Girls Who Bite - book discontinued by Cleis Press Inc. - review by Jenny Swallows

Anyone with a more or less respectable shelf full of erotic short stories will quickly begin to recognize the same names recurring again and again, those authors who mastery of the form allows them to walk into any anthology they choose to. And maybe, just maybe, your heart sinks as you see some of them because... well, even the best lover can get repetitive after a while.

Welcome, then, to “Girls Who Bite: Lesbian Vampire Erotica,” an anthology whose fifteen contributors certainly are not wide-eyed ingenues taking their first bold steps into print. But they’re not the familiar warhorses of a dozen other titles, either. Which works, because the stories they contribute are not familiar ones, either.

Vampires. Has any supernatural being had such a bad time of things as the dear old vamp? If it’s not the Anne Rice generation moping gloomily over the unbearable darkness of being, it’s la belle Lugosi in the back row of film class, driving fresh stakes (or Stokers) into Nosferatu’s heart. A new wave of Twilight tots playing emo bitey-neck while they watch True Blood reruns; and now, god help us, the Fifty Shades of fang fiction ghouls extracting the last shards of dentistry from a corpse that should have been buried ten years back.

But that’s on the frontlines of mainstream entertainment, which is never where you should look for true danger and thrills. And I’ll admit that the cover adorning this collection didn’t fill me with hope either - my mom has record sleeves from the Eighties that look like this. Nothing against the Eighties, by the way - Catherine Deneuve’s The Hunger (1983) is one of my favorite movies ever, and there’s a couple of stories here that remind me why that should be.

Because they are elegant, because they are haunting and most of all, because they are beautiful. More than half the stories here will leave you breathless, with surprise if not desire, but probably both at once - the changeling weregirl who passes through Angela Caperton’s “Pet Door”; the Dark Angel prowling Paisley Smith’s vision of 1930s Berlin; the languid lust and timeless taste that pumps through every page to strike just the right balance between liquid sex and - well, liquid refreshment.

Cliche is the book’s first victim; yes, there are stories (I’ll leave you to find them for yourself) that dance a little close to been-there/done-that/got-the-bloodstained-t-shirt tales of venal vampirism. And occasionally (Karis Walsh’s “Dark Guard”) you feel as though you have been dropped fully-formed into the midst of an already unfolding story caught somewhere between “Blood Ties” on TV and the “Underworld” saga. With added cunnilungus, of course.

But then you bump into Adele Dubois’ “The Crystal Altar,” AE Grace’s “Madeline” and, so gorgeous it will leave you gasping long after you close the book, Victoria Oldham’s “Red Horizon,” and you are transported, not only out of the everyday humdrum of life and living, and not only out of the realms where great erotica usually takes you. But transported to a plane where these stories, these beings, these dreams are reality, and fiction is the garbage that piles up at the bookstore as the latest teenmeat vamp sensation tempts its acolytes with Tommy Twilight action figures and all the other geegaws that the conscientious modern fang-banger seems to require.

Vampires may or may not exist. Lesbian vampires likewise. But if they do, if girls do bite, then this is how you want them to be. And if you turn back to the first story in the collection, and follow Vivi Anna’s instructions carefully, maybe... just maybe....

Naaah. Nothing that good happens in a small town like this.