Under the Fang, edited by Robert McCammon (1991): The World is a Vampire

Vampires, vampires, vampires! Loathsome creatures of the night stalking and snacking on humans across the globe! There's no escape! Whatever can we do?!

Nothing, it seems, or very little, to save ourselves. Thus is the setup for the stories in Under the Fang (Pocket Books, Aug 1991, cover by Mitzura), under the auspices of the Horror Writers of America coalition, with editing duties by iconic bestselling paperback author Robert R. McCammon. Akin to the zombie apocalypse anthos based on George Romero's movies, Book of the Dead (1989) and Still Dead (1992), (which of course hearken back to 1957's I Am Legend) all the stories exist in this new world, with each author bringing their own special methods of madness to the proceedings.

McCammon in 1991

Virtually all the vampire anthologies published prior to the early Nineties were collections of classic stories, moldy golden oldies by the likes of Bram Stoker, Polidori, EF Benson, Crawford, Derleth, et al. Esteemed editor Ellen Datlow gave us Blood is Not Enough in 1989 and A Whisper of Blood in 1991, which featured all-new vampiric works by the cream of the genre's crop. I'll confess: I've read neither, even though I've owned them since Kurt Cobain was still alive. But those two volumes seem to be the first that showed that the old symbols and themes of vampire fictions could be given fresh new life at the end of the century. 

The vampires within Under the Fang exist on a spectrum of generic types: the typical night creeper; the almost-zombified monster driven mad by thirst; the brilliant military leader; the scientific sort looking for a way to walk in daylight; the Anne Rice decadent aesthete. Vampires have been dubbed cutesy nicknames, like "suckheads" and "fangers" and whatnot. That out of the way, let's get to the contents: McCammon gets a twofer, first with a metafictional introduction, in the guise of a doomed note from an unnamed narrator:

They've won. They come in the night, to the towns and cities. Like a slow, insidious virus they spread from house to house, building to building, from graveyard to bedroom and cellar to boardroom. They won, while the world struggled with governments and terrorists and the siren song of business. They won, while we weren't looking...

He handily sketches out the scope of the situation in a couple pages, setting us up for the tales to come. Second is his story "The Miracle Mile," of a family's drive to an abandoned season vacation spot and amusement park. Vampires have of course overrun it, and Dad is pissed. With his signature mix of corny sap and derivative horror, McCammon delivers perfectly cromulent reading material. It's just that I always find him square and dull and earnest, and not my jam whatsoever.

McCammon and Sarrantonio, 1990

The recently-late Al Sarrantonio's "Red Eve" is an effective slice of dark, poetic fantasy in full Bradbury mode, which was common for him. I have no idea who Clint Collins is, but his brief "Stoker's Mistress" is a high-toned yet effective bit of metafiction about vampires "allowing" Bram Stoker to write his "ludicrous" novel Dracula... Shades of soon-to-be-unleashed Anno Dracula. Nancy A. Collins had already had her way with the vampires; "Dancing Nitely" is a perfect encapsulation of the modern image of the unholy creature: they all want to live in an MTV video scripted by Bret Easton Ellis. Contains scenes of NYC yuppies dancing under blood spray at an ultra-hip underground vamp bar, called Club Vlad, with a neon Lugosi lighting up its exterior. We may cringe looking back at it today, but back then this style was au courant du jour.

Late crime novelist Ed Gorman delivers an emotional wallop in "Duty," powerfully effective even though I was half-expecting how the turnaround was going to happen. I gotta try one of his full horror novels! Richard Laymon does his his usual schtick of adolescent ogling and rape fantasy scenarios rife with toxic masculinity in "Special," this story ends on an unexpected note of enlightenment. Better than other things I've read by him, but not enough to make me a fan. 

One of those writers whose byline makes me groan inwardly, J.N. Williamson (above), contributes a lengthy, pulp-prose-level Interview with the Vampire-esque work called "Herrenrasse" ("master race" in German, yuck) in which a hoity-toity vampire traps a potential Van Helsing in his apartment. They then engage in a lengthy dialogue of philosophical conceits of bloodsucking. Kinda cool, but Williamson's style can be pompous, overwritten in that pulpy, self-taught style that screams "show-off." Thomas F. Monteleone, he of the wonderful cutting edge Borderlands anthologies, contributes "Prodigal Sun," a brilliant vampire who had been an immunologist who now tries to cure their curse of bloodthirst. Well-written but so-so.

