1995 World Fantasy Award for Best Novella (nominee)
A World Fantasy Award Finalist for 1994, “A Slow Red Whisper of Sand” first appeared in Poppy Z. Brite’s vampire anthology, Love in Vein (1994).
Here’s what Brian Stableford had to say about this long short story:
“Poppy Brite has cunningly arranged Love in Vein . . . so that its climactic item, Robert Devereaux’s “A Slow Red Whisper of Sand,” is a kind of summary of all that has gone before. This extraordinary tour de force condenses into its thirty-seven pages not merely the whole riot of improbably various, impractically cruel and impossibly orgasmic sexual intercourse that greases the other pages of [the vampire anthologies here reviewed] but also—and most importantly—the entire tangle of miserably narrow-minded, morosely intense and plaintively inchoate aspirations that guide the entire enterprise. The unstated but very pointed moral of “A Slow Red Whisper of Sand” is plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose—or, to put it less obliquely, vampires might get their kicks differently, but at the end of the day, they’re no better off than the sad individuals who place and follow up contact ads. The message—and it really is a message—which finally emerges from these anthologies, when they are considered as a set, is that there really is no perfect relationship to meet your imagined needs; substituting a vampire for the boy/girl next door might seem to promise something more, but it can’t and won’t deliver.”
Here’s what Brian Stableford had to say about this long short story:
“Poppy Brite has cunningly arranged Love in Vein . . . so that its climactic item, Robert Devereaux’s “A Slow Red Whisper of Sand,” is a kind of summary of all that has gone before. This extraordinary tour de force condenses into its thirty-seven pages not merely the whole riot of improbably various, impractically cruel and impossibly orgasmic sexual intercourse that greases the other pages of [the vampire anthologies here reviewed] but also—and most importantly—the entire tangle of miserably narrow-minded, morosely intense and plaintively inchoate aspirations that guide the entire enterprise. The unstated but very pointed moral of “A Slow Red Whisper of Sand” is plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose—or, to put it less obliquely, vampires might get their kicks differently, but at the end of the day, they’re no better off than the sad individuals who place and follow up contact ads. The message—and it really is a message—which finally emerges from these anthologies, when they are considered as a set, is that there really is no perfect relationship to meet your imagined needs; substituting a vampire for the boy/girl next door might seem to promise something more, but it can’t and won’t deliver.”
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