contemporary America. The Lady in the Loch
(1998) is more serious, a blend of historical novel
and alternate world fantasy in which Sir Walter
Scott apprehends a killer seeking to perform a
black magic ritual. Some of Scarborough’s short
fiction has been collected in Scarborough Faire
(2003). One of her best is “Carol for Another
Christmas” (1996), in which Ebenezer Scrooge’s
ghost visits a modern-day woman.
“The Scent of Vinegar” Robert Bloch(1993)
Although vampires show up in one form or an-
other in the myth systems of a wide variety of cul-
tures, most horror writers follow the model of the
European vampire, as created by J. Sheridan LE
FANU, Bram STOKER, and others. Robert BLOCH,
one of the more prolific and consistently entertain-
ing authors of short horror and suspense fiction,
chose to invoke a very different tradition in this
Bram Stoker Award–winning story.
Greg Kolmer is a tabloid reporter who thinks
he may have stumbled onto a good thing. During
an interview with an aging Hollywood star, he
learns of the existence of a brothel that was once
the secret rendezvous of many influential and
now rich movie industry figures, a brothel that
eventually switched emphasis to sadomasochism
and other extreme fetishes. He also learns that
the operator of the brothel, the Marquess, was se-
cretly taping and photographing her clients as
part of a plan to blackmail them that never came
to fruition. Kolmer then ascertains the approxi-
mate location from another man and finds the re-
mote, decaying house. Unfortunately, he also
finds the animated corpse of a young Asian
woman who removes her own head, sending him
racing to safety.
Unfortunately for Kolmer, someone else is on
the same trail and knows of his interest. An Asian
man who identifies himself as the son of a one-
time employee of the brothel holds him at gun-
point, forcing him to return to the abandoned
building. He tells Kolmer that the creature is a
“penangallan,” a Malaysian vampire that hunts by
removing its head and that flies around in search
of a victim with its entrails hanging below. The
penangallan must soak its entrails in vinegar before
returning to its body and is otherwise fairly analo-
gous to European vampires.
They drive a stake through the creature’s
heart before searching the remainder of the build-
ing, where they find only desiccated fragments of
the rest of the penangallans, who were all killed
and devoured by the one survivor. They also find
the remains of the blackmail cache, destroyed be-
yond any possibility of ever being put to use.
Kolmer, suspecting that his partner will kill him to
cover his tracks, acts preemptively, but his own es-
cape is thwarted by the penangallan’s head, which
can survive separately from the now-disabled body.
There are two ways in which a writer can
make us care about the fate of a character in a hor-
ror story: by making them so likeable that we sym-
pathize with them or so annoying that we are
rewarded by their eventual fate. Bloch took the
latter route in this case in what is probably the best
story from the later part of his long and successful
writing career.Schow, David J.(1955– )
David Schow quickly established a reputation with
the explicit gore and violence of his short stories
and, in fact, is credited with having coined the
term splatterpunkto refer to writers who chose that
path. He is also a distinctly regional writer, reflect-
ing Californian settings and attitudes in most of his
published fiction. Schow has written only a few
novels, thrillers that rely on psychological horror
rather than fantastic content, although Rock
Breaks Scissors Cuts(2003) comes very close to
being supernatural. He has also produced a large
body of distinctive short fiction, most of it col-
lected in six volumes between 1988 and 2004.
Schow’s stories are widely varied in theme and
treatment, ranging from quiet and thoughtful to
gross-out horror. In “One for the Horrors” (1983) a
decaying movie theater shows old films that inex-
plicably have new and sometimes horrible scenes
never shown in the originals. “Coming Soon to a
Theater near You” (1984) has a very similar setting,
but this time the theater is run by the animated
dead. Dinosaurs mysteriously begin reappearing in
the world in “Sedalia” (1989), apparently through
some magical change in the laws of nature. “Scoop310 “The Scent of Vinegar”