You know you're in trouble when your anthology's best (and longest) contributions have been in the public domain for a century-plus, but that's the case with the underwhelming "Vamps."
Heavyweight Steven King turns in a republished story about Jerusalem's Lot, which takes place after the horrors inflicted on the town in his 1975 masterpiece "'Salem's Lot." I guess Ramsey Campbell wasn't returning phone calls, because for some reason there's nary a tale about a Liverpudlian bloodsucker to be found. Manley Wade Wellman strikes a poignant, elegiac note with "Last Grave of Lill Warran," the tale of a hapless mark who loves a vampiress so much he digs her out of the ground each time the superstitious townsfolk bury her.
In the crap column we have a cornpone tale by Fritz Lieber about a gorgeous model who also happens to be a vampire. She uses her charms to psychically suck the power of all who behold her image where it's broadcast in advertisements. The subtext, in case you've had a frontal lobotomy and need me to point it out, is that ad execs are bloodsuckers. This was not a novel or fresh observation even in 1949, when this thing was published. Next is "Drifting Snow," by Lovecraft's sidecar August Derleth. The story is about people who die in snowstorms and in turn become swarming piles of sentient snow. Watching snow fly proves to be as terrifying as watching paint dry. Last, and certainly least, is Richard Matheson's "Dress of White Silk." Matheson was a great writer, but this oft-republished tale is, much like a vampire, a blight that should have long ago gone been consigned to eternal sleep.
About the best, longest, and oldest tale in the collection, Theophile Gautier's "Clarimonda," is a profoundly beautiful yarn about a man who is torn between his pledge to his faith and to a demoniac passion that seizes him around the throat the first time he lays eyes on the titular beauty. Older Gothic works can sometimes seem prolix and rambling to the modern reader, but this thing is so full of fire, life, and barely contained sexual torment that time and fancy language can do nothing to blunt its effect. A masterful tale, that almost excuses the rest of the collection's missteps and oversights.
The other masterpiece is Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla," which deals with a quasi-romantic, perhaps sapphic love that grows up between an ageless vampire maiden and a young lady who has grown deathly bored at her family's country estate. All of the film adaptations have focused on the lesbian subtext, and the Hammer films have never skimped on blood-soaked bosoms straining in corsets (I admit I'm partial to this stuff too). But rereading the novella after all these years, what really stands out is the way Le Fanu is able to evoke the funereal stateliness of a noble bloodline gone to seed. Its haunting conjuration of that strange Eastern European frontier where Ottoman and Asiatic influence starts to creep in was an undoubted influence on young Abraham Stoker, who actually worked as a paperboy delivering the newspaper in which Fanu's tale was syndicated.
But what the hell does that got to do with "Vamps"? The eighties were a renaissance for horror, especially horror movies, which, while broad in their appeal, couldn't have been accused of the kind of bloodlessness seen on display here. Also, I'm no feminist, but maybe more exploration of the link between femininity and vampirism could have been explored, things like menstruation and age-old fears of female sexuality. Poppy Z. Brite wasn't really on the scene yet at this point, but what about Anne Rice? Men of course can "head hop" into female headspace in fiction (I'm no more an essentialist than a feminist), but too much of "Vamps" feels like an opportunity to update tropes/cliché-flip, which both the authors involved and the editors responsible let slip through their grasp. The cover artwork is beautiful, though, a garish burgundy red background with a large white globe of a moon pinned to the horizon, and a vampiress in a frilly purple shirt and long flowing velvet cloak dominating the foreground. But don't judge the craptacular contents by the superlative cover.