Homespun goth

>> The Vampire Stories of Nancy Kilpatrick mix dark romance with a dash of undead sex and violence

by JULIET WATERS

Last week on the metro I was reading The Vampire Stories of Nancy Kilpatrick while my son slept soundly in his snugly. I looked up and caught the glare of a woman who obviously considered it inappropriate reading material for the mother of an infant.

She had a point. I chose Kilpatrick's book to review because Halloween was coming up, and because Kilpatrick, "Canada's Queen of the Undead," lives in Montreal (in one of her novels, vampires operate out of their international headquarters at 666 Redpath Crescent). I appreciate the campiness of Kilpatrick's work, even if I find the writing a bit lame. But after the first few stories, I started to feel that maybe I was really the wrong person to be reviewing this.

My life is far removed from Kilpatrick's homespun goth. Right now it's pretty wholesome and cute. My only concession to the dark side is a Beanie Baby bat who, despite his plush purple wings, is clearly an outcast in the growing menagerie of cuddly bears, bunnies and ducks.

Kilpatrick's work is classified as Dark Fantasy, which basically means the writing is mainstream, but the sex and violence are more intense than what you'd see on Bleu Nuit or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. If I were to judge the collection solely on the first stories, I'd probably reclassify it as Dark Romance: that place in the bookstore where the old Harlequin romance heroes--the ones who didn't make the cut after the guidelines forced them to be more sensitive and safe-sex conscious--have gone to die, or I guess, undie. There they can safely taunt, infuriate and ravish--not rape (Kilpatrick was very clear on the distinction in an interview)--their heroines. Just like the good old days, the only drawback being some very chilly sex in coffins.

But as Kilpatrick's stories progress, they become less formulaic and more imaginative. Unfortunately, only one is set in Montreal: "The Game," a homo-cide horror story about two gay vampires, which starts in a restaurant on Ste-Catherine. Kilpatrick is at her best when she's placing her vampires in contemporary situations. My favourite is "Virtual Unreality," about an old vampire hooked on a virtual reality machine because it offers him virtual sunlight, even though technology is not his friend. "As he yanked his coffin lid closed, he wondered about his era, when the electronic dead were more frightening than real demons. And more effective. Perhaps his time had come and gone. He had outlived his usefulness as a dark and dangerous force. Progress had buried him."

Perhaps because of progress these stories feel more quaint than scary. But perhaps the short story is not the best vehicle for vampires. It's like a coffin. A nice place for them to cocoon, but there's not enough room to build suspense, to spread their wings and terrify.

Towards the last section, however, I did start getting a bit creeped out. I started noticing more and more in common between babies and the undead. Like the way they like to feed at night. Plus, Kilpatrick starts throwing in some pretty lurid symbols like: "The thing from the sky turned enough [so] that I could see breasts, the nipples plump as if filled with milk for nursing." And in the next story when "his weight pressed her to the slippery floor tiles. She gasped suffocating in a womb of chilled flesh."

Then I got to the first paragraph of "Sustenance": "IT's always hungry. In the months I've been down here, not one revolution of the planet has taken place when IT hasn't fed on me. There are no windows in this grey cell I'm locked in. Natural light cannot get through, but I know when it's night. That's when I'm tired. That's when IT comes for me." And I started feeling that maybe my life wasn't as far removed from these stories as I'd like to think.

The Vampire Stories of Nancy Kilpatrick by Nancy Kilpatrick, Mosaic Press, pb, 175pp, $20