oxblood

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 26 Review

Style: Choice-Select
Played: 7/20/26
Playtime: 30m

Some things I can endlessly revisit, not experiencing anew exactly but not exhausting their novelty either. I have a decades-long relationship with Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii where familiarity has not eroded the experience even a little bit. I have a similar relationship with Reanimator, The Blues Brothers, and Fury Road. This is not limited to music and movies. There are boardgames on my shelf that hit the table decades on, and despite years-long gaps I relish revisiting my beleaguered copy of Catch 22. This is not the RULE of course. Far more entertainment is disposable or.. timeful? Is that the opposite of timeless? As a young person, I discovered Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards and adored it. It is a chore to endure now. (It came out within months of Star Wars, isn’t that wild? Artistically, they seem separated by DECADES.)

So, Vampire IF. Despite my self-avowed bona fides as a Horror Fan, vampires have never been my thing. It’s cool, some of my things would probably repel many of you. Despite vampires being low on my revisit list, I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say my review corpus is dominated by them. I’ll have to run the numbers one day. Seems likely the Queer Vampire Jam is the root of that. I mean, if there were a, I dunno, Ribald Mathematics Jam it could have broken a totally different way but here we are.

It is true that the community has made it easy on me in one regard: the overwhelming majority of them spin unique takes on the lore, the metaphoric linkages, the imaginative execution. There is probably an essay somewhere about the LGBTQIA+ community’s dialogue with vampire mythology. Demonstrating I AM capable of bare-minimum introspection, I AM NOT THE ONE TO WRITE IT. No, instead I’ll just accumulate an ever-growing critical engagement with works in the vein. (I know you saw it, I won’t lampshade it. THIS TIME.)

These twists on lore are so pervasive, something like oxblood carves out its novelty by reengaging more traditional vampire beats and making THAT feel transgressive! “Wait reviewer, surely that is dependent on the ORDER you encounter works in! Without the large body of prior art as context, its seeming uniqueness couldn’t possibly land!” Ah, knee-jerk strawman reader, you are lucky I am here. oxblood has anticipated this possible refutation. You see, the text of the work presumes a romantic human-vamp relationship as its setup, then proceeds to unwind the peril that has ALWAYS been in the subtext. And does it while making a statement about toxic romantic attachment! It seems in conversation both with romantic-vampire genre AND selfish romantic expectations! For me, it was a startling breath of fresh air… wait, that’s not what I want to say. That implies I have been breathing stale air for some time which is decidedly NOT my experience. For me, it was a startling subversion of expectations executed with PRIOR EXPECTATIONS. And it caught me in exactly the right critical context to feel novel and insightful.

Crucial to all this is the prose of the piece. We spend most of the piece inhabiting a vampire at the dissolution of a romantic relationship, privvy to the hurts and pettiness of the protagonist. Which then sings off their affliction (is it ok to call it that? my foot-in-mouth sense is tingling…) to spiral into something dangerous and self-destructive. This is an all-too-common aspect of human relationships, and vampire lore is used to shine a bright light on it. The repeated euphemism of INK, which pretty quickly is understood to be (Spoiler - click to show)blood highlights the self-deception that attempts to fend off the darkness prior to an eventual surrender. The prose paints all of this against a kind of matter-of-fact portrayal of vampire life that feels lived in and well observed. The PURPOSE of this backdrop is to center the protagonist’s experience and bring it into sharp focus without distracting dissonances. I found it really well done, decidedly dark, and doing a lot to inject the HORROR back into its genre. As much emotional horror as supernatural, that simultaneously echoes and counterpoints the larger body of engaging vampire IF.

When I am praising prose, as I mean to do here, I often try to grab samples to prove I am not just making it up. That manifests as a quick pause in my playthrough to cut’n’paste, spurred by an out-of-flow recognition of ‘hey that’s a nifty phrase.’ I do not have that for you this time. I think it’s because in the moment there were no showy textual flourishes. It was just a slow build of atmosphere and character decline that accumulated over the course of the piece to a very affecting (and (Spoiler - click to show)tragic) climax.

It is not lost on me that SO many of my reviews of this genre start with ‘Ehh, I’m not about vampires really.’ Is that actually helpful to you, the reader? I THINK it gives you some context to process my words with, but at some point the repetition might feel like dismissal. Maybe I can redeem that a bit by revealing that I AM about THIS vampire story. It emphasized the STAKES of these tales in a tense and insightful way. (Don’t cry to me. You had to know it was coming.)