First zombies, now vampires... oh my!

David Wellington is back at it. I pimped him here before for his excellent Monster Planet series, a trilogy of some of the finest on-line zombie fiction I've ever read. Of course, I haven't read much other on-line zombie fiction... but this guy's stuff is really good.

Now he's doing a vampire novel on-line, "Thirteen Bullets". I have never read vampire fiction before, no Anne Rice, no Lestat (as played by Tom Cruise.. yes?), nada. The whole cannon always struck me as too fetid, too oversexed and swoon-y... swarthy master players in silk shirts fronting rock bands and running the boardroom while choking down some neck of virgin. Or brooding, obsessive, bougainvillea scented tortured souls who after all, really, really just want to be loved. Now 13 bullets is only at chapter 6 (so now is a good time to go get caught up...) and the author might still take his characters in that direction, but I hope and think not. He played with the conventions of the zombie thing pretty well in his Monster series, so I'm inclined to be hopeful for this latest effort.

For a very different take on the whole vampire thing though, head over to Peter Watts site, and check out his "Vampire Domestication: Taming Yesterday's Nightmares for a Better Tomorrow". It's a scary spot-on parody of a PowerPoint presentation from the good folks at FizerPharm of what to do with vampires for fun and profit. Oh yeah, Peter Watts also has some absolutely AMAZING fiction available on-line as well.

Tags: Fiction | Zombie | Vampire | Horror | reading