By Blood We Live

Catherynne M. Valente is the critically acclaimed author of The Orphan's Tales, the first volume of which, In the Night Garden, won the Tiptree Award and was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award. She is also the author of the novels The Labyrinth, Yume No Hon: The Book of Dreams, and The Grass-Cutting Sword. Her latest novel, Palimpsest-which she describes as "a baroque meeting of science fiction and fantasy"-was published in February. In May, her first science fiction story, "Golubash, or Wine-Blood-War-Elegy" appeared in my anthology, Federations.

This next piece, translated by Valente, is an excerpt from Exsanguinations: A Handbook for the Educated Vampire, the indispensable tome of vampire legends and lore by noted vampire scholar Anna-Silvia Oppenhagen-Petrescu of the University of Budapest.

Valente originally published this prefatory and press material on her website, annapetrescu.catherynnemvalente.com. It appears here in print for the first time. Look for Exsanguinations at fine purveyors of Demonic Texts throughout Europe and America in October 2009.

An Ideal Vampire: Prefatory Notes

Death is such a Victorian conceit.

Death is solemn, it is colorless. The unfortunate maiden is laid in a long bed with a silk scarf at the neck, scented with oils so that her stink does not offend delicate nostrils, her hair brushed to a lustre never achieved in life, skin powdered pale and smooth, lips drawn in obscene red: all to give the appearance of life just snuffed out, so recently that the body has not yet realized it has not merely dozed off in the midst of a pleasant afternoon. Why, her eyelashes never laid so coyly dark upon her cheek! Her color was never so high and fever-flushed! Her teeth never sat so white upon her scarlet lips, her curls never clustered so black around her seraphic face!

In short, all effort has been made to make the poor corpse appear immortal, to dress it as a vampire. After all, it is not a proper funeral if she does not look so fresh that she could leap at any moment from the coffin and affix her teeth to a relative's jugular. It is a fetish, really, the just-dead virgin. As if death were a door from which she must emerge a whore, demoniac, and hungry.

The vampire, on the contrary, is essentially Byronic. It walks in beauty like the night, and through the night, and in it, it is always windswept and brooding, dandified by the accessories of death-the cross, the coffin, the shroud. But these things are merely fashion, no more intrinsic to the vampire self than a widow's peak or a Lugosian laugh. What is necessary is the predatory instinct, and the eternal study of death, since the vampire is its most skilled practitioner. The vampire is not half in love with easeful death, it is easeful death, and it has some small duty to make of death an art, an ecstasy, a philosophy. Else why be a demon? Certainly mortals cannot get away with such pretension. One might casually wonder whether the vampire was a product of the Gothic imagination, or the Gothic imagination was a product of the vampire-if one were predisposed to ponder such questions. The vampire, by its nature, does so. Unable to see itself in a looking-glass, it is the vainest of all creatures, and considers its own nature incessantly. These days, there are night-conferences in Bulgaria and Romania, with endless papers and sample chapters of promised masterpieces.

Of course, being Byronic, the ideal vampire is male, heroic in his way, a frontiersman braving the wilds of humanity, piling high his carcasses on the plains.

I am not an ideal vampire.

But surely my curls were never so black and shining as the day they lay me in the dirt. I listened to them mumble the old 23rd and counted like sheep the thud-falls of shoveled earth on the lid of what I must assume was a very expensive coffin. Death, as I have said, is Victorian-thus, no family would allow themselves to be seen in public with sub-par funerary rites.