While they are all equal-opportunity predators when their blood-lust prompts them to hunt mortals, they prefer female playmates. All the central characters are lesbian Jamaican vampires who enjoy the kinds of 'power exchange' sex that go with blood sports. Supposedly, these overlapping concepts are no longer taken seriously by the enlightened, but the “darkness” described above still inspires an endless amount of horror literature, art and movies.Įvery Dark Desire reads like the worst nightmare of anyone who still lives by a traditional Western value system. The fifteenth-century Christian Inquisition claimed that woman (femina) had 'less faith' (fe + mina) than man, and was therefore more inclined to be seduced to the 'dark side' by the Devil, envisioned as a black man or a bestial being with horns and hooves.įor centuries, the patriarchal Christian mindset which produced these ideas has also separated 'normal' sex (horizontal, heterosexual, marital, procreative) from all the 'perversions' of the instinct to mate. The parallel treatment of women and animals has been justified by parallel theories. The massacre and exploitation of darker-skinned peoples by Europeans have been rationalized by means of racist theories about who is “savage” and therefore in need of control.

'Dark' has a variety of meanings in Western culture: obscure, hidden, mysterious, unconscious, exotic, violent, dangerous, associated with death or night, richly pigmented.

Every Dark Desire by Fiona Zedde (New York: Kensington Books, 2007).

Bliss by Fiona Zedde