After all the recent vampire silliness it is nice to be reminded that an author can actually do something with the idea of the vampire that doesn’t suck.
For every writer who makes it to fame and glory there are countless numbers who fail. If these failures are bad writers this is as it should be. But when a writer of great potential dies, it is tragic. Such is the case with Susan Petrey. With the few stories left us, it is doubtful Petrey will ever be a household name. Had she lived beyond her thirty-five years she would have become a major American fantasist.
Fortunately for readers and collectors, a group of writers in her hometown of Portland, Oregan published her few mature works in a book entitled Gifts of Blood (Baen Books (1992). The majority of Susan Petrey’s work concerns her vision of the vampire, or Varkela, peace-loving healers who exchange medical care for small amounts of blood called the blood-price. Set on the wild steppes of Tsarist Russia, the healers work amongst the diverse groups of people inhabiting the land, the Cossacks, the Turks and the Tartars.
Susan Petrey was a master of several languages including Russian, a lover of horses, a musician and a medical technologist. She used these elements to make the Varkela stories special. She wrote seven in all, each appearing in the prestigious Fantasy & Science Fiction between 1979 and 1983, three before her death, the others posthumously. The rest of the book is filled out with her Hugo-nominated story “Spidersong” and an unpublished piece called “The Neisserian Invasion”.
Gifts of Blood opens with “Spareen Amongst the Turks” (F&SF September 1979), a story about Spareen the Varkela (one of the two protagonists in the Varkela series), a wild youth, who has left the security of his father’s circle to make it alone amongst the Turks. His only friend is a golden-eyed mare with whom he can speak (an ability all Varklea have). Disappointed in love, dangerously close to death for lack of blood, Spareen can only survive by accepting the advances of a Turkish maid.
Episodic in its telling, “Spareen Amongst the Turks” is wisely chosen to lead the book, for it introduces all the main elements of Petrey’s writing: horses, medicine, sex, and the day-to-day struggle of life. The reader can easily identify with the vampiric need to earn the blood-price for survival, as we all must struggle month to month to pay the rent.
The second piece is a five hundred word short-short called “Fleas” (Westercon 37 Program Book, 1984) with whom the Varkela can see much in common. The relationship between Spareen and the golden-eyed mare (who seems to lack any other name) is part of what makes this story work, and all the Spareen stories so engaging.
In “The Healer’s Touch” (F&SF, February 1982) Vaylance, Spareen’s gentler brother, goes to the Russian fort to get a medical cure to the malaria that is decimating the Nogai and consequently to save his sister, Rayorka . To win the help of the head medico, a Doctor Rimsky, Vaylance goes into the mind of a mad girl using the soul healing. After this strange display, the Russian doctor realizes the healer is a Varkela and pays him in blood, as well as gives the vampire the malarial cure.
Petrey shows her keen understanding of both psychological archetypes and Asian mysticism in “The Healer’s Touch”. The magic of Vaylance’s healing journey is both fascinating and logical as is the story’s over all message of holistic understanding, offering both science and mysticism.
This story takes place chronologically earlier than those before it, for Spareen makes a brief cameo as an eleven year old nuisance, more interested in horses than his ailing sister.
“Spareen and the Cossacks” (F&SF, April 1981) features both Vaylance and Spareen. The gentler brother invites Spareen to the Cossack fort at Groznoi when a man needs the mold-cure, penicillin fermented inside the vampire’s nasal cavity, a process that Spareen alone can do. While waiting for the fermentation, the brothers go to a dinner party, where the wild Spareen misbehaves and encounters a woman who may be a prospective mother to his children. The tale ends neatly without a major crisis and is one of Petrey’s fluffier pieces, though some of Vaylance’s history is sketched in, namely a marriage at seventeen and the wife’s subsequent death. These tid-bits give the reader brief glimpses of the wonderful stories we will never read.
