meat+drink

by Daniel Polansky

Baltimore isn't safe. Not even for the predatory meat that stalks its nights. Searching for victims who won't be missed, meat doesn't feel regret or pain--only thirst. But the meat remembers something more... doesn't it? is there more to eternal life than finding another drink?

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Genres: Short Stories, Horror, Vampires, Fantasy, Fiction, Urban Fantasy, Paranormal

18 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 26, 2016

About the author

Daniel Polansky is the author of the Low Town trilogy, Empty Throne duology, the Hugo-nominated novella The Builders, and A City Dreaming. He can be found in Los Angeles, mostly.

Reviews

[karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

bill says sometimes that there are men hunting us but i do not think this is true. it is hard to imagine we are important enough for someone to spend so much time looking for us. then again there are people whose job it is to hunt rats and cockroaches so perhaps i am wrong.

okay, i'm still on this "review all the free tor shorts i got backlogged up in here!" journey. and i seem to only be reviewing the so-so ones right now, which is not a reasoned decision i have made, but just what happened by chance. i have many excellent stories still to review, so don't lose hope in the free tor shorts - as with all things, some are better than others. this one is a solid medium.

as much as i appreciate a story told without capital letters, this one also has some typos in it, which is distracting, and it's kind of choppy and repetitive in its flow. but it's decent story about the myriad problems a gang of vampires face what with the infighting and blood-hogging and the hierarchies and preferences and the power struggles and the "why did you turn that white child into a vampire?" you know, typical vampire squabbles.

this takes place in baltimore, so obviously i couldn't help but pretend it was an alt-world Wire season 4 - where people are going missing, but the bodies aren't turning up, and all these vampires are living in the vacants, feasting on 'em and covering their tracks with a nailgun.

we will have to migrate. it is not difficult. in this part of baltimore most of the houses are vacant, and a few days before hand we will all go out to scout for a new home.

it's encouraging to know that racism could be eradicated if we all became vampires:

edmund and i go out together and walking side by side for so long we sometimes even forget that we are meat, we might even be a brother and sister walking together, like i used to do with my real brother. of course edmund is pink and i am brown but without a reflection it is easy to forget that our meat is not the same color.

but the vampire in this story is really missing out on one of the other perks of being a vampire:

when i am not naming different colors i read whatever i find scavenging. some days i think of breaking into a book store and taking everything i want, but i never do so, i am too frightened. the books i read are the ones left when someone does not feel like moving their library to their next house, already well picked over, mostly romance or self-help, neither of much good to me.

vampires shouldn't be so scared. immortality = having the time to read ALL THE BOOKS.

it's a good-not-great story and at the very least, you will learn the inherent difference between meat and flesh, in vampire terminology.

still all next morning I could not forget the look in the flesh’s eyes and I decided that I would need to find a way to make her into meat, not meat like we are meat but empty meat. but then we went to feed the next evening I found there was no point, the flesh had become meat all on its own. maybe she choked on the rag that bill stuffed into her mouth or maybe her heart stopped working, i am not sure. flesh is very fragile.

and points for not being sparkly.





read it for yourself here:

http://www.tor.com/2016/10/26/meatdrink/

come to my blog!

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is another free story from Tor that can be found here. It would have been better with proper capitalization. The lack was distracting & didn't add anything to the mood for me. This was a moody piece, inside the mind of a vampire. Bleak & well done.

[JM · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty cool vampire short story. It's been a long time since I read one that wasn't basically a sexual fantasy for women or a violent action-movie wish-fulfillment gore-fest for men. Polansky's vampires are monsters for sure, but there's a bit more to them than that.

[☽｡⋆ Shells (jlreads_) · Rating 4 out of 5]

"some days i think about the sun, of setting up one morning from the basement to see it. of course bill would stop me, not because he cares if i am here but because if i did it than i think he knows that we all would do it, and he is a coward as well as an idiot. so far i have been a coward also, but if i ever grow brave i will make sure to carry edmund up with me."


●

disturbing in a sense with a touch of melancholy and apathy in it. this is quite a silent, gruesome vampire story that's being told as if they're ghoul type monsters with all the 'meat' and 'flesh' lines. just for me, tho.

i would rate this a 4⭐️. (i'm typing this review like this to pay homage to the writing structure of this short story).

definitely check tordot.com for more interesting horror short stories 🫶.

