STRANGE BLOOD hits bookstores this week!

Hey kids! I penned an essay on The Reflecting Skin for this compendium celebration of offbeat bloodsuckers, along with several other cool cats like Hidden Horror contributors Jon Kitley (Night of the Werewolf, Vampyres), Doug Lamoreux (Valley of the Zombies, The Vampire Bat), Gert Verbeeck (Vamp), J Luis Rivera (The Addiction, La peau blanche, Santo vs. the Vampire Women), Steve de Roover (Bordello of Blood, Daughters of Darkness, Embrace of the Vampire, Requiem for a Vampire, Vampyros Lesbos), Charles M. Kline (The Night Flier), Sven Soetemans (Blood for Dracula, Martin), Lee Gambin (Grave of the Vampire), as well as the mysterious madam herself, Vanessa Morgan (Cronos, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, Habit, Karmina, Let's Scare Jessica to Death, Rabid, Salem's Lot).

Free on Kindle and reasonably priced for the physical paperback version as well - definitely worth checking out!

STRIGOI (2009) review

Strigoi (2009) (1st viewing) d. Jackson, Faye

Bizarre little UK vampire film set in Romania (the performers speak their lines in English through oft-impenetrably thick accents, an odd choice to be sure) that conjures memories of The Wicker Man in its intensely collusive community and wry, unblinking dark humor. However, the rules of these bloodsuckers are a little sketchier, and while this may have been by writer/director Jackson’s design (leaving the audience as off-kilter in dealing with supernatural elements as the onscreen characters), the result is troubling in that I found myself asking, “What just happened?” when I probably should have been asking, “What’s going to happen next?” That the living characters are just as quirky and unpredictable as their undead counterparts doesn’t help matters, though it definitely lends a foreign, otherworldly quality to the proceedings. Not wholly satisfying, but still somehow strangely worthwhile.