After all the recent vampire silliness it is nice to be reminded that an author can actually do something with the idea of the vampire that doesn’t suck.
For every writer who makes it to fame and glory there are countless numbers who fail. If these failures are bad writers this is as it should be. But when a writer of great potential dies, it is tragic. Such is the case with Susan Petrey. With the few stories left us, it is doubtful Petrey will ever be a household name. Had she lived beyond her thirty-five years she would have become a major American fantasist.
Fortunately for readers and collectors, a group of writers in her hometown of Portland, Oregan published her few mature works in a book entitled Gifts of Blood (Baen Books (1992). The majority of Susan Petrey’s work concerns her vision of the vampire, or Varkela, peace-loving healers who exchange medical care for small amounts of blood called the blood-price. Set on the wild steppes of Tsarist Russia, the healers work amongst the diverse groups of people inhabiting the land, the Cossacks, the Turks and the Tartars.
Susan Petrey was a master of several languages including Russian, a lover of horses, a musician and a medical technologist. She used these elements to make the Varkela stories special. She wrote seven in all, each appearing in the prestigious Fantasy & Science Fiction between 1979 and 1983, three before her death, the others posthumously. The rest of the book is filled out with her Hugo-nominated story “Spidersong” and an unpublished piece called “The Neisserian Invasion”.
If you’d like to read the rest, please check out Monster 3:From the Pages of Dark Worlds Quarterly