Vampires cover art

Vampires

The Recent Undead

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Vampires

By: Charlaine Harris, Jeanne C. Stein, Carrie Vaughn, Holly Black, Karen Russell, Tanya Huff, Charles de Lint, Rachel Caine
Narrated by: Bahni Turpin, Jonathan Davis, Khristine Hvam, Suzanne Toren, Marc Vietor, Josh Hurley, Edoardo Ballerini
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About this listen

The undead are more alive today than ever. Immortal? Indeed! Nothing has sunk its teeth into 21st century popular culture as pervasively as the vampire. The fangsters have the freedom to fly across all genres and all mediums - there's even apps for vamps. Whether roaming into romance, haunting horror, sneaking into science fiction, capering into humor, meandering through mystery - no icon is more versatile than the vampire. Slake your insatiable thirst with the best sanguinary stories of the new millennium: terrifying or tender, deadly or delicious, bad-ass or beneficent, classic or cutting-edge.

Full list of authors: Holly Black, Michael Marshall Smith, Charles de Lint, J.A. Konrath, Kelley Armstrong, Tanith Lee, Rachel Caine, Jeanne C. Stein, Stephen Dedman, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Tanya Huff, Conrad Williams, Susan Sizemore, Tina Rath, Mary Turzillo, Carrie Vaughn, Barbara Roden, Charlaine Harris, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Albert Cowdrey, Nisi Shawl, Kim Newman, Grove Karen Russell, Nancy Kilpatrick, and John Langan.

The full list of narrators includes: Bahni Turpin, Jonathan Davis, Kevin Pariseau, Susan Duerden, Khristine Hvam, Victor Villar-Hauser, Suzanne Toren, Marc Vietor, Josh Hurley, and Edoardo Ballerini.

©2011 Paula Guran (P)2011 Audible, Inc. Anthologies & Short Stories Fantasy Fiction Horror Science Fiction Scary Vampire Witty

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All stars
Most relevant
Disappointing, got it because of a story from Charlaine Harris thinking it will be good.
I listen to about six stories went on to number seven and could not complete it. Forwarded to Charlaine Harris story (which was good) then sent it back.

Vampires The recent undead

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Only a very few good short stories among many bad ones. Narrotors were mostly fine.

Not worth your time

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I can't say I've really enjoyed listening to this. One of the narrators (the posh English lady) is really terrible. And there is absolutely no time between the stories, no pause or music or intro to the next author, no time to digest the story. There are a couple of good stories, but most of them follow a formula which gets very boring very quickly:

1. Starts in media res, with a human being chased around/in pain/in the middle of encountering something weird
2. Spends some time explaining how REAL VAMPIRES are different from STUPID POP CULTURE VAMPIRES in this particular universe. Do they actually love Italian food with lots of garlic? Is the sun a big deal? Do they use fangs or some kind of bony protuberance under their tongue? Do I care?
3. A human is changed into a vampire, and angsts about whether to change their family members to save them from life-threatening conditions, or gradually watch everyone die around them. OR, a vampire angsts about this having happened. OR, everyone angsts about vampires being cold and numb both physically and emotionally and therefore UNABLE TO LOVE SOB SOB SOB.
4. We have a scene focusing on the vampire discussing the ramifications of being so long-lived, and having flashbacks to another time, or a human who is now very old having flashbacks to encountering an ageless vampire when they were a child.
5. Incredibly sudden ending, leaving me to poke at my iPod and see if I had reached a place where the audiobook was broken into smaller files - but no, it actually just ended there.

Ahem. To be fair, I think a lot of that is unavoidable from anything but a really excellent author, just because vampires don't really lend themselves to short stories. (Unless you're going for absolute classic vampires which need no explanation.) There are a couple of good ones in there, though.

Badly formatted, mostly unoriginal, a few good'uns

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Most stories are tedious, A few good authors such as Caine and Harries but I wish I'd read the reviews first.

Lots seem to be prefaces to series rather than true short stories.

Some good authors

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Really good collection of short stories ranging from 15-20 mins up to over an hour and set in various times and locations. Probably something for everyone who enjoys vampires or fiction.

Great value collection!

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I'm not sure why this collection has got such a low review as I found it to be really good! It's a hard thing to get an anthology right when it's one particular monster that your focusing on and the mix in this book worked really well. There are some really dark story's here but also some with a bit of fantasy, humour and action. Its a wide spectrum and I never got bored. In fact I wish thay would put out another volume.

My only criticism is that one story set in England ( the one with Van Helsing) is so horribly read and performed with such terrible accents that I skip it every time as I cannot stand the narrator. But if I only hate one story out of this collection then I think it's forgivable and I would still recommend it to all.

A top collection.

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