Fevre Dream by George R. R. Martin

This book was a vampire story with a difference: it does not center on a romantic relationship between a vampire and a human, but on a decidedly non-romantic partnership. If anything, the beautiful lady in this story is the riverboat they build together. I enjoyed the adventure, I enjoyed the friendship between Joshua York and Abner Marsh, and I loved the historical side of things (mostly set on steamboats plying the Mississippi river before the Civil War). Martin's writing feels fresh in the face of the way a lot of vampire stories go.

Stories: All-New Tales edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio

This collection of stories covers a wide range of genres and a wide range of authors. Mostly the stories leaned toward the fantastic or toward horror. I mostly enjoyed this collection, but I don't know that any stuck out so much that I am going to track down more by that author specifically on that story's account. It's really an impressive collection of essays.

Dead Ever After by Charlaine Harris

This book has received a lot of criticism from fans ever since a copy appeared in Germany before its official publication date. I saw the writing on the wall in the last few books: Sookie was not going to end up with Eric. I can almost see Sookie falling for Sam. But I thought the plot was weak--it was more about bringing back everyone for one last hurrah than developing a coherent mystery or an exciting romance. I also thought Eric deserved a better send off; it makes sense to me that he and Sookie would not be together forever because she doesn't want to be a vampire (a thoroughly refreshing view, in my opinion), but not that they would break up as casually as they did. This is a series that was strongest in its middle books.

Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture edited by Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger

This collection of essays examines the role of the vampire in contemporary literature. Its essays are grouped into four categories: the development of the vampire metaphor in an historical continuum, on writing vampire fictions, the role of disease and disease metaphors in writing contemporary vampire fictions (especially AIDS), and the vampire as an other (especially related to sexuality). I found some of the essays in the collection stronger than others ("Consuming Youth: The Lost Boys Cruise Mallworld" by Rob Latham on the ways in which the film The Lost Boys enacts the capitalist/vampire metaphor in our contemporary economy was particularly good), but all of the essays do better with reading a given text or set of texts than theorizing in new and exciting ways.

The Twelve by Justin Cronin

I found this book a little hard to pick up--but I suspect it would be much easier had I read the previous book, The Passage, more recently. There's a lot of shifting in time in this book: one set of stories shows the actions of a devastated few immediately after the virals escaped--a pregnant doctor so traumatized by the attack she sees that she loses her mind, a lone wolf's escape from the penthouse apartment he'd holed up in, a group's response to the camps the US government set up to control the flood of refugees from infected areas--and the other set of stories is set about one hundred years later, as Amy and a variety of characters from the first book, attempt to destroy the 11 remaining, original virals. Once I figured out what was going on, I enjoyed this book, which was well plotted and well written.

Wolfsbane and Mistletoe edited by Charlaine Harris and Toni L.P. Kelner

This collection is united by the idea of werewolves and Christmas. The number of stories that started with someone spending the holidays alone for whatever reason got old really quick (even the Sookie story starts that way--a story, I might add, that also appears in the collection of Sookie stories). There were two that focused on Santa Claus that I thought were well-done and interesting: in one, a werewolf eats Rudolph and gets put in his place and in another, a couple of vampires discover that Santa is actually a vampire. I enjoyed the Kitty story by Carrie Vaughn.

Dark and Stormy Knights edited by P.N. Elrod

This collection of nine short stories is united by its protagonists: they're all somewhat morally ambiguous protectors of the weak (by choice or by compulsion). The Jim Butcher story ("Even Hand") features John Marcone instead of Harry Dresden and was really excellent. I also loved "Even a Rabbit Will Bite" by Rachel Caine about the last dragonslayer in an age that doesn't really need her anymore. "Rookwood and Mrs. King" by Lillith Saintcrow, "Dark Lady" by P.N. Elrod, "The Beacon" by Shannon Butcher, and "A Questionable Client" by Ilona Andrews were all intriguing--I'd especially be interested in the series associated with Elrod's and Andrews's stories. Some of the other stories (apparently part of stories) were really opaque: the magical systems, worlds, and rules were weird and not clearly explained and the characters had lots of missing backstory.

Red, White, and Blood by Christopher Farnsworth

This book is easily the best so far in the President's Vampire series. Although the name of the villain (the Boogeyman) is laughable, his murders are not. At times the descriptions in the book are over the top, but the story was well-plotted and kept me guessing at every turn (especially the last, which sets up a great starting point for the next volume in the series). I thought the campaign trail was a great place to set the series of murders and the book balanced introducing a new villain with the return of old foes nicely. I listened to the audiobook version of this title, and the narrator did a nice job with different voices for the characters.

The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett

In this book Samuel Vimes, commander of the Watch, is sent as Ankh-Morpork's ambassador to Uberwald where tempers are running high over the latest dwarf election and the ceremonial Scone may be missing. With the help of his sharp wife Sybil, Vimes must negotiate a diplomatic solution in a country full of vampires, werewolves, dwarfs, and Igors but noticeably short on the rule of law. I am enjoying the Watch books more and more.

Looking for Jake by China Miéville

This collection of stories covers a wide range of fantasy; there's one set in Bas-Lag (home of Perdido Street Station, Iron Council, and The Scar), there are a number set in various post-apocalyptic Londons (including The Tain, a novella about vampires and people captured in mirrors), and even an illustrated story. I really enjoyed "'Tis the Season" about a world in which Christmas is so trademarked that you have to buy permission to celebrate. The stories were all good. Once again Miéville shows off his endlessly inventive and entertaining imagination.

