Dead Roses for a Blue Lady: A Sonja Blue Collection - Softcover

In her debut novel, Sunglasses After Dark (1989), no-nonsense nosferatu Sonja Blue is a punk vampire vigilante with a Clint Eastwood swagger who shows up the sensitive vampire antiheroes of most dark fantasy as refugees from a fern bar. The commanding figure she cuts in three follow-up novels is only occasionally on display in these seven short stories (three original to the volume), the majority of which read like outtakes from longer works. "Cold Turkey" actually was incorporated into the third novel, Paint It Black, but it offers a satisfying example of the series' hard-boiled appeal with its chronicle of Sonja's struggle to repress "the Other," the ravenous vampire ego that lurks behind her omnipresent mirrorshades and terminally threatens her efforts at anonymous coexistence with humans. Other stories are less generous in imagination, overworking vampire rape imagery, yanking Sonja onstage belatedly to bat cleanup and, in the case of "Knifepoint," avoiding her appearance altogether. At least one is near-perfect, though: "Vampire King of the Goth Chicks," in which Sonja exposes a vampire faker in the Goth subculture, perfectly balances graveyard humor with Sonja's self-conscious disgust with her own vampirism and her seething contempt for deluded vampire wannabes who think being undead is "all black leather, love bites, and tacky chrome jewelry." Though Collins is in full command of her material and always makes the gore seem to matter, this book is only for Sonja's blood simple fans.
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The author of the popular Sonja Blue novels here presents all of her heroine's short stories, prefacing them with an interview in which she discusses the origins and popularity of the character, a vampire who hunts her own kind. The stories proper include "Cold Turkey," in which a young man, Judd, pursues Sonja romantically and tragically brings out her "other"--the part of her that is a predatory vampire. In "Tender Tigers," Sonja encounters the stepdaughter of an ogress and determines to free the girl and her enslaved father from the ogress' grasp. "Variations on a Theme" borrows a bit from the popular graphic-novel series The Crow; in it Sonja discovers two murdered lovers, one of whom has been changed into a revenant to avenge his dead lover. These absorbing stories, half of which are debuting in this collection, are dark and introspective, and show just why Sonja Blue is popular. Kristine Huntley
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