"T. K. F. Weisskopf & Greg Cox Ed. - Tomorrow Sucks" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weisskopf T.K.F)

TOMORROW SUCKS
Edited By
T. K. F. Weisskopf & Greg Cox

CONTENTS
Greg Cox - A Scientific History of Vampirism
Ray Bradbury - Pillar of Fire
Joe L. Hensley - And Not Quite Human
Brian Stableford - The Man Who Loved the Vampire Lady
S. N. Dyer - Born Again
Keith Roberts - Kaeti's Nights
Spider Robinson - Pyotr's Story
Leslie Roy Carter - Vanishing Breed
Dean Ing - Fleas
Susan Petrey - Leechcraft
C. L. Moore - Shambleu
Roger Zelazny - The Stainless Steel Leech
T. K. F. Weisskopf - An Anthropological Approach to Vampirism




A Scientific History of Vampirism
GREG COX

Dracula nearly killed the vampire story.
Creatively, that is. Coming at the end of a wave of Victorian vampire tales that
began in 1819 with John Polidori's "The Vampyre," Bram Stoker's classic horror
novel, first published in 1897, quickly established itself as the definitive vampire
story, encompassing and supplanting all that had been written beforeтАФand most of
the vampire fiction to come. Dracula movies and plays popularized Stoker's vampire
even more, and the Count cast an oppressive black shadow over more than fifty
years of copycats and parodies. No vampire novels worth remembering were
published for at least five decades after Dracula, and only a handful of short
storiesтАФsuch as Ray Bradbury's lyrical "Homecoming" (1946)тАФturned over fresh
soil in an increasingly overcrowded literary graveyard.
LifeтАФand unlifeтАФwas simpler then. Vampires were heartless creatures of hell, or,
at best, tormented lost souls condemned forever by some unholy curse. Their
motives and abilities were clearly defined, as were their weaknesses: sunlight, holy
water, wooden stakes, and so on. They were the (mostly illegitimate) children of
Dracula, and numbingly predictable for that reason.
Science proved the vampire's salvation. A few early stories pointed the way, like
Mary Braddon's "Good Lady Ducayne" (1896), an otherwise forgettable story about
a vicious old woman who preserves her life via frequent blood transfusions. C. L.
Moore's "Shambleau" (1933) was possibly the first vampire of extraterrestrial origin,
unless one counts the blood-sucking Martians in H. G. Wells' The War of the
Worlds (1898)тАФand that's a bit of a stretch. Wells also supplied "The Flowering of
the Strange Orchid" (1894), a ground-breaking tale of botanical vampirism whose
blood-sucking plant anticipated The Little Shop of Horrors and other bizarre
horrors.