“Vampires are dead.” People have been saying this ever since the overwhelming popularity of the Twilight series led to an explosion of young adult paranormal fantasy in the mid-2000s that saturated the market. But as a life-long vampire fan, I’ve always felt that these denizens of the undead still have more to teach us. There is something universally appealing about the vampire that isn’t going away anytime soon, and there are still infinite new angles from which the topic can be approached. Instead of telling everyone that the genre has been done to death already, why not open it up to a diversity of fresh new voices that haven’t yet had the chance to tell their story? That’s exactly what Zoraida Córdova and Natalie C. Parker do in their new anthology Vampires Never Get Old: Tales with Fresh Bite, which came out back in September.
Vampires Never Get Old is an anthology of eleven short stories written by some of the biggest voices in today’s young adult fiction. Each story is followed by a short commentary by the editors, Zoraida and Natalie, in which they comment on how the story approaches particular recurring themes and tropes in vampire fiction. With this collection, Zoraida and Natalie wanted to “reimagine [the] default” of vampires as predominantly white, straight, cisgender, able-bodied men, as they explain in the brief introduction. And while many vampire tales in the classic canon have employed queer subtext, over half of the protagonists in this collection are explicitly and on-the-page gay, lesbian, bisexual, or trans. In these pages, you’ll also find Black vampires, Native American vampires, and desi vampires, as well as a vampire who uses a wheelchair. With so many new perspectives to explore, this collection is sure to convince you that the vampire genre still has a long life ahead of it.
Many of the stories in this collection explore the idea of how vampirism might empower the disempowered. The most compelling of these is “In Kind” by Kayla Whaley, in which a disabled teen is rescued by a vampire after being nearly murdered by her father who serves as her caretaker. Her transformation into a vampire doesn’t magically “cure” her disability, but it does give her the opportunity to speak up and prevent her father and the sympathetic media from controlling the narrative around her attempted murder. In “The Boys from Blood River” by Rebecca Roanhorse, a gay, Native teen actively seeks out the vampires of local legend in an attempt to escape his bullies and his loneliness. But when it becomes clear that joining the Blood River Boys will require serious sacrifices, he’ll have to consider whether that is truly the best path to empowerment. And in one of the most unique tales in the collection, “A Guidebook for the Newly Sired Desi Vampire” by Samira Ahmed, the writers of the guidebook encourage their audience to redress some of the power imbalances of colonialism in India by feeding exclusively on white British tourists.
Apart from such novel explorations of identity and power, Vampires Never Get Old places these mythical creatures in the modern day by showing vampires interacting with the technology of the digital age. In Samira Ahmed’s story discussed above, a group of desi vampires have banded together to create an app to address a specific need in their community. In Mark Oshiro’s story, “Mirrors, Windows, & Selfies,” an isolated teen vampire finds others like himself by venting his feelings on a personal blog. And one of my favorite stories in the collection was “Vampires Never Say Die,” cowritten by the anthology’s two editors. The story follows a human teen and her vampire best friend who have developed a deep connection via Instagram.
Whether you’ve always been a voracious consumer of vampire tales or you’ve grown bored with the vampire pickings heretofore on the menu, Vampires Never Get Old is a delightful and refreshing dive back into the genre. You can find a copy on shelves now at your favorite local retailer, or buy it online and support The Gothic Library in the process using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. Once you’ve read it, come back and share your favorite story from the collection, or any other thoughts, in the comments!