[Sassy Sarah Reads · Rating 1 out of 5]

meat + drink by Daniel Polanksy

1.25 stars

I do love reading short stories and it's been some time since I read a Tor short. Sadly this one is very lackluster. It has no real oomph to the story. It's written a la karen's review style without capitalizing letters, which is a style I really enjoy, but for this story it doesn't work. I felt as though I was reading a story written by a twelve-year-old. The pacing was choppy, the sentence structures were brief and had no direction, and the overall story was unoriginal. Vampires are nothing new and this story did absolutely nothing for me besides give me a reason not to start working on my math study guide for finals.

Whimsical Writing Scale: 1

Character Scale: 1

Plotastic Scale: 2

Cover Thoughts: I usually love Tor illustrations, but this one doesn't evoke any strong emotions from me.

[Paul Perry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Effective tale from the point of view of a one of the members of a group of vampires - but these are not in any way the romantic vampires of most modern fiction, or even the rougher predators of Near Dark or Blade. They are barely a society, simply a pack of predators. The narrator makes the distinction between flesh ( the living on whom they prey ) meat ( vampires ) and dead meat ( people who have been killed, usually by being fed on ) and this demonstrates that they know they are not only not human, but less than the humans they once were; they have lost memories and vocabulary, and live almost entirely by instinct.

[chvang · Rating 4 out of 5]

A vampire story set amongst the decaying and vacant houses and people of Baltimore. If you want to read about vampires who are monstrous instead of sexy, here it is:

http://www.tor.com/2016/10/26/meatdrink/

[Badseedgirl · Rating 4 out of 5]

By not using any capitol letters, and referring to herself as "meat" or "i" the author Daniel Polansky really drove home the lack of humanity in these characters. It was a very intelligent use of capitalization.

[Gabriela · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting take, but not as refreshing as a vampire story needs to be to be original these days.
The story felt a little too experimental and underdeveloped.

[Kieran McAndrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even creatures of the night can find times difficult.

An interesting take on vampirism, where Polansky posits that not everyone is cut out for the lifestyle.

An interesting use of style, where capital letters are not used, which shows the lack of education in our narrator.

A couple of annoying printing errors in what is otherwise an excellent short story.

[Heaven Ashlee · Rating 4 out of 5]

vampires but like...they also make me think of zombies. i can dig it.

[Spencer · Rating 3 out of 5]

This short story is told from the viewpoint of a vampire; it’s a bleak and pointless existence where their thirst drives them to care about nothing but blood and even then it’s instinctual and without pleasure.
I liked this, it was an enjoyable short story, nothing groundbreaking but worthwhile all the same. The writing and style was a bit different different which made this somewhat unique and added to my enjoyment. I'll have to check out more of Daniel's work.

[Maggie Gordon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Polansky's meat+drink is an experimental and very gritty vampire story. It's a refreshing shift from the sparkly and pretty vampires that have been central to the genre since Lestat. These are vampires that live in the bad side of town and are utterly lacking in humanity. It was a nice change of pace, but also not special in any other regards. A good story for Halloween.

[nikki · Rating 4 out of 5]

a story about vampires that isn't glamourized to heck! really, really fantastic. this is a dreary, ghastly tale of the undead. meat is stronger than flesh, but hunger is stronger than anything. it's a bleak and pointless existence, nothing more. i really liked polansky's prose, as well.

[Dawnie · Rating 2 out of 5]

flesh is a part of you and maybe the greater part, but meat is something you carry along like a knapsack.

this story didn’t work for me.

it’s written in a way that i didn’t enjoy, since it felt very focused and almost overly simplifying things to an extent that i started to get bored in a story that is under 20 pages.

also the actual writing? no capitalization or well done punctuation.
and yes thanks i understand it’s ironic for me to say that doing neither of those things right now BUT this is not published story it’s just something like a note.

it also had a few typos and grammar errors, which bothers me since i know how bad they have to be for me -a dyslexic that uses her second language to read this- to notice them.if i can find some without looking there are way more in there other reader will notice.

again something i think shouldn’t be happening in a published story that is said to be edited -if i didn’t remember that wrongly about this story but since most of not all story on tor.com are edited, or would be strange for this one not to be!
it just bothers me.
it’s just something personal i guess? but it makes me drop ratings.


so all that wasn’t a fantastic start to the story.

but it didn’t get better since this to me just felt like a very typical vampire myth taken down into the very basic terms and themes.
where vamps cannot have sunlight, mirrors, have no real feelings, don’t have great smelling abilities, apparently no taste, no real emotions beside the basic needs to survive.

it is a bit creepy -and i do give the story credit for that- to have this very detached tone talking about killing people and drinking blood, surviving without typical humanity aspects and needs or wants.
but k also think there is a. tree way to get rite creepily detached without telling a story as this was and making it even creepier because to draws the reader in more and maybe makes it easier to read as well?

what i did like about this story as the idea that because vampires are so literally cold and detached from humanity and emotions, that is by might not be feeling sexual attraction or want anymore either.

which i thought was very interestingly done with how it’s written and told so that it’s left open if that’s how they all feel or just one of them.

also just the idea behind it was a nice one for me since vampires are generally so sexualized in media that the idea that they are actually literally cold blooded and couldn’t care less about it? that’s very interesting to me.

overall there were good things but it could have been so much better then it was.

