The Mammoth Book Of Vampire Stories Written By Women

" I thought it was clear ," Walters said. His voice had deepened to the familiar sexual growl and he rolled forward with her, still joined, until Sondra was on her knees beneath him. One of his large hands slipped beneath her left arm and encircled her throat; he didn't squeeze — never that — simply held tight enough to feel the hot rush of her pulse through the artery so close to his killing fingers. The feel of her blood excited him more and he drove deeper into her, making her cry out in surprise and spiralling ecstasy. His other arm snaked across her hipbones and lifted until her knees were clear of the floor and she dangled from his body with only her fisted hands to keep her face from banging against the tiles. Flopping loosely in the air while he fucked her like she was some kind of whore doll, Sondra would have been furious except for the tenderness in his dark voice and the convulsions of rapture that were enveloping her. The words in her ear were like ice-crusted velvet as his mouth grazed the soft juncture of her throat and shoulder and left another barely bloody scratch for him to suckle like an infant.

"Remember what I said, Sondra? You're one among millions, able to do something that should be treasured. And I will do just that. I will exalt you and place you above all else, for ever."

Sondra didn't know if it was his next words and the way his hand moved from her throat to caress her waiting belly, her rippling, final orgasm, or her sanity giving way that made her begin to shriek as he came and filled her with a blazing, blood-streaked icy liquid and passion.

"Unlike my twin brother Nicholas, I will be with you at every moment as you carry my precious sons and bear them into this world."

Luella Miller

Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman

Mary Eleanor Wilkins (1852-1930) was born in Randolph, Massachusetts. Her husband, Dr Charles Freeman, was an alcoholic who was committed to the state hospital for the insane in 1920, where he died three years later.

Having made her literary debut in 1881 with a ballad for children, her poems and fiction appeared in a number of publications. A member of the regionalist "local colour" movement of American fiction, she wrote twelve novels, including Jane Field (1893) , The Shoulders of Atlas (1908) and The Butterfly House (1912), and some of her more than 200 short stories are collected in A Humble Romance and Other Stories (1887) , A New England Nun and Other Stories (1891) and The Best Stories of Mary E. Wilkins (1927). In 1926, the author received the William Dean Howells Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Letters .

During her lifetime, only six of the author's supernatural stories were collected between hardcovers, in The Wind in the Rose-Bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural (1903). The 1974 Arkham House volume , Collected Ghost Stories, added five more .

One of her most famous stories was adapted for the 1970 episode "Certain Shadows on the Wall" of the TV series Rod Serling's Night Gallery. It is a pity that nobody has yet attempted to film the classic vampire tale that follows