The Drain
by Caitlin T. Vale
The Drain is one of a set of eight horror novelettes just published by Dead Ink Books, purportedly reprints of the 1993 run of subscriber-only books issued by the mysterious Eden Book Society.
Each of the books in the series, commissioned from eight leading contemporary horror writers, is published under a pseudonym supported by a fictional biography. In the case of The Drain, the fictional author is a certain "Caitlin T. Vale", who purportedly has often been "compared to literary colleagues in America such as Poppy Z. Brite and Melanie Tem". Vale, we are told, "found a readership who eagerly lapped up her brand of violent queer fiction, which often sat on the very edge of erotica."
This certainly sums up this particular novella. Its protagonist, Poppy, a drug-taking hooker, evades an abusive partner and teams up with Cherie, an alleged vampire who leads Poppy on a murderous, bloody spree from England to France. We meet Poppy while she's undergoing rehab. The marks on her body are taken by her mentors as evidence of her drug use. Poppy is happy to play along, knowing that the truth – that they are the marks of the blood-sucking Undead – will not be easily believed...
The Drain is a
sapphic vampire tale that reads like Carmilla on steroids. I'm not
really a fan of the sex-and-gore genre, and this necessarily impacted my
enjoyment of The Drain. That said, there were aspects of the book that I
appreciated, particularly its ambivalence. Is Cherie really a vampire, or is it
all make-believe, as suggested towards the novelette's conclusion? And, for
that matter, does Cherie even exist, or is Poppy projecting her own fantasies
onto reality?
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