[Netanella · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wasn't quite sure what I was getting in to when I loaded up "meat+drink" on the screen, but I hoped it wasn't a celebrity chef tell-all. Instead, brilliantly enough, I read a wonderful vampire story, about vampires who are not the intelligent, suave, sophisticated, and sometimes sparkly vampires that we all know and love, but rather slow-witted scavengers who live on the dregs of society, and the edge of starvation, and literally keep to the shadows to stay alive.

some basic terminology here. meat = dead bodies. some meat movies, ergo it is a vampire. some meat does not move, ergo it is dead. flesh is alive. drink is blood. blood is good.

This is pretty much the story, except without the "ergo's" and capitalization, for some reason. I guess that shows the somewhat mental decline of these vampires.

I enjoyed reading about the social hierarchy of this pack of vampires. And I equally enjoyed the social commentary on the city of Baltimore. Very well done.

[Faiza Sattar · Rating 4 out of 5]

★★★★☆ (4/5)

A selection of my favourite passages from the book

• many (most?) of the things that you think are your mind are really your flesh. anger is the heart beating faster. fear is the stomach tightening and untightening. lust is blood swelling between your legs
• flesh is ever-changing, flesh is self-aware. meat is insentient, meat is stagnant. flesh is a part of you and maybe the greater part, but meat is something you carry along like a knapsack.
• perhaps it is only that sometimes misery seems to ease when spread about, or that spreading it seems to provide some purpose to the misery

[Merit · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dark, abrupt tale. The prose was structured in a very strong, jarring way that hammered down how horrible their lives are. It was intriguing when capitalisation was used, unexpected, but maybe that's the protagonist real thoughts being emphasised. I liked how detached she was, but never from the hunger of more blood. It was an interesting and bleak retelling of vampire mythos.

[Jana Bianchi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Achei o conto legal, mas nada mais do que isso. O ponto de vista escolhido pra contar a história é interessantíssimo, mas a história em si não apresenta grandes inovações. Fiquei o tempo todo achando que no final ia ter alguma reviravolta que subvertesse isso, mas não teve. Legal pela linguagem e pelo POV, rapidinho de ler, mas nada tão diferente ou surpreendente como outras coisas que li na Tor.

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

A vampire story with all the core elements, but told through the eyes of a vampire husk. Well done and oozing with mood. At first, I found the punctuation choice (no capitalization at all) to be annoying, but it works. There are no highly complex thoughts and sentences, and yet the protagonist manages to make some very deep statements in very simple language.

[Arden · Rating 3 out of 5]

An average sort of vampire story.

Not badly written. But the choice to eschew all capitalization in favor of lowercase font was... pretentious. If it was meant to highlight the narrator's cold demeanor and apparent lack of humanity, that was already accomplished by the use of the word ‘meat’ to refer to the reanimated vampire form, and the word ‘flesh’ to mean the living body.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

This gets middling ratings because readers are tired of vampires. I can understand that, but it's a really good and original story. Gritty ghetto vampires in Baltimore. I wish this could be a tv series.

[OldBird]

A short story about how vampire/zombie hybrids can't use capitalization... OK, so the vamp-bies eat, drink and backstab too. I didn't much care for the quirk of the writing style or how the story was told. Not my cuppa.

[Matthew · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first Polansky that didn't work for me (A City Dreaming , too. But I did audiobook, so need to give it another chance).

Generally felt apathetic towards the story other than the last few pages. Kinda wish that was the start of the short story and not the end.

[Puffthemagicbunny · Rating 3 out of 5]

TW: Graphic death, murder, blood Minor alcohol.

I read this in the Best of Tor dot com 2016.

Well written first person account. Perhaps it was the lack of a definite ending, but this wasn’t my glass of wine.

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

A nice little short story. An interesting take on vampires - or should I saw meat.

[Lucy · Rating 4 out of 5]

of course meat does not sleep. of course meat does not dream.

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting

[Sara G · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was just kinda fine.

[AJA · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short stories are defintely not my preferred format but this one was solid. Not amazing but solid