Dark Angels is a lesbian vampire erotica book published by Cleis Press. It’s copyright 1995, so it’s about 15 years old, and is edited by Pam Keesey who also edited Daughters of Darkness. There are eleven different stories contained on 144 pages. Unlike other Cleis Press books, this one seems to have a different style and format since it’s older – the words look a lot more “medieval” and don’t look nearly as modern. I think all of this was also to help get in the mood for vampires. The book is soft cover and is black and white on the inside with a smaller-than-usual font for the book. The front of the book shows a vampire-looking woman lying down on the ground with her fangs showing, so it isn’t exactly discreet either. However, as long as you keep the cover laying flat on something, this is something you could take out in public.
Dark Angels definitely helps show how Cleis Press has grown over the last 15 years. The text is a lot smaller, the stories are a lot longer and include a lot less sex, and as was probably the time, the stories don’t include much in the way of actual sex – it’s mostly the teasing and denying that many people find arousing. Which means this is definitely something I was not expecting when I requested this for review. I had imagined this would be a modern book but would just have lesbian vampires in it – I was in for a surprise.
To start off, this erotica book probably has the largest introductions I’ve ever seen. It’s all about the symbolism of vampires and monthly periods. The introduction is twenty pages long and seems really out of place in an erotica book. However, if you are interested in the history of vampires or why vampire erotica is symbolistic, it goes into all of the detail. To be honest, my eyes glazed over half-way through since I opened the book expecting sex and then spent ten pages reading over facts *about* the sex with no sex involved.
Something else I definitely wasn’t expecting – I knew I’d be expecting two women to be getting together in this story, but I certainly wasn’t expecting there to be a lot of vampires drinking other women’s monthly gift which is what a vast majority of the stories included. It wasn’t always in graphic detail – most of the time it was just a couple sentences describing it, but it certainly wasn’t what I was expecting when I picked this up. I thought there’d be some drinking from around the breasts near the collarbone, but nothing like that. However, a couple of the stories really do describe it in an erotica manner which I enjoyed, but I just say it to warn those that may not like it.
Something else I found surprising – I’m not sure it’s the editor, the topic of the book, or the time it was published, but a lot of the stories are heavy on plots on light on sex. You get a lot of the plot with the vampire/human love affair, but there isn’t much in the way of describing the sex itself. The stories are well-written, and I enjoy reading them, but some of the time, the stories actually just end with a kiss between the partners. So while it is erotic, it’s not what I normally expect from my erotica. Some of the stories also included a couple of pages of dialogue between the characters about the history of vampires which could be a slight annoying if you were reading the story to attempt to get off – it just got distracting.
One of my favorite stories in this book was “The Tale of Christina” by Cecilia Tan. It’s about a vampire who meets a girl at a club, thinks about why she loves her so much, then when she goes to pick her up for their date, the girl is missing. She uses her vampire senses to find where the girl is and finds her being attacked by some guy. The guy ends up stabbing the vampire, and the vampire sucks his blood until he dies. The two women go back and do some light oral sex and kissing before they end up taking because the woman wants to be turned into a vampire. This story wasn’t amazingly erotic, but I just found the emotional aspect written into it to be too honest to ignore. Plus, the vampire senses that the vampire had shown were the senses that I always imagined a vampire to have which was reassuring.
“Cinnamon Roses” by Renee M. Charles is also a pretty good story. The vampire is telling the story and unlike some old-fashioned stories, this one has the vampire using modern language and a sarcastic nature. She works at a barbor shop that sells “extras”, and when a customer comes in who just smells beautifully of good blood, she can barely contain herself from nicking the girl’s pubic area while she shaves it. There isn’t much sexual action in this one, but there’s a lot of anticipation and teasing.
The one, however, that turned me off the most was “The Bloody Countess” by Alajandra Pizarmik. Like, an epic turn-off. As in, I’m confused why the editor would ever ever include this in this book. It’s a tale told in eleven separate parts – each separate part is a description of a violent death of a person. For example, the Countess kills someone by pouring ice water over them until their body gives up. This is, in no way, shape or form, erotic. The main character may be a vampire, but this is just…awkward for an erotic novel. It isn’t a badly-written story, but for something that’s supposed to turn me on, this is so far off the mark it’s just…wow. Even for someone who is very firmly entrenched in BDSM and kinks.
I’m not sure how I feel about this book overall. I’m confused. I feel like it might be the age that contributed to it, but this book is just full of so many stories that didn’t even come near the mark of “erotic” for me. I was expecting sexually powerful women who went after what they wanted – and I got that, to an extent, but it just wasn’t all that erotic and many times it included the death of the participant. However, for those who are looking for good vampire stories that aren’t necessarily erotic and want to learn more about vampire history, this book does a great job of showcasing that. This erotica publisher sells Dark Angels: Lesbian Vampire Erotica.
