Returning to the Black Widower

Quite some time ago I stumbled over a collection of stories online, vampire stories with a host of quite interesting characters. The stories - at least the main story - are called "Black Widower", which is the nickname of one main character. Currently there's two pages with the stories, as the author is transferring to a new web-address.

I had been neglecting the stories for a while ... as it seemed as if there was nothing new. But this Wednesday I did a short trip to the pages again and found quite a host of new stories - and new chapters for the main story. Slowly "Black Widower" (as the main story is called) and "Changing Fortunes" (a side-story with two new characters) are merging a bit.

The story is set 40 or so years in the future, after the 'Supes' (homo superior, humans with supernatural powers like telepathy, telekinesis and so on) took over, enslaving 'normal' humans - or 'Saps' (homo sapiens, what else?). One of the two main characters, Angelo, the "Black Widower", has become a vampire before that time, when he was a 15-year-old teenager in southern Florida. A few years after his change he returned to his hometown and made his older cousin Dimitri his first child.

But Dimitri isn't the second main character, that's a boy named 'Weasel' by his Keeper (you could call that guy a pimp, but above all you'd have to call him dead, so it doesn't matter anyway) who found him stumbling around as a child without any memories of his past. His real name is Jaques Baptiste Drollet and he's sort of vampire royalty - the clan 'Baptiste' has very special powers that allow the members to become 'Broodmasters' who can actually feed off the blood their underlings take ... and includes, besides Weasel, his uncle Ardoin, who's head of the vampire organisation, and his aunt Angelique, who's a witch (Weasel also has witch-blood from his father's side) and hates her brother and his brood deeply.

Angelo and Weasel are, in many ways, total opposites. They look quite different (Angelo is dark-haired, dark-eyed and rather short; Weasel is a bit taller than him, has silvery-blond hair and green eyes) and they are quite different in character. Cam (a character from "Changing Fortunes") describes it like this: "Angelo is fire and Weasel is ice, able to cool him down and keep him under control." (No quote here, though, it's written a bit different in the story.) Nevertheless, and despite the fact that neither of them is completely faithful to the other, they really are deeply in love - and deadly to everyone whom they meet and can't stand.

Recurring characters, besides Dimitri, include Amorette, a vampire whom Angelo and his 'sire' (the vampire who made him) Sylvie created together - as her blood-thirst proved too large for Sylvie alone - and Radu, not a vampire, but a shifter (you could also say 'Werewolf', but not into his face), who's both a lover and an enemy to Angelo (they're too much like each other in character). Then there's, of course, the Broodmaster Ardoin himself - and sometimes his sister Angelique, too.

As the stories contain slash (what else do you expect from a story with two male characters in the lead?), they're probably not for everyone, especially as Angelo, Dimitri and Radu are quite ruthless when it comes to killing (Weasel being something of a 'good vampire', most of the time) and tormenting their prey. As Angelo states in another side story ("Angelo's Cures for Boredom"):

As anyone who knows me can testify, Angelo gets bored very, very easy.

I have several cures that I've developed over the years.

Sex, of course is a great cure, but only if it's good sex. If it's shitty sex, then we get to the other cure for boredom - mental and physical torture of a shitty bed partner.

Yeah, one of those kinds of kills. Let's just say if it gets to the point where I'm not concerned with being careful, there won't be much left of him by the time I'm done.

Gaming is a great cure as well, but only if the mark makes it worth it. I hate being bored.

This nicely brings together all his interests: Sex, hunting down prey and killing it. But on the other hand ... Angelo isn't a normal 'vampire' (none of the main characters are, in the reality of "Black Widower"), not even by his world's standards: he's half Sangsue (that's the vampires, you see) and half incubus, meaning he can't just suck blood, he can also drain another of all sexual energy - thus his nickname "Black Widower", derived, without doubt, from the deadly spider known as "Black Widow". Just as Weasel is half Sangsue and half witch. Radu, on the other side, seems to be a full-blooded Odogi (that's the werewolves).

It's a bit difficult to explain the whole story and the world in one post, so, if it sounds interesting to you, I suggest you take a trip to the current website (the other one is still a work in progress without index-page) or look for the "thesaurus-Black Widower" file at the new address. That file explains a lot about the expressions used in the stories.

If you like the vampire stories by Anne Rice (but always wanted something a little more explicit and maybe less 'elegant', too), you might really like the "Black Widower".