This novella is also available in Nebula Award Stories Sixteen (1983), and was originally published in New Dimensions II (1980). From the novel The Vampire Tapestry. Dr. Floria Landauer's newest patient, Edward Weyland, suffers from the delusion that he's a vampire, not the undead variety but a predator that's co-evolved with humans to drink their blood. This idea has threatened his career as an anthropologist, and he needs a bill of good health to resume his position. However, as Weyland describes his "fantasy," Floria suspects she's being handed the truth dressed up as a lie, and the therapy becomes a fascinating contest of wills where trust and respect vie with mortal imperatives.
Author
Suzy McKee Charnas, a native New Yorker raised and educated in Manhattan, surfaced as an author with WALK TO THE END OF THE WORLD (1974), a no-punches-pulled feminist SF novel and Campbell award finalist. The three further books that sprang from WALK (comprising a futurist, feminist epic about how people make history and create myth) closed in 1999 with THE CONQUEROR’S CHILD, a Tiptree winner (as is the series in its entirety). Meanwhile, she taught for two years in Nigeria with the Peace Corps, married, and moved to New Mexico, where she has lived, taught, and written fiction and non-fiction for forty five years. She teaches SF from time to time, and travels every year to genre conventions around the country and (occasionally) around the world. Her varied SF and fantasy works have also won the Hugo award, the Nebula award, the Gigamesh Award (Spain), and the Mythopoeic award for Young-Adult fantasy. A play based on her novel THE VAMPIRE TAPESTRY has been staged on both coasts. STAGESTRUCK VAMPIRES (Tachyon Books) collects her best short fiction, plus essays on writing feminist SF and on seeing her play script first become a professionally staged drama in San Francisco. Currently, she’s working at getting all of her work out in e-book, audio, and other formats, and moving several decades’ worth of manuscripts, correspondence, etc. out of a slightly leaky garage and sent off to be archived at the University of Oregon Special Collections. She has two cats and a gentleman boarder (also a cat), good friends and colleagues, ideas for new work, and travel plans for the future.