Together, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and Suzy McKee Charnas pit their own fictional vamps—Count St. Germain and Dr. Edward Weyland, respectively—against one another in "Advocates," the most philosophically ambitious work here; no surprise, as both women approached the vampire as a concept in their other writings. Could've been better I felt, less than the sum of its parts.

Brian Hodge, 1991

On to the finest stories within: my favorite was Brian Hodge's "Midnight Sun," which is so well-conceived in scope and execution I daresay he could've written an entire novel using his scenario. Muscular and convincing, its setting of a military outpost in frozen wastes makes it a standout; the conflict, not only between humans and vampires but also between vampires themselves give the story a real moral heft. A close second was "Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage," by Chet Williamson, in which a loving husband and wife experience tragedy and woe after escaping into a cabin in the woods. Tough, moving, unsettling stuff. 

Surprisingly, Lisa Cantrell (above), she of The Manse "fame," pulls out a little winner in "Juice." It ain't moonshine this good ol' boy is making a living from. "Does the Blood Line Run on Time?" by Sidney Williams and Robert Pettit, is one of the real bangers here, an action-adventure-horror offering that is oh-so Eighties in just the right way. Williams wrote a few horror paperbacks around then, and now I'm considering adding them to my want-lists.

Other stories here, by authors both known and unknown, run up and down the scale from ok sure fine to oh well whatever nevermind. This might not be the best antho of the era I've ever read, but the quality of prose is very high—this was the HWA, after all—even if the story itself doesn't quite succeed. Me, I could've done with some more graphic bloodshed/drinking, or classic Lugosi/Lee-style vamp action in the good old Les Daniels' tradition. No matter; your mileage may vary as well (PorPor Books enjoyed it maybe a smidgen more than I did). Overall, I'd say Under the Fang is an easy recommendation for your horror anthology and/or vampire fiction shelves.

The Manse by Lisa W. Cantrell (1987): The Mayberry "Horror"

Inexplicably the winner of the 1987 Bram Stoker Award for best first novel, The Manse is that kind of maddening, meandering, monotonous horror fiction that isn't outright terrible but just middling, sitting there politely and inoffensively without a truly horrific moment to make it memorable. Hell, any kind of fiction that is this simplistic, colorless, and obvious is grating to one's critical faculties. I can't hate it yet I can't love or really even like it. Lisa W. Cantrell writes in a style that can at best be called "young adult lite" and the tepid plot abounds with by-the-numbers characters and dialogue in which everyone refers to each other constantly by their first names and says the most obvious thing possible. With that large text and margin size I hate that bloats a passable 275-page novel up to nearly 350, I really sense that Cantrell had a novella that her editor at Tor Books wanted to publish as a novel.

The manse itself is an imposing and creepy old house in which the local Jaycees hold their yearly Halloween haunted house fundraisers, in the small town of Merrillville, North Carolina. The very fact that I'm typing "Jaycees" in a horror-fiction review is setting my back teeth on edge and boring me out of my skull all at once. But apparently the "vibe" of all the people scared in that house by the props and costumes and lights and smoke set up by the... Jaycees has somehow awakened an old evil and now the manse is actually haunted, like, for real. And people are disappearing, for Chrissake! Won't anyone listen?! Dammit!

Cue small-town folk à la King who all know each other, as well as an attempt to build an atmosphere of quiet, whispering horror that is really more like a description of a haunted house on a Halloween greeting card. The story doesn't get up and running till a hundred pages in. There's a fiery climax during one of the haunted house tours, children get pulled into funhouse mirrors - that wasn't bad - but then comes the half-hearted "twist" ending; oh, God, how lame those are, so expected and unimaginative. The cover art, by Bob Eggleton, is in the malevolent-yet-ridiculous Halloween style, although that title font that Tor loved to use is kind of all right. But the artist should have simply depicted this terribly scary manse itself on the cover - so people would know what the fuck a "manse" is.

Thinly written and indifferently paced especially in the opening chapters when an author should want to hook readers, The Manse is a trite, tiresome flop. I found it difficult to even skim the pages just to be done with the book and place it back on my shelf. How this novel beat out Clive Barker's grim, inventive The Damnation Game or a Steve Rasnic Tem novel for the Stoker Award is a real puzzler.

I don't know if Cantrell got any better as a horror author - I could find out if I wanted, as I've also got a copy of the sequel, Torments - but she hasn't published anything since the mid-1990s and I could find nothing about her on all the internets. I supposed The Manse would make an okay book for a young and/or inexperienced horror reader, but for an adult man who's been reading horror fiction much of his life? Yeah, no; The Manse is a miss.

This did not happen.