Carpe Jugulum by Terry Pratchett

In this book King Verence of Lancre makes the mistake of inviting a family of vampires (or rather vampyres--they're trying very hard to be modern and to train themselves out of weaknesses like their aversions to holy symbols, sunlight, and garlic) to his daughter's christening. To compound the problem, a group of magpies steal Granny Weatherwax's invitation. I really enjoyed this book. It wasn't as laugh-out-loud funny as some of the other entries in the series, but I thought it had a strong plot, I loved reading the witches (especially Granny Weatherwax), and I really liked what Pratchett did with his parody of vampires. All in all a great read.

Hex Appeal edited by P. N. Elrod

I really enjoyed this anthology. I picked it up for the Jim Butcher story, which was excellent, but I really liked most of the other entries as well. Lots of morally ambiguous characters, lots of witches. The magic systems were all straightforward enough that I didn't have a lot of trouble getting into the worlds (sometimes a problem with anthologies) and even the parts of larger series were clear without familiarity with those series. I'll be on the lookout for other anthologies by this editor.

The President's Vampire by Christopher Farnsworth

In this book we get to see what an outlier Nathaniel Cade really is: he's a vampire, but he's not on the Other Side (which has apparently infiltrated not only the CIA and a shady contractor, Archers/Andrew, but also Yale as well). There's a retrovirus here which remakes humans into snakeheads (lots of almost-plausible-sounding science)--it basically works like a zombie plague might--but it's getting better at making scarier snakeheads at every outbreak, which would imply human involvement and development. There's a lot of blood, a lot of guts, and a lot of backstabbing in this story--but the mystery is well done, and it does a nice job developing the relationship between Cade and his liaison to the President, Zach Barrows as well. I also enjoyed the development and hints about many popular conspiracy theories (especially the Kennedy assassination).

Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness

This book picks up where A Gathering of Witches left off: Matthew and Diana travel back in time to Elizabethan England to look for a manuscript known as Ashmole 782 which promises to reveal secrets about witches, vampires, and demons. Matthew was still a bit heavy handed for my tastes, but we did get to see more of Diana's power--and just as importantly--to get some explanation of why she has the powers she does. We also got a number of historical cameos, including Queen Elizabeth I, Kit Marlow (who has been both daemonized and demonized in this retelling), and, all too briefly, William Shakespeare. There was a lot of historical detail (it probably doesn't hurt that Deborah Harkness is an esteemed historian of seventeenth century England in addition to writing novels and blogging about wine), which added to the atmosphere of the piece. At times it felt like obstacles were thrown up and then almost immediately brushed away (for example, when Matthew takes Diana to his family home in France, Matthew's father Philippe insists that Matthew and Diana are not married and should not marry, but by the end of the section, less than a month later, throws them a lavish wedding). The mysteries of the Ashmole 782 only continue to grow; even though we get to see it again, the reader is left with questions instead of answers--but now it seems that the book is more an object or possession than a book. It's all setting things up for the third and final volume of the trilogy.

Blood Lite III: Aftertaste edited by Kevin J. Anderson

This collection was better than the first two because fewer of the stories fell flat. I still think that there's a high percentage of stories that don't quite get the humor, but Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden story was great. The shorter stories (such as the contract provided by the Maleficium software company) were often funnier (and more unique in execution) than the longer ones. I might suggest that Harry Dresden fans just read the Jim Butcher story, rather than spend all the time with the whole collection.

Deadlocked by Charlaine Harris

SPOILER ALERT: The point of this book seems to be to break Sookie and Eric up so that Sookie can have a family someday. Eric is being romanced by a vampire queen, and he seems to be counting on Sookie to use her wish to win his love (despite the fact that neither of them acts like they have an ounce of passion for each other). I'm curious to see where the story ends, but I think the television series has done a much better job with the stories and the world.

Home Improvement: Undead Edition edited by Charlaine Harris and Toni Kelner

This collection contains stories focused on home improvement of some type or another. While the quality was uneven, I really enjoyed the Sookie Stackhouse story. Generally this collection worked fairly well. There was a fair amount of humor in some of these stories, and it generally worked.

Blood Lite II: Overbite by Kevin J. Anderson

Like its predecessor, this collection of short stories didn't strike me as particularly funny. I think the collection suffers from the focus on humor--the stories weren't all that funny. Also, several of them had worldsystems/mythologies that were hard to parse for a short story (like they were taken from complicated, longer series).

Side Jobs: Stories from the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher

This volume collects most of the short stories, novelettes, and novellas set in the Dresden Files universe (the only currently available stories not in the collection are "Curses," "AAAA Wizardry," and "Even Hand"; obviously the forthcoming "I Was a Teenage Bigfoot," "Bigfoot on Campus," "B is for Bigfoot," and the untitled Molly POV story from Dangerous Women are also not included). I enjoyed the collection. I particularly liked "Backup" (told from Thomas Raith's point of view), "The Warrior" (a great story about Michael), and "Aftermath" (told from Karrin Murphy's point of view, about her actions after Harry's apparent death in Changes). Butcher generally does a good job selecting subjects for these stories that work for the length--I enjoyed most of the stories in this book as much as the full-length novels (and it was easier to put down in the middle). I'll be tracking down the remaining stories as I can.

The Sookie Stackhouse Companion by Charlaine Harris

This book contains a short story about the marriage of Sam's brother (pretty good), synopses of the previous books (a little helpful, especially now that the new Sookie Stackhouse book is out) and a collection of southern recipes. Worth checking out of the library, if not buying.