Tuesday, November 20, 2018

The "Vampires" Recap

Ladies of Horror Fiction Instagram Challenge Weekly Recap Banner - it simply states "The LOHF Instagram Challenge Weekly Recap" on a background with a skull atop a stack of books imprinted to the left.

If you missed last week’s “branches” prompt, be sure to check out it. We selected some gorgeous photos!

Well, we suppose it was inevitable that this day would bring on a lot of Anne Rice. Yet again we tried to choose only one from her and spread the love to other vampire writers in the genre.

 

 

 

 

Amanda__reads kicks us off with The Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice. It’s hard to imagine a list of vampire books by female horrors authors and not have this one make an appearance!

“An international bestseller and beloved cultural touchstone, Anne Rice’s classic novel Interview with the Vampire starts “where Bram Stoker and the Hollywood versions leave off and penetrates directly to the true fascination of the myth” (Chicago Tribune). But that’s only the beginning. Over the course of twelve interwoven novels, Rice crafts a richly imagined, magnificently transporting epic around her chilling, charismatic antihero, Lestat. An aristocrat in the heady days of pre-revolutionary France who lives to become a rock star in the demonic, shimmering 1980s, Lestat rushes through the centuries in search of others like him, seeking answers to the mystery of his eternal, terrifying existence.”

 

 

 

 

 

Booksinthefreezer showed us this incredible short story collection by Karen Russell titled Vampires in the Lemon Grove.

Within these pages, a community of girls held captive in a Japanese silk factory slowly transmute into human silkworms and plot revolution; a group of boys stumble upon a mutilated scarecrow that bears an uncanny resemblance to a missing classmate that they used to torment; a family’s disastrous quest for land in the American West has grave consequences; and in the marvelous title story, two vampires in a sun-drenched lemon grove try to slake their thirst for blood and come to terms with their immortal relationship.”

 

 

Our own findingmontauk1 paired Octavia Butler’s Fledgling with a hand-crafted Barlow voodoo doll.

Fledgling, Octavia Butler’s new novel after a seven year break, is the story of an apparently young, amnesiac girl whose alarmingly inhuman needs and abilities lead her to a startling conclusion: She is in fact a genetically modified, 53-year-old vampire. Forced to discover what she can about her stolen former life, she must at the same time learn who wanted – and still wants – to destroy her and those she cares for and how she can save herself. Fledgling is a captivating novel that tests the limits of “otherness” and questions what it means to be truly human.

 

 

 

Tarasbookaddiction gave us Hunting Prince Dracula by Kerri Maniscalco. This is the sequel to the popular Stalking Jack the Ripper book. Isn’t that little Giles Funko Pop so fitting?!

“Following the grief and horror of her discovery of Jack the Ripper’s true identity, Audrey Rose Wadsworth has no choice but to flee London and its memories. Together with the arrogant yet charming Thomas Cresswell, she journeys to the dark heart of Romania, home to one of Europe’s best schools of forensic medicine…and to another notorious killer, Vlad the Impaler, whose thirst for blood became legend.

But her life’s dream is soon tainted by blood-soaked discoveries in the halls of the school’s forbidding castle, and Audrey Rose is compelled to investigate the strangely familiar murders. What she finds brings all her terrifying fears to life once again.”

 

This stunning photo by dlgillis20 showed us The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova.

“To you, perceptive reader, I bequeath my history….Late one night, exploring her father’s library, a young woman finds an ancient book and a cache of yellowing letters. The letters are all addressed to “My dear and unfortunate successor,” and they plunge her into a world she never dreamed of, a labyrinth where the secrets of her father’s past and her mother’s mysterious fate connect to an inconceivable evil hidden in the depths of history.

The letters provide links to one of the darkest powers that humanity has ever known and to a centuries-long quest to find the source of that darkness and wipe it out. It is a quest for the truth about Vlad the Impaler, the medieval ruler whose barbarous reign formed the basis of the legend of Dracula. Generations of historians have risked their reputations, their sanity, and even their lives to learn the truth about Vlad the Impaler and Dracula. Now one young woman must decide whether to take up this quest herself–to follow her father in a hunt that nearly brought him to ruin years ago, when he was a vibrant young scholar and her mother was still alive. What does the legend of Vlad the Impaler have to do with the modern world? Is it possible that the Dracula of myth truly existed and that he has lived on, century after century, pursuing his own unknowable ends? The answers to these questions cross time and borders, as first the father and then the daughter search for clues, from dusty Ivy League libraries to Istanbul, Budapest, and the depths of Eastern Europe. In city after city, in monasteries and archives, in letters and in secret conversations, the horrible truth emerges about Vlad the Impaler’s dark reign and about a time-defying pact that may have kept his awful work alive down through the ages.”


Are any of these amazing vampire books on your TBR? Tell us some of your favorites in the comments below! Make sure and check back next week when we give a recap for “Short Stories.”

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