“Leechcraft” (F&SF, May 1982) is the Varkelan tour-de-force. The Russian steppes of 1845 are torn by war. While Vaylance and Rimsky are giving aid to the wounded, the doctor is severely injured by cannon fire and is need of a blood transfusion. Vaylance will not risk the primitive and often fatal transfer, but uses the dream-walk, a kind of dream-powered time-travel to go into the 20th Century to gather knowledge on the process. While in our present time the Varkela meets Myrna, a lab technologist and a “wolf-minded” woman, one of the few out-bloods who can mate successfully with the Varkela.
Romance is inevitable between the emotionally-scarred woman and the gentle Vaylance. The healer attempts to bring Myrna back to 1845 with him but is thwarted by the ghost of his mother. In the dream tunnel, the spirit offers Myrna a wolf cub which changes into a demon. The modern woman is rejected because of her emotional repression. It is only after Myrna learns to love freely that she passes into the Vaylance’s world. A happy ending which suggests further adventures for the three, Vaylance, Rimsky and Myrna. Of all the unwritten tales, these are the ones I mourn most.
“Small Changes” (F&SF, February 1983) shows how the Christians react to the Varkela, calling them ‘Vampires’ and impaling them with stakes. Fortunately for Spareen, the Christians who have captured him are converted Kalmuck Tartars, who remember the old tales and are willing to give the healer a chance to prove his virtuous heart. Elementary deduction wins the day, when Spareen discovers the patient is allergic to wool.
The last Varkela story is “Spareen and Old Turk” (F&SF, August 1983) The rebellious vampire decides to capture a magnificent stallion named Old Turk for Iskander Khan, whose people will take Spareen on as their healer. Spareen’s need to keep his bride, Varkura, in blood over-rides his better judgement.
Only after he has tried and failed to catch Old Turk does he have a change of heart. The vampire later warns the horse to move to another territory since Iskander Khan plans to wound the horse. The Circassian wants the animal for a stud to his livestock, and has no qualms about maiming Old Turk, which he does when the horse foolishly returns. Spareen offers a last service when he helps the wild animal to escape both the Khan and life as a cripple. Old Turk rides over a cliff as Spareen chants the horse prayer.
By no means a finale, “Spareen and Old Turk” leaves the reader with the impression there should be more, and there should have been. Even though Petrey’s Hugo-nominated story was not one of her Varkela tales, there is no reason to assume she would have abandoned the series. Many more tales of feisty Spareen and gentle Vaylance and his medical friends would have come from her pen, perhaps enough of both that each character could have had his own collection. I am saddened that I will never read them.
The rest of Gifts of Blood is very much different. “The Neisserian Invasion” follows the Varkela stories and is a strange departure from the fantasy of Susan Petrey. A strain of cross-species venereal disease infects both humans and Serrabeans, the unearthly overlords who have conquered humankind. The rulers leave the planet when the disease reaches epidemic proportions. Essentially, the Earth is saved by the Clap. The medical terminology lends credence to a story that has gained significance with the advent of AIDS. Since the editors were attempting to publish all of Petrey’s work in one volume, the story is acceptable in this collection.
Wisely, the compilers left the best for last. “Spidersong” (F&SF, September 1980) was nominated for the coveted Hugo and the John W. Campbell award. “Spidersong” is a musical fantasy about a lyre spider named Brenneker who builds her home inside a lute. Laurel, the owner, enters a contest at the university, hoping to win her tuition. Thomas, her lover, refuses to accompany her on his guitar, wanting to stay in their village and marry, but Laurel goes to the competition anyway. Without him, she has little hope of winning.
Laurel’s lute is jeopardized when a woodworm named Turkawee eats its way into the instrument. Brenneker tries to repair the damage with her own metal-like web, but with so much web spinning, the spider is almost too tired to play accompaniment for Laurel. Shortly after Laurel wins, the lute cracks open and Brenneker is discovered. One of the judges wants to kill the spider but Laurel saves her.
After the competition, Laurel returns Brenneker to the woods near her home. With Spring, Wisterness, Brenneker’s thwarted love, appears to her mating song. The story ends on a sweetly-sad note, as Brenneker plays a song in the memory of the mate she has just eaten. A poignant final note to a collection of stories filled with beauty and sadness.
