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A Whisper of Blood

By Ellen Datlow & Suzy McKee Charnas &
A Whisper of Blood by Ellen Datlow & Suzy McKee Charnas &  digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

This “toothy follow-up to Datlow’s first-rate Blood Is Not Enough” offers “admirably inventive variations on vampirism” (Kirkus Reviews).
 
Featuring stories by Jonathan Carroll, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, and Robert Silverberg, A Whisper of Blood is a “consistently engrossing anthology” from award-winning editor Ellen Datlow (Publishers Weekly). Continuing to expand the boundaries of the concept of vampirism—as she did in her first collection, Blood Is Not Enough—Datlow has assembled eighteen fascinating stories that range from tales of literal vampires to what she calls “metaphorical bloodsuckers,” who can drain another’s life force without ever sinking their teeth into necks.
 
In “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” by Suzy McKee Charnas, an elderly Jewish woman who’s taken her own life has second thoughts and makes a deal to become a vampire to stay immortal, the only condition being she has to drink blood by request only. An amnesiac operative tries to sort out if a secret government agency is trying to help him regain his memory or is wiping it clean in Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Kafkaesque “Do I Dare to Eat a Peach?” And in Jonathan Carroll’s “The Moose Church,” a tourist in Sardinia is literally scarred by asking questions of death in his dreams . . .
 
A Whisper of Blood includes contributions by Suzy McKee Charnas, Karl Edward Wagner, Robert Silverberg, Kathe Koja, Elizabeth Massie, Barry N. Malzberg, Rick Wilber, Jonathan Carroll, Thomas Ligotti, Melissa Mia Hall, David J. Schow, Jack Womack, Melinda M. Snodgrass, Thomas Tessier, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, K. W. Jeter, Pat Cadigan, and Robert Holdstock and Garry Kilworth.
 

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About Ellen Datlow

Ellen Datlow, an acclaimed science fiction and fantasy editor, was born and raised in New York City. She has been a short story and book editor for more than thirty years and has edited or coedited several critically acclaimed anthologies of speculative fiction, including the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series and Black Thorn, White Rose (1994) with Terri Windling. Datlow has received numerous honors, including multiple Shirley Jackson, Bram Stoker, Hugo, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards, and Life Achievement Awards from the Horror Writers Association and the World Fantasy Association, to name just a few. She resides in New York.  

Robert Silverberg

Robert Silverberg (b. 1935) sold his first science fiction stories to the lower-grade pulps in the mid-fifties, moved swiftly to the three prestigious magazines (ASTOUNDING, GALAXY and THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION) and as his style deepened and themes expanded in through the next reached the first rank of science fiction writers. He is regarded as the greatest living writer of science fiction, an SFWA Grandmaster, ex-President (in the 1960’ s) of that organization, winner of five Nebulas, four Hugos and many other domestic and foreign awards. Among his famous novels are DYING INSIDE,THE BOOK OF SKULLS, DOWNWARD TO THE EARTH, A TIME OF CHANGES; his novella BORN WITH THE DEAD (1974) is perhaps the finest work of that length published within the genre. Shifting to a predominating fantasy in the late 1970’ s (LORD VALENTINE’ S CASTLE and the attendant Majipoor Series), Silverberg continued to write science fiction and won a Nebula in 1986 for the novella SAILING TO BYZANTIUM, and Hugos for the novelettes GILGAMESH IN THE OUTBACK and ENTER A SOLDIER: LATER, ENTER ANOTHER. He was editor of the long-running original anthology series New Dimensions and of important reprint anthologies such as THE SCIENCE FICTION HALL OF FAME, ALPHA and THE ARBOR HOUSE TREASURY OF MODERN SCIENCE FICTION.

Jonathan Carroll

Jonathan Carroll (b. 1949) is an award-winning American author of modern fantasy and slipstream novels. His debut book, The Land of Laughs (1980), tells the story of a children’s author whose imagination has left the printed page and begun to influence reality. The book introduced several hallmarks of Carroll’s writing, including talking animals and worlds that straddle the thin line between reality and the surreal, a technique that has seen him compared to South American magical realists.
 
Outside the Dog Museum (1991) was named the best novel of the year by the British Fantasy Society, and has proven to be one of Carroll’s most popular works. Since then he has written the Crane’s View trilogy, Glass Soup (2005) and, most recently, The Ghost in Love (2008). His short stories have been collected in The Panic Hand (1995) and The Woman Who Married a Cloud (2012). He lives and writes in Vienna. 

Melissa Mia Hall

Melissa Snodgrass

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

Chelsea Q. Yarbro is the first woman to be named a Living Legend by the International Horror Guild and is one of only two women ever to be named as Grand Master of the World Horror Convention (2003). In 1995, Yarbro was the only novelist guest of the Romanian government for the First World Dracula Congress, sponsored by the Transylvanian Society of Dracula, the Romanian Bureau of Tourism, and the Romanian Ministry of Culture. Yarbro is best known as the creator of the heroic vampire the Count Saint-Germain. With her creation of Saint-Germain, she delved into history and vampiric literature and subverted the standard myth to invent the first vampire who was more honorable, humane, and heroic than most of the humans around him. She fully meshed the vampire with romance and accurately detailed historical fiction, and filtered it through a feminist perspective that made both the giving of sustenance and its taking of equal erotic potency. A professional writer since 1968, Yarbro has worked in a wide variety of genres, from science fiction to Westerns, from young adult adventure to historical horror. A skeptical occultist for forty years, Yarbro has studied everything from alchemy to zoomancy, and in the late 1970s worked occasionally as a professional tarot card reader and palmist at the Magic Cellar in San Francisco.

Pat Cadigan

Pat Cadigan is the author of more than a dozen books, including two nonfiction titles, a young adult novel, and two Arthur C. Clarke Award–winning novels, Synners and Fools. She has won two Scribe Awards for a novelization of Alita: Battle Angel and an adaptation of William Gibson’s unproduced screenplay for Alien 3, along with three Locus Awards and a Hugo Award for her novelette “The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi.” Pat lives in North London with her husband, Chris Fowler.

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