Jamie Gertz's characters from the first film). With their parents gone, they relocate to Luna Bay where Nicole unknowingly takes a vampire for her boyfriend. Chris then turns to the authority on bloodsucker beatdowns Edgar Frog (Corey Feldman reprising his role) for help.

"Leader of the new vamp pack is actor Angus Sutherland, real-life brother of Kiefer, here playing Shane who travels the world with his fanged chums. Yes, they're surfing vampires. But Rodionoff is quick to dismiss that these are not the stereotypical "bro" and "dude"-dropping wave riders we've seen in cinema countless times. Roving gypsies is more like it. Traveling the world and pissed off that they've been deprived of sunlight."

The film's story does pick up from the original, with cameos by minor actors as well as character continuity. Attractive 53-year-old Canadian actress Gabrielle Rose appears as "eccentric Aunt Jillian," who takes in Chris and Nicole after their parents are killed in a car accident. The vampire "gang" in this movie are surfers, but we're assured by Mr. Rodionoff that not much surfing is done on film. The movie is scheduled to be released in summer, 2008.

Baby vampires and disturbed grown-ups

I read a number of vampiric community messageboards. Several of them include a forum for "troll baiting." Posts made by abusive, or clueless, individuals are moved to this forum and other members of the board are given free rein to ridicule, abuse and denigrate the poster to their heart's content, in this forum only. I suppose the intention is to divert the flamewars that often follow certain kinds of posts from the main body of the board. Whatever their intention, these "troll-baiting" forums are nothing but an excuse for self-indulgent and immature behavior of the worst sort by purported adults. The provoking posts are rarely worth bothering with at all, but the "troll-baiters" quickly surpass even the most abusive of their targets in sheer mean-spiritedness and infantilism. It's amazing how much time some people have on their hands to waste on such trash.

Eight years ago, when I was running my own messageboard, and contributing to others, I tried to convince other moderators that there was only one way to deal with trolls, abusers and nuisance posters--only one, no exceptions. The problem posts are instantly deleted on sight and never discussed, replied to or mentioned ever again. Period. Trolls are usually trying to stir up conflict, and they thrive on flamewars--they get a tremendous sense of self-importance from upsetting other people on the messageboard. But no matter how often this scenario was repeated, and how much I tried to demonstrate to other moderators that they were contributing to the problem, not helping it, people in the OVC never learned. They continued to play suckers and fall into the trolls' trap, every single time. Troll-baiting forums only corral the nonsense into a limited area.

For the most part, this would only be annoying. But recently I watched a "troll-baiting" unfold that had some very unsavory elements indeed. I won't say which messageboard this was on, nor identify the principals involved. I stumbled across the thread because I was looking for updates in a different topic that had been moved into the troll-baiting forum.

A new member of the board, who stated that she was 14 years old, had responded to an "Intro" post by criticizing the poster's grammar. Yes, it was a bit snotty--but no more than 14-year-old girls often are. If it had been my board, I'd have just deleted the post, no comment.

But of course, the purportedly adult suckers on the messageboard started sniping at the young person, and the whole thread was moved into the troll forum, where it proceeded to simply blow up--page after page of long posts attacking the young person for her subsidy-published book, her MySpace page, and other completely irrelevant things. They just wouldn't let it alone.

Now, there's nothing unusual about that--except that these were all self-proclaimed adults, ganging up on a 14-year-old. Not one of them seemed to feel they were doing anything inappropriate. The ringleader in the attacks was a 45-year-old (so claimed, anyway) who made lengthy posts diagnosing the young person as a "Narcissist" and expounding on why "Narcissists" could never change and are intolerable to be around. As far as I know, this 45-year-old is not a mental health professional and is not qualified to diagnose--although this 45-year-old evidently has extensive personal experience with mental health issues. As the 45-year-old continued to pummel the 14-year-old in this thread, I found myself getting more and more queasy. I hate the "troll baiting," anyway. It's stupid and juvenile, which is also how I'd characterize the alleged adults who indulge in it. But this went beyond that. For a 45-year-old to spend that much time and energy heaping public abuse on a 14-year-old for so little provocation was just...wrong. More than wrong, it was sick.

My main concern with the young person was the fact that she'd "borrowed" the name of my website, By Light Unseen, for her MySpace screenname. I reported this to MySpace and shortly afterwards the young person changed her screenname. As far as I was concerned, that settled things. I was curious enough to download the young person's book, which was free of charge, from the subsidy publisher's website. It's...well, it's stories written by a 13-year-old. But it could be far worse, and at least it's not fanfic, that cancer of creativity that is draining the last vestiges of original thought from most aspiring writers these days. Predictably, the troll-baiters crowed that they deserved credit for the young person changing the screenname, although we have no idea why that happened. The troll-baiters also jeered at the young person's listing her age, in her MySpace profile, as "100," as though the young person was pretending to be an "immortal vampire." The young person was claiming nothing of the sort. Many minors use ridiculous numbers for their age in their MySpace profile, because MySpace includes age in the page title. 14-year-old girls who don't want to be harassed by creeps and perverts usually fudge their age. But this young person was honest about her age everywhere else.

