Friday Reads | Dance With a Vampire

I’m continuing the week with more vampires. Dance With a Vampire by Fabian Black is a seven pages long story. I love short fiction. Many make the mistake of thinking it’s easy to write—it’s not. It takes a lot of skill. Authors who master the form can rip my heart out in just a few words where others leave me quite unaffected. In a novel, you have time to grow to like a character, but in short fiction, that connection has to be established in just a few lines.

This is the second story I’ve read by Fabian Black, and my heart might not have been ripped out but I wasn’t unaffected either. At first, I found the narration a bit strange, or maybe not the narration, but the story is written almost like a letter where the MC is talking to a ‘you’. I was thinking the MC was another of those in your face, bratty, young characters, and he kind of is, but there’s also some subtlety to this short story.

There is one thing that always annoys me, though. Why oh why do bisexual characters always have to be described as unreliable? In this short, short story it’s even pointed out twice.

I made a mental note never to date a bisexual again. It doubled the chances of being dumped. – p.2

Bisexual faux vampire types were notoriously unreliable, emotionally draining and generally unsatisfactory. – p.4

But if you’re in the mood for a bratty twenty-one-year-old waiting in line outside a nightclub on Halloween and some vampires with a hint of BDSM, then Dance With a Vampire is for you.

You’ll find it here:

books2read.com/DanceWithAVampire *

A different kind of vampire tale, short and romantic, it uses a song title as a door into the story.