Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy

mother’s name was Eva, my other mother’s name Alicia; I am Janet Evason. When I was thirteen I stalked and killed a wolf, alone, on North Continent above the forty-eighth parallel, using only a rifle.

She got to her feet, stumbling. She was holding the staff and the wooden mask. “Ruto is the Sami goddess of the plague. She takes us from our beds and brings us to Tuonela, the Land of the Dead. She crosses Pohjola the wasteland and brings us to our graves.”

She turned

Like the humans it feeds on, the vampire must respond to its own dark compulsions

there is a bit of the vampire in each of us

Unnatural beings can only exist close to the natural world and nature’s been displaced

They are often portrayed as amoral beings, rather than as immoral ones, who simply have little comprehension of human notions of right and wrong.
The great English folklorist Katharine Briggs tended to avoid the “good” and “bad” division, preferring the categorizations of Solitary and Trooping Faeries instead.

Bishop Thomas Percy began to collect old English folk ballads, which he published in an influential volume called Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Without Percy’s labors, many old poems and ballads might have been lost forever—he rescued one important manuscript from a cottager who was using it to light the fire

Opium derivatives like laudanum, called “the aspirin of the 19th century,” were available without prescription in Victorian England, and were commonly used for insomnia, headaches and “women’s troubles”. It may be no accident that the Victorian’s obsessions with fairies and Spiritualism occurred during the same span of years when casual opium use was widespread.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was the son of the faery painter Charles Doyle who, like Richard Dadd, had been confined to an insane asylum and whose imagery came from his personal visions. The faery painter Richard Doyle, by all accounts a sane, sweet-tempered man, was Arthur Conan Doyle’s uncle.

My faery mother, Aurora, liked to siphon the rich beauty out of milk, leaving us with just the whiteness.
Aurora would buy beads to string me bracelets, but she’d steal the brightness from the colors.
She sapped the juice out of papayas, the bite out of peppers.
What she robbed, worse than all that, was the strength from my father’s bones. Tonight I fried bean cakes with shrimp and sliced pineapple as tender as butter—he didn’t touch any of it. He claims that only the touch of my mother will save him. I scream that it’s been three years since she left us, and in faery time two months equal two hundred years, and you do the math, I’m weary of it, she’s a sprite, a firefly, a belch of swamp gas, an accordion made of sparks that you grasp in both hands and squeeze to hear music, but she explodes in your face. Aurora was born in water; the rain makes Papa wonder if she’s splintering into an army of needles hailing down on him.