4/2/26
Welcome to day 2 of Women in Horror Year (just in case any of you thought yesterday’s announcement was some sort of April Fool’s joke). The way this will work over the next 364 days is I’ll begin with the usual daily journal stuff, and then talk about that day’s book. And I’ve chosen a format in spotlighting the books that I think will work best, giving the marketing copy first, followed by my personal review.
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Yesterday was spent on FALLING ANGELS in the morning. I’d intended to work on OPERATION: LITTLE GOLDEN BOOK and its ancillary project in the afternoon, but ended up having to proof the galleys for the trade paperback edition of BENEATH THE LOST LEVEL instead. Then in the late afternoon, I had a Zoom call with Lisa Kroger and Melanie Anderson about a possible future project, and a flurry of texts with one of my attorneys. And then, in the evening, we went to the Spring pop concert at the high school, which featured 251 students, ranging from Elementary to High School, all on stage and playing songs from Queen, Lady Gaga, and popular film scores.
And then I slept like absolute crap last night — totalling perhaps three hours of actual sleep. So work today should be an exercise in futility.
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Women In Horror Year: Day 2
AfterAge by Yvonne Navarro
A plague of vampirism has crept across the country, reducing once-thriving cities to ghost towns. In Chicago, a few scattered survivors hide behind the fortified walls of office buildings and museums, raiding deserted stores for dwindling supplies of clothing and food. Meanwhile a hungry vampire population also struggles for survival as their prey grows scarce, forcing them to capture alive the last remaining humans as breeding stock for the blood farms that will ensure their future. Now a small band of humans makes a desperate last stand against their vampire masters, fighting back with the only weapon that can kill the dead...
AfterAge was originally published as a mass market paperback by Bantam in 1993 — during the last great days of the first Horror Boom, just before everything went bust. It wasn’t the first thing I read by Von (that would have been “The Peeping Tom” in a 1989 issue of Dead of Night) but it was the first novel-length work I read by her, and — as far as post-apocalyptic fiction goes — it remains a personal favorite all these decades later. A lot of the tropes that have become so prevalent in vampire comics, games, and other novels in the years since — the farming of humans, for example — originated here, in this book. It is an absolute masterclass in worldbuilding, as well as in how to effectively write cross-genre stories (it is as much an action-adventure novel as it is a horror novel, owing perhaps more to The Dirty Dozen or The Guns of Navarone than it does Salem’s Lot or Dracula).
I don’t know how the book did, sales-wise, in 1993 (because as I said, we were entering the collapse of the first Horror Boom) but I always found it laughable that, years later, when Overlook Connection released a nice signed, limited edition hardcover, the reviewer for Publisher’s Weekly incorrectly labeled it as yet another in the plethora of novels about global vampire takeovers, without understanding that this was the O.G. for those same books.
AfterAge is a seminal work of horror fiction — one that every fan should read at least once in their lives, and a foundational stone in the history of Women In Horror. Currently available in paperback and audiobook from Crossroad Press.
