#Titanuary ‘Vampires Never Get Old’ edited by Zoraida Cordova and Natalie C.Parker

About the book…

Eleven fresh vampire stories from young adult fiction’s leading voices!

In this delicious new collection, you’ll find stories about lurking vampires of social media, rebellious vampires hungry for more than just blood, eager vampires coming out―and going out for their first kill―and other bold, breathtaking, dangerous, dreamy, eerie, iconic, powerful creatures of the night.

Welcome to the evolution of the vampire―and a revolution on the page.

Vampires Never Get Old includes stories by authors both bestselling and acclaimed, including Samira Ahmed, Dhonielle Clayton, Zoraida Cordova and Natalie C.Parker, Tessa Gratton, Heidi Heilig, Julie Murphy, ‘Mark Oshiro, Rebecca Roanhorse, Laura Ruby, Victoria ‘V.E’ Schwab, and Kayla Whaley.

My thanks to the awesome team at Titan Books for my gifted review copy of this wonderful anthology, dripping with fresh blood and scares! Published in 2020, ‘Vampires Never Get Old’ is available from all good bookshops with this sharp, easily noticeable cover and comes highly recommended by yours truly.

Loving title pun, I dove into these 11 tales and tore through them like a vampire who has been living on rats for months on end.

Best taken in small bites, or, devoured whole, these original tales explore the complexities of life as a vampire, both in the modern and historical world, and are aimed at Y.A readers-although I am, ahem, a little past that qualifying factor-though they are eminently accessible to all.

It is an interesting take on the wanting to live forever myth, combined with the burgeoning sense of identity , plus the teen’s immortal, unstoppable feeling of life lying open in front of them, just ripe for the taking.

The sense of self as a social as well as a personal construct is given new life by authors who use vampirism as a metaphor for, amongst other things, gender identity, ableism, sexuality, moral arguments and colonialism.

Vampires are, after all, leech like parasites who need to survive by drinking the blood of others, sometimes with consent, other times without. There are rules depending on which way you look at the complexities of a human/vampire relationship. Each species can represent to the other a source of salvation or damnation, but what is what and to whom?

Flipping the script to see the humans as the bad guys, the destroyers, the slayers as vulnerable as the humans they seek to protect, the ones with inherited flaws against which their children can rise…all of this is played out against a historical back drop where people who were scared to be buried alive created systems to try and avoid that experience, to border towns where being gay is seen as much as a parasitic plague in need of extinction, to a parent’s determination on the worth of their child’s life , and back to a football field where a long held tradition is dominant in a female lineage that would make mincemeat of Buffy.

There are scares and tears to be wrung from such talented authors as Dhonielle Clayton and Julie Murphy who I had never read before, and now need to be added to my list of those who I would crawl over broken glass to get their newest literary offerings. And that, to me, is the joy of anthologies, reacquainting yourself with the writers you love, whilst finding new ones, and this collection had the added bonus of a post story analysis, with questions asked of the reader to reflect the issues raised in the story before.

Any book, any writer, which gets you thinking beyond the bounds of the comfortable and safe, challenges both privilege and societal mores belongs on a modern horror lover’s bookshelf, in this humble reader’s opinion.

About the editors…

Zoraida Cordova

Zoraida Córdova is the author of many fantasy novels for kids and teens, including the award-winning Brooklyn Brujas series, Incendiary, and Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge: A Crash of Fate.

Her short fiction has appeared in the New York Times bestselling anthology Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View, Star Wars The Clone Wars: Stories of Light and Dark, Come on In: 15 Stories About Immigration and Finding Home, and Toil & Trouble: 15 Tales of Women and Witchcraft.

She is the co-editor of the bestselling anthology Vampires Never Get Old. Her debut middle grade novel is The Way to Rio Luna. She is the co-host of the podcast Deadline City with Dhonielle Clayton. Zoraida was born in Ecuador and raised in Queens, New York. When she isn’t working on her next novel, she’s planning a new adventure.

Links-https://zoraidacordova.com/

Natalie C.Parker

Natalie C. Parker is the author and editor of several books for young adults, among them the acclaimed Seafire trilogy. Her work has been included on the NPR Best Books list, the Indie Next List, and the TAYSHAS Reading List, and in Junior Library Guild selections.

Natalie grew up in a navy family finding home in coastal cities from Virginia to Japan. Now she lives with her wife on the Kansas prairie.

Links-https://www.nataliecparker.com/

Twitter @TitanBooks  @zlikeinzorro @natalieparker