"Kim Newman - Andy Warhol's Dracula" - читать интересную книгу автора (Newman Kim)

cluster of gold chains and medallions Ч Transylvanian charms, badges of
honor and conquest Ч that hung in the gap between his hand-sized
collar-points.
With the white jacket, lined in blood-red silk, Johnny was a blinding
apparition. He didn't need a strobe to shine in the dark. Sid raised his
knife hand, to cover his eyes. The boy's reaction was better than any
mirror.
"Punk sucks," said Johnny, inviting a response.
"Disco's stupid," Sid sneered back.
Sid was going to get in trouble. Johnny had to make a slave of the boy, to
keep himself out of the story.
He found an unused needle on the bed. Pinching the nipple-like bulb, he
stuck the needle into his wrist, spearing the vein perfectly. He let the
bulb go and a measure of his blood Ч of Nancy's? Ч filled the glass phial.
He unstuck himself. The tiny wound was invisibly healed by the time he'd
smeared away the bead of blood and licked his thumbprint. He tossed the
syrette to Sid, who knew exactly what to do with it, jabbing it into an
old arm-track and squirting. Vampire blood slid into Sid's system,
something between a virus and a drug. Johnny felt the hook going into
Sid's brain, and fed him some line.
Sid stood, momentarily invincible, teeth sharpening, eyes reddened, ears
bat-flared, movements swifter. Johnny shared his sense of power, almost
paternally. The vampire buzz wouldn't last long, but Sid would be a slave
as long as he lived, which was unlikely to be forever. To become
nosferatu, you had to give and receive blood; for centuries, most mortals
had merely been giving; here, a fresh compact between the warm and the
undead was being invented.
Johnny nodded towards the empty thing on the bed. Nobody's blood was any
good to her now. He willed the command through the line, through the hook,
into Sid's brain. The boy, briefly possessed, leaped across the room,
landing on his knees on the bed, and stuck his knife into the already dead
girl, messing up the wounds on her throat, tearing open her skin in dozens
of places. As he slashed, Sid snarled, black fangs splitting his gums.
Johnny let himself out of the room.

They were calling him a vampire long before he turned.
At the Silver Dream Factory, the Mole People, amphetamine-swift
dusk-til-dawners eternally out for blood, nicknamed him "Drella":
half-Dracula, half-Cinderella. The coven often talked of Andy's
"victims": first, castoffs whose lives were appropriated for Art,
rarely given money to go with their limited fame (a great number of
them now truly dead); later, wealthy portrait subjects or Inter/VIEW
advertisers, courted as assiduously as any Renaissance art patron (a
great number of them ought to be truly dead). Andy leeched off them
all, left them drained or transformed, using them without letting
them touch him, never distinguishing between the commodities he
could only coax from other people: money, love, blood, inspiration,
devotion, death. Those who rated him a genius and those who ranked
him a fraud reached eagerly, too eagerly, for the metaphor. It was
so persistent, it must eventually become truth.