The Vampire Tapestry

Suzy Charnas was a friend. I was gutted when she died. She wrote some brilliant, absolutely game-changing books. One of them, The Vampire Tapestry, is reissued today as part of the Tor Essentials line that publishes new editions of SFF books “of proven merit and lasting value, each volume introduced by an appropriate literary figure.”

I wrote the introduction to this one.1 I had fewer than 2,500 words to play with or I would have said more.

Suzy McKee Charnas is an award-winning writer of powerful, prismatic prose. She is a mirror-maker, reflecting both the reader and the world. Her gift is to not just to make us look but make us see—and, just as importantly, feel glad to have seen. She published 11 novels, one play, two works of nonfiction, and three collections. The Vampire Tapestry is her masterpiece.

My first introduction to Charnas’s work was “Scorched Supper on New Niger,” a not-quite novella-length slice of far-future space opera that had me grinning with delight one minute and slack-jawed with shock the next as it deftly brought me face to face with my own assumptions. (The only other writer who was able to pull that trick so neatly was Karen Joy Fowler, with “Game Night at the Fox and Goose.”) Amazed, I went looking for more, and found Charnas’s first novel, the post-apocalyptic Walk to the End of The World (1974)—first of the four-novel Holdfast Chronicles—a dazzling, horrifying vision of the gender-war endgame. The sequel, Motherlines, was one of the first (if not the first) novels in English to feature no men at all. 

In the space of a month I had read three superlative works unlike anything I’d encountered. It was clear I was dealing with a fearless writer. I picked up The Vampire Tapestry eager to find out what such a writer might do with a vampire.

And, oh, I did! The Vampire Tapestry is truly special. Go read it.