Alan Ryan's Penguin Book of Vampire Stories.

I can't remember if I have this collection or not. I'll check when I get home.

Fevre Dream was wonderful. Then again, George R.R. Martin generally is.

and C.L. Moore's "Shambleau," which I love with a mad passion.

I sent Teppy a collection of all of C.L. Moore's Northwest Smith stories. Best exotic gothic space adventure stories ever!

I assume all True C.L. Moore Fans already know about Jirel of Joiry, "Vintage Season" and "No Woman Born," but I'm grabbing this opportunity to plug "Judgment Night" if you haven't read it already--it's a terrific, dark, romantic, apocalyptic space opera. I was stunned when I first read it, both by how good it was and how I hadn't read anything about it in any of the commentary on Moore.

It doesn't have Jane Yolen's "Mama Gone," which is another terrific vampire short story, about grief.

Ooh! I love Jane Yolen. I never read that story, I don't think, but I read this great book of hers called Wizards Hall, which was like Harry Potter before there was Harry Potter.

I sent Teppy a collection of all of C.L. Moore's Northwest Smith stories.

I was thinking about that earlier today, during the conversation in Minearverse about sci-fi authors.

In high school, my English teacher assigned short stories from his personal collection of an out of print supernatural anthology, and there was one about a man and a vampire being the only survivors of a shipwreck. They were trapped in a lifeboat for some time, and developed a symbiotic relationship in order to survive. Does that ring any bells for anyone? I've wanted to look up the anthology for myself, but can't remember the names of any of the stories.

The shipwreck story sounds like "Life of Pi."

I haven't read Life of Pi, but Kat once told me the plot, and I think that's when I started wondering about the vampire story. It's the only story from the anthology that really made an impact on me, particularly the vampire's argument that humans were the vermin because we eat dead things, rather than getting nourished from life like vampires. Unfortunately google searches for "vampire + lifeboat" are not only fruitless, but boring.

There was something missing on Christopher Moore's website, so I wrote to him and got this tidbit back from him during an email exchange:

... the turkey bowling anecdote comes from my experience in grocery stores in the late 70s. Incidentally, I'm about to write two more San Francisco books, the second is the sequel to Fiends, called You Suck: A Love Story. Even though ten years have passed, I plan to have the book open the next day after the first one ended. (I've been trying to sell this book for nine years, but it was only the success of Lamb that allowed me to do it.) Since Tommy and Jody live in the SOMA, I guess there will have to be a discussion something like this:

Tommy: What happened while I was out?

Jody: Well, there was this dot.com thing that happened yesterday and all of the rents in the neighborhood increased ten-fold, but it went away last night and now we have a Pakistani restaurant next door.

Something like that should bring us up to date.