Blood Muse: Timeless Tales of Vampires in the Arts - Hardcover

The undead are undone by lifeless interpretations of their potential role in the creative arts in this compilation of 32 original stories. Most of the selections, which are grouped according to the artistic medium they cover ("The Screening Room," "The Sculpture Garden," etc.), restrict themselves to one of the three approaches to the vampire theme outlined in Friesner's introduction: art's power to confer immortality; its demand for self-consuming passion in the artist; its dependence on life for sustenance. Susan L. Williams's poignant "Blind Faith," in which a vampire artisan stains glass for a cathedral he can never enter, and Tim Waggoner's crafty "Preserver," about the unforeseen intent behind a vampire patron's deal with a collagist, are among the handful of tales that transcend this formula. In "Sing Heavenly Muse," Meg Turville-Heitz adroitly suggests that Milton was in thrall to a vampire muse when he created the self-tortured Lucifer of Paradise Lost. Generally, however, despite the editors' praise of the creative imagination, there are few truly novel representations of vampires here. Overstocked with angst-ridden artistes who suffer the torments of hell for their art, this anthology would have benefited from some of the comic relief to be found in the editors' previous anthology, Alien Pregnant by Elvis.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The leading humorous fantasist (Friesner) and the leading sf-fantasy anthologist (Greenberg) collaborate to compile this less than wholly humorous anthology. The stories disclose vampires in painting, cinema, music, sculpture, dance, writing, and several other fine and performing arts. If any subsidiary theme predominates, it is the loneliness of the vampire compounding--and sometimes fighting against--the loneliness of the artist. Particularly memorable stories include those by established writers Jane Yolen and Susan Shwartz and those by relative unknowns Thomas Roche, Laura Ann Ginman, Gregory Nicoll, and Tim Waggoner. The average quality is more than acceptable, as the contents both explore the main theme with intelligence and offer an abundance of good reading to the literate vampire fan. Roland Green