A review by macbean221b
Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror by Kelley Armstrong, John Ajvide Lindqvist
4.0
I received SEIZE THE NIGHT as an ARC from NetGalley.com.
SEIZE THE NIGHT is, hands down, the best vampire anthology I've read in...maybe ever, actually. Even if it's not the very best I've ever read, it's been a very long time since I've read one this good. So long that I can't even remember it. But at least part of this is due to the fact that I've always liked vampires in horror, not romance. It never occurred to me until this book that that is very likely the reason why my interest in vampire fiction has nearly disappeared in the past decade or so. After the overwhelming influx of vampire love stories, SEIZE THE NIGHT was a breath of fre--uh...graveyard air.
There are twenty stories in this collection. There were only three that I really disliked, and that mostly had to do with the fact that my tolerance for graphic on-screen/on-page rape dwindles exponentially as I get older. I don't need details of that to be horrified by it, and it disgusts me even further as a method of titillation. Ugh, gross.
Aside from the three flat-out dislikes, there were three stories that simply had no impact on me, negative or positive. That's a fairly impressive number, I think, in a collection of twenty stories. Even if my number of dislikes was higher, this would make me interested in more anthologies collected by this editor.
So that leaves fourteen out of twenty stories that I really liked. My reactions ranged from delight at bleakness, to heartbreak over characters or themes, to needing to turn a light on, to jealousy that I didn't think of the concept and write the story first, to a note of simply "OH MY GOD THERE WAS SOME GRAPHIC GORE IN THIS ONE." This is definitely a book that I will want to revisit in the future. I recommend it to any fan of old-school vampire stories.
SEIZE THE NIGHT is, hands down, the best vampire anthology I've read in...maybe ever, actually. Even if it's not the very best I've ever read, it's been a very long time since I've read one this good. So long that I can't even remember it. But at least part of this is due to the fact that I've always liked vampires in horror, not romance. It never occurred to me until this book that that is very likely the reason why my interest in vampire fiction has nearly disappeared in the past decade or so. After the overwhelming influx of vampire love stories, SEIZE THE NIGHT was a breath of fre--uh...graveyard air.
There are twenty stories in this collection. There were only three that I really disliked, and that mostly had to do with the fact that my tolerance for graphic on-screen/on-page rape dwindles exponentially as I get older. I don't need details of that to be horrified by it, and it disgusts me even further as a method of titillation. Ugh, gross.
Aside from the three flat-out dislikes, there were three stories that simply had no impact on me, negative or positive. That's a fairly impressive number, I think, in a collection of twenty stories. Even if my number of dislikes was higher, this would make me interested in more anthologies collected by this editor.
So that leaves fourteen out of twenty stories that I really liked. My reactions ranged from delight at bleakness, to heartbreak over characters or themes, to needing to turn a light on, to jealousy that I didn't think of the concept and write the story first, to a note of simply "OH MY GOD THERE WAS SOME GRAPHIC GORE IN THIS ONE." This is definitely a book that I will want to revisit in the future. I recommend it to any fan of old-school vampire stories.