Dead Roses for a Blue Lady: A Sonja Blue Collection

I fell in love with the character, Sonja Blue, in Collins's MIDNIGHT BLUE, so finding this collection was very exciting for me. For the uninitiated, Sonja Blue is an unhappy and unstable vampire who has dedicated her afterlife to killing vamps and other monsters. She's tough, stronger than most vamps because she can walk in daylight, and completely punk rock. But she has a dark side, the `other', who is like a split personality, appearing and creating chaos in Sonja's otherwise orderly existence. Nancy Collins is a great writer. She really takes you into the story and makes you care for the characters. The only reason I'm not giving DEAD ROSES five stars is because I thought this collection wasn't as cohesive as it could've been. It was more like reading a file of journal entries on Sonja, than stories that took you from point A to point B. If you are new to Collins and Blue, I would suggest reading MIDNIGHT BLUE first, just so you can get a better feel for what's going on. If you like vamps, comics, punk rock, strong women, monsters, good writing, or all of the above, you should pick up this book. You won't be sorry.

"When you keep the hours that I do, you often find yourself in other people's stories." -Sonja Blue With the exception of "Knifepoint," which takes place before she was "born," and "Cold Turkey," which provides telling insight into her "otherness," the words above perfectly capture the tenor of the remaining stories in this collection, which feature Nancy Collins' vampiric vampire killer, Sonja Blue, as a cynical, world weary adventurer, who, when she's not hunting her own kind, is cleaning up her little corner of the world, a la Clint Eastwood's "Man with No Name." In "Tender Tigers," she rescues a child from her abusive stepmother, an ogre; In "Vampire King of the Goth Chicks," she gives a vampire wannabe his comeuppance; "Variations on a Theme" finds her in James O'Barr's "Crow" universe; "Some Velvet Morning" features her in her "angel of vengeance" mode, hunting down one of the oldest of her kind; finally, in "The Nonesuch Horror," she teams up with the werewolf sheriff of a remote western town to rid the hamlet of an unwelcome visitor.Always the pro, Collins makes each of these pieces work, milking her themes and situations for all they're worth. Doing so, she delivers a handful of solid entertainments that should inspire longstanding fans to revisit her worthy Sonja Blue novels, and those new to her work to sample them for the first time.