Some of Your Blood Audiobook

One of the Horror Writers Association's Top 40 Horror Books of All Time—the story of a troubled soldier and his bizarre, violent obsession with vampirism.

At the height of an unnamed war, a soldier is confined for striking an officer. Referred to as George Smith in official papers and records, the prisoner comes under the observation of Army psychiatrist Philip Outerbridge, who asks the young man to put his story down on paper. The result is a shocking tale of abuse, violence, and twisted love, a personal history as dark and troubling as any the doctor has ever encountered. Believing the patient to be dangerously psychotic, Dr. Outerbridge must dig deeper into his psyche. And when the truth about the strange case of George Smith is fully revealed, the results will be devastating.

Told through letters, transcripts, and case studies, Some of Your Blood is an extraordinary, poignant yet terrifying, genre-defying novel.

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"I first encountered Theodore Sturgeon in my early teens by way of a curiously twisted little horror tale, "The Professor's Teddy Bear." The story was included in a paperback anthology called "The Unexpected," edited by Leo Margulies (though, reputedly, the actual editor may have been Groff Conklin). As fate would have it, I also hit upon Ray Bradbury for the first time in the same anthology: his grisly story, "The Handler," also occupied the fictional roster.From that point forward, Sturgeon and Bradbury became my favorite authors in high school, and they remain strong presences to this day. But while Bradbury achieved honors well beyond genre fiction, Sturgeon is still underrated. I believe they should be linked, however, inasmuch as both, despite humble beginnings, had special gifts as stylists, gifts which transcended the genre writers of their day. In short, Bradbury and Sturgeon were prose poets who just happened to find their metier in the realms of fantasy fiction.Both had exceptional lyrical facility --- their command of rhythm, imagery, and metaphor displayed itself in everything they wrote. One reason for their excellence was that both read widely outside of pulp genres --- James Joyce, Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Steinbeck, and Sherwood Anderson, to name a few. Sturgeon, in particular, found Ring Lardner a significant influence on his more humorous fiction. Of the two, Bradbury had more grandiose literary ambitions, while Sturgeon seemed content within the confines of genre fantasy."Some of Your Blood" was the only full-length work of horror fiction Sturgeon wrote, and it's arguably his last novel of enduring stature. But Sturgeon wrote a number of other first-rate stories in the horror genre, all displaying his originality and stylistic panache. "Bianca's Hands," "It," "Talent," "Bright Segment" (already mentioned by another reviewer) and "A Way of Thinking" --- these, along with the aforementioned "Professor's Teddy Bear," rank with some of the best horror fiction of the 20th century. One could also cite "Fluke" (aka "Die, Maestro, Die") --- a tour-de-force of jazz fiction that doubles as a horror tale --- it clearly influenced later jazz-oriented stories like Charles Beaumont's "Black Country," Donald Barthelme's "King of Jazz," and Richard Matheson's multi-page poem, "The Jazz Machine."Blood" is fascinating, not merely for its original take on vampirism, but because it employs a variety of different styles and points of view, and for the way it contrasts the backwoods colloquialisms of "George's Account" with the alternately "professional" and lower-class vernacular of the two