For WWAC’s manga readers, 2022 has been a year of blood, guts and romance! Our top picks of the year include stories about vampires, high school sex-ed classes, and many more interesting and unusual stories that caught our attention and refused to let it go. And if you want to see what we loved in…
Nosferatu’s Kindred, Part 3: Goethe and The Bride of Corinth
Continuing a series that celebrates the centenary of Nosferatu with an overview of German vampire literature.
Nosferatu’s Kindred, Part 2: Gottfried August Bürger and Lenore
Continuing the series that celebrates the centenary of Nosferatu with an overview of German vampire literature.
Vampirella: Blood Invasion Breaststrokes Boobily Down the Stream
Dynamite Entertainment ventures into the world of prose novels with Vampirella: Blood Invasion, featuring a gorgeous cover by Jenny Frison. Unfortunately, the inside pages could use a little more polish.
The Vampyre’s Legacy, Part 12: One More Decade
Two centuries ago, Dr. John Polidori’s story “The Vampyre” was published, and vampire literature was born. The Vampyre’s Legacy series has charted the evolution of the genre over two hundred years, taking one story from each decade to use as a case study. But the most recent decade presents a problem: the period is still too…
The Vampyre’s Legacy, Part 11: Urban Fantasies
The period following the publication of Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire saw vampire fiction entrench itself not as a subgenre of horror, but as a substantial body of fiction in its own right. Author David J. Schow would look back on this state of affairs in his 2018 collection DJStories: You know how zombie-flavoured…
The Vampyre’s Legacy, Part 10: Sympathy for the Devil
During the sixties and seventies, pop culture was hit by an explosion of interest in the occult. Aleister Crowley glowered from the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band while Mick Jagger sang “Sympathy for the Devil”, and before long Black Sabbath would be embracing Gothic imagery as part of the nascent metal scene….
The Vampyre’s Legacy, Part 9: Atom-Age Vampires
As far back as the nineteenth century, certain writers had tried to demystify vampires by coming up with scientific explanations for their condition and behaviour. James Malcolm Rymer’s ramshackle Varney the Vampire introduced – and later abandoned – the notion that its main character was a man resurrected through galvanism. Charles Wilkins Webber’s Spiritual Vampirism…
The Vampyre’s Legacy, Part 7: Dion Fortune’s Demon Lover
Born Violet Mary Firth in 1890, the British writer Dion Fortune is one of the most influential figures in Western occultism. She penned a sizeable number of books – both fiction and non-fiction – prior to her death in 1946, including a sequence of occult novels. The first of these, a 1927 book entitled The…
A Texas Broad Reads Preacher in 2016
This past March and April, I read Preacher for the first time, which feels like comics sacrilege in 2016. Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s seminal late 90s creation about a man from East Texas who is burdened with glorious purpose—or, more accurately, the spawn of an angel and a demon—is held up alongside The Watchmen…
A Gender-bent Bella: Damsel No More in Meyer’s Life and Death?
October 6th was already a big day for middle grade and young adult lit, from the illustrated re-release of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to Magnus Chase, Simon and Baz, and the rest (of us who just live here). Then Little, Brown Books for Young Readers and Stephenie Meyer decided to Beyoncé the market…
Top Eleven YA Horror Novels for Scaredy Cats
Much to the dismay of my high school best friend, I’ve never been one for horror anything. She dragged me along to bad slasher movies at the discount theater or rented Stephen King movies for sleepovers. I was always terrified even if the movie was cheesy and terrible. House of Wax starring Paris Hilton, anyone?…
