Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
Mostly funny, clever, tongue-in-cheek short vampire stories told with Chetwynd's usual wit, and quite inventive. Not your usual vampires. "Looking for Something to Suck" was imo probably the best, just for the frightening description of the story's vampiric "thing".
A mixed bag. Some of the light-hearted stories aren't bad at all but others just don't work.I may expand this review later - if I can work up the enthusiasm.
Prior to picking up this book, I had never heard of Ronald Chetwynd-Hayes. I think most people probably haven't, given that he's been dead for 11 years and was British (apparently one of his publishers referred to him as "Britain's Prince of Chill"). He wrote more than 200 short stories and a dozen novels, some of which were adapted into films (many thanks to his obituary in The Telegraph for that info!) Thanks to a New Orleans used bookstore, I found this collection of tales, and I'm very glad
Combining horror and humour with pathos— now that's a very difficult job! Yet there are some authors who excel in preparing such exquisite cocktails with judicious mixture of three rather disparate feelings. R. Chetwynd-Hayes was one of them. This book contains an enjoyable selection of his 'Vampire' stories. As evident from the title, puns and dry humour punctuate the collection with a level of neatness which is rare.The book begins with Stephen Jones' 'Foreward: Never Beastly to Vampires'. Sub...
"Looking for Something to Suck" contains 16 of Chetwynd-Hayes vampire stories. Chetwynd-Hayes was the recipient of 3 World Fantasy Awards, 3 International Horror Guild Awards, 4 Bram Stoker Awards, 21 British Fantasy Awards, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the World Horror Association (from the "About This Author" section) - so you can assume he knows his stuff... I was unfamiliar with his work, aside from the fact his stories formed the basis for the movie "The Monster Club" (1981). At a
I like how varied Chetwynd-Hayes's vampires are. Some of them are skittish, sweet, worn-out dears that have been repeatedly traumatized by cross-wielding, garlic-toting zealots; while others are evil, moldering revenants with a keen taste for criminal blood. They can also be deliciously outré, embodied by an essence-stealing maze of a mansion, for example; or famished ghosts that need blood and darkness to assume corporeal frames; or even an immortal reverse vampire. While most of the stories he...
Where were you when you first read Dracula by Bram Stoker? I was in elementary school when I first read it - there was an abridged copy in the library. That and the abridged copy of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Phantom of the Opera were my earliest introductions to macabre literature. One could say that it helped spawn a life-long love of the supernatural and the creepy.In recent years - some perhaps could say decades, now - the genre of the supernatural has become overstuffed. And this
I especially enjoyed the Vampire & the Werewolf, a touching love story