Sheena and Other Gothic Tales
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Sheena is a vampire from Leeds who works in a call center, and has a dark secret that even she doesn't know about. Her boyfriend has to discover it the hard way, alas. Like the other two vampire stories included in the book, both of which feature vampire babies, «Sheena» is a love story, which shares the life-enhancing attributes common to all love stories. Here are ten tales of the fantastic, the horrific, and the gothic, including: «Rose, Crowned with Thorns,» «Rent,» «Tenebrio,» «Behind the Wheel,» «Innocent Blood,» «Emptiness,» «The Woman in the Mirror,» «Regression,» «Heartbreaker,» and «Sheena.» Great reading by a great writer!
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Once upon a time, all stories were told rather than being written. They had tellers rather than authors, who posed as mere transmitters of tales whose authority was based on their antiquity. They were set in a past that was qualitatively different from the present rather than merely displaced in history—as they had to be, because oral cultures, by definition, have no history. The past of “once upon a time” is a mythical past, in which magic worked, supernatural beings interacted with humans on a routine basis, and which might be subject to other fanciful embellishments, such as animals that talk. The people who told such tales, and listened to them, sometimes believed in the possibility of some of or all these things, but were very conscious of the fact that they no longer happened ordinarily. The tacit assumption of tales of the mythical past is that that the world has been—and still is—subject to a process of “thinning” that has leached the supernatural out of the mundane and banished it to the edges of experience.
Whenever and wherever oral cultures were displaced by literate ones, the early phases of literary development began with written versions of oral tales: the mythical past was recorded, not merely as history but as pseudo-history. Once there were documents, however, the raw material of actual history began to be produced, and the possibility developed of transforming pseudohistory by degrees into actual history, and of replacing stories set in the mythical past by stories set in the historical past.
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I don’t know how exactly how it came about that I became a part of a little group of four. It wasn’t entirely a matter of chance, and it certainly wasn’t entirely a matter of convenience. I suppose, looking back, that it was because I liked Howard Fletcher that I gravitated into his orbit, and because Howard knew John Coulthart from school that he turned out to be already occupying the next orbit in—and it was probably because John thought that Barbara Schiff looked gorgeous that he tried with all his might to bring her into our combined gravitational field. Once we were together, though, that initial chain of causation gave way to a much more complicated combination of attractions and movements.
Howard’s nickname must have been left over from school. John had obviously been calling him ‘Flasher’ for years, and wasn’t about to be put off just because Howard wanted to make a clean start—quite the reverse, in fact. I don’t think Howard ever retaliated in kind; it was certainly Barbara who first started calling him ‘Coldheart’, deliberately echoing the kind of transformation that he insisted on wreaking upon his friend’s name. I didn’t want to get involved—I never called Howard ‘Flasher’—but they wouldn’t leave me out of it. I even explained to them that Rose already was a nickname, because my name was actually Rosemary, but they wouldn’t be content with that.
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