Just Finished Reading: The Vampire Hunters Casebook edited by Peter Haining (FP: 1996)

As I had said many times before, the main risk with reading collections of short stories is their variable quality. This volume is no exception to that rule but the percentage of poor stories is thankfully very low. I think only one made my toes curl and my nose twitch at how truly poor it was. Most of the others were at the very worst readable and actually generally of good quality especially considering the age of some of them. However, the true weakness with this collection is the narrowness of, or at least the interpretation of the narrowness of, the subject matter. Each and every story is about vampire hunters who discover, track and dispatch (in the main) their vampire prey. Each story is a variation on a very minor theme and after reading 14 of them in reasonably quick succession I did feel more than a little bored with the whole thing. Saying that there are some gems in here including early works by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1871-72) and Arabella Kenealy (1896) which pre-date Bram Stoker’s seminal work. Despite my qualified praise above this is still worth the time and effort of any fan of vampire literature. Reasonable.