The troll-baiters got bored and moved on, finally, and I'm sure that hapless young person will never trouble that messageboard again. Meanwhile, this news item appeared in my online news filters.

It's difficult to imagine an adult, and the parent of a teenager, who could justify being that cruel and deceptive. She definitely has no business being a parent, I'm certain of that. I shudder to think of the model she has been for her own teenager. Whether the young victim would ultimately have committed suicide anyway--since there are numerous clues in the article that her life was filled with problems and she had a history of mental health issues and medications--is something no one can say. But when the victim's mother says, "But when adults are involved and continue to screw with a 13-year-old, with or without mental problems, it is absolutely vile," she is absolutely correct. Vile, and sick. How could anyone be an adult in America these days and still not realize that?

Fun With Search Engines...

For a multiplicity of reasons, I've been running a lot of tests on search engine results. Last night, just out of curiosity to see what actually got the best Google rankings (at least at that moment in time), I did a Google search on "vampire." Not surprisingly, that term returned 39,400,000 hits. I wanted to see, first, what a person who typed "vampire" into Google would immediately be presented with; and second, how close to the top any "real vampire" sites were, and which sites were top rated. What I saw was...interesting.

The top-rated Google site for "vampire" is the Wikipedia page with that name, dealing with vampire folklore. Next came Vampire Wine, which I believe is the old domain that used to be Pathway to Darkness, and hence may be riding on that now long-vanished site's extensive linkage and popularity. Then VampireRave.com, which is a commercial Goth/punk site aimed at Lifestylers and vampire fans more than vampiric people. Then came the two main pages for Vampire: The Masquerade and Vampire: Requiem at White Wolf Games. Then the Skeptic's Dictionary page on "vampire," which links Sanguinarius.org and Dr. Elizabeth Miller's Dracula page. A technical page was number 7, then VampireFreaks.com, which is a very disturbing site. 9th and 10th on the first page of hits were Sanguinarius.org and Temple of the Vampire. So, two "real vampire" sites appeared among the first 10 hits.

The second page started with two gaming sites, "the vampire random name generator" and the "vampire" section in the site "How Stuff Works," titled "How Vampires Work." This is kind of sketchy, and has a handful of links that need updating. (Among other things, it links a page on this site that is no longer there.) But the fifth entry, the vampire section on Monstrous.com, is a candidate for my Hall of Shame--it's entirely plagiarized! I started to read it and immediately recognized big chunks of text from my old "Human Living Vampires" articles and from Sanguinarius' site, all just jumbled together without attribution or credit. The whole section consists of unashamedly ripped off material. The rest of the page was technical sites, gaming sites, and VampireMeetups.com.

The technical sites are intriguing. There seems to be a trend to name technical products, businesses or projects "vampire" something. There was "Vampire, an extension module for mod_python," "Net Vampire, a file download manager," "VAMPIRE--Visual Active Memory Processes and Interactive REtrieval," and "Vampire Wire," an online store for cables and wiring.

The third page of Google hits included Damien Deville's organization The Vampire Church, and one of my friend Bev's articles on vampire myths. It also contained Vampire Wear, the IMDb page for "John Carpenter's Vampires," a gaming site, a photographer's gallery site, the spoof website "Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency," and the website for the band Vampire Weekend.

And so it went, for pages and pages. Very few serious information sites or real vampire sites appeared among the top, say, 200. Obviously, anyone running a Google search on just the word "vampire" is going to have a hard time finding much information of substance--and not because the information isn't on the 'Net. But Google's method of ranking sites is not angled toward returning the highest quality material. Apparently, it's related primarily to the number of links a site has from other "important" websites.

The results from the same search on Yahoo! are entirely different. Yahoo! returns far more hits, 54,100,000, to start with. The first site on the list is Vampires Among Us, followed by Vampires Only, Dr. Miller's Dracula Page, Sanguinarius.org, Beverly Richardson's Vampire's Vault, and Vampyres Online. By Light Unseen is number 11, top of the second page, and with the correct name. Google still lists us as "Living Vampires," which hasn't been the site's name since 2002. (It still comes up if you Google By Light Unseen, however). Unfortunately, Yahoo! also returns Monstrous.com on the first page of hits, so I really will be contacting Monstrous about their little copyright problem. But the bottom line is: Yahoo! returns a much more substantial assortment of websites at the top of a simple keyword search than Google does.

"Angel"--the story continues:

On the heels of the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" comics (or graphic novel) series, Joss Whedon is producing a comics series picking up the plotline of "Angel" after the television series finale's cliffhanger ending.

http://blogs.usatoday.com/popcandy/2007/09/return-of-the-v.html?csp=34

I'm tempted to say something about a line drawing of David Boreanaz having more range than the actor does...but I'll be nice. There are some sample pages of the comic available on Ain't It Cool News, it looks quite handsomely done.

Blood drinker achieves international fame!

International newswires have been carrying this item:

"Vampire" arrested for stealing and drinking blood at hospital

I wonder if this fellow even knew what he was drinking, or if he was so drunk, he thought they were shooters of something? I certainly hope the female patient wasn't being tested for something really nasty...