Tag Archives : vampires

With This Ring, You’ll Be Dead: Violence Against Female Protagonists in Romantic Vampire Fiction: Part 4: Marriage


Editor’s Note: content warning for violence, abuse, and potentially triggering subject matter. Marrying a vampire is a terrible idea. Just ask Dracula’s brides. As much as I love Bram Stoker’s novel, most of Dracula’s “romantic” encounters are nonconsensual. He uses mesmerism or some other form of mind control to seduce his prey and then he uses the bodies of his…

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Sunshine and Vampires: An Unlikely Combination


For the first time since the challenge started, I thought about not doing the POPSUGAR Reading Challenge this year. I haven’t been thrilled with the most recent prompts and the challenge had started to feel like a chore. Then I perused the list and much like the mafia, just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in…

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Dracula Versus the Stepford Wives: A Review of Grady Hendrix’s The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires


I’ve been dying to talk about this book since reading the ARC in October. It drove me crazy  not being able to tell everyone I knew how good it is. The release date was April 7, so without further ado, here is my review of The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires. The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying…

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Weekly Roundup: March 23-27, 2020


Welcome back to another episode of Weekly Roundup! I’m your host, Kristina, coming to you live from the Land of the Rising Sun on the ancient island of Kyushu. What sort of speculative adventures can you expect this week? We’ve got reviews, recommendations, special guests, and more to appeal to your every genre taste and love. So without further ado,…

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With This Ring, You’ll Be Dead: Violence Against Female Protagonists in Romantic Vampire Fiction: Part 3: Dating


Editor’s Note: content warning for violence, abuse, and potentially triggering subject matter. Dating isn’t easy. Anyone who tells you that it is, is either insane or simply not self-aware enough to see all of the potential pitfalls. Seeking a suitable mate for long-term monogamy isn’t nearly as simple a task as the romance novels and movies make it out to…

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Changing the Map: Tanith Lee’s Weird Gothic Towers of the Second Wave


Examining the weird/gothic landscape through eyes firmly embedded with set of rainbow lenses, Tanith Lee erected severely Weird Gothic Towers and Spires throughout the map, starting with her debut novel, The Dragon Hoard in 1971.  Her edifices are constructed using the building blocks of fairy tales, myths, standard fantasy, vampires, and just plain strangeness, and are adorned in proper Gothic…

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BBC/Netflix Dracula: (For The) Blood is (the) Lives


As you may or may not have heard by now, Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat recently collaborated on yet another TV miniseries adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula — three episodes, produced through the BBC, available right now on Netflix. And much like Gatiss and Moffat’s version of Sherlock Holmes (BBC Sherlock, admired and hated in roughly equal measure by fans…

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With This Ring, You’ll Be Dead: Violence Against Female Protagonists in Romantic Vampire Fiction: Part 1: Stalking


Editor’s Note: content warning for violence, abuse, and potentially triggering subject matter. I’ve consumed a lot of vampire fiction in the past thirty-five years. In fact, I often think of my consumption of vampire fiction — novels, short stories, comics, movies, TV shows, etc. — as vampiric in and of itself. To say that I am obsessed would be an…

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