Review of Best Stories in French journal Cercles

A review of Best Stories Under the Sun (D. Myers and M. Wilding, eds) CQUP, 2004 in which my short story “My Transylvanian Cousin” appears, was published in Cercles (a French journal on Anglophone literature)

http://www.cercles.com/review/r27/wilding5.htm

A par on my story:

Inez Baranay uses her Hungarian heritage to replay the vampire figure in the visit by Cousin Vlad to the Gold Coast in “My Transylvanian Cousin” [113-126]. Here the bright lights and garish touristy atmosphere of the Gold Coast are intertwined with the myths and ancientness of old Europe. If the vampire requires his consumption of fresh blood to survive, Baranay hints, by analogue, at the voraciousness of twenty-first century materialism devoid of sustaining myths that consolidate a clearly defined identity. It is the people of the twenty-first century, at play on the Gold Coast, who are seen as being far more at risk from moral and spiritual demise than Vlad on his necessary dose of blood. The true vampire emerges as western consumerism devouring everything in its path leaving no room for mythmaking, or spiritual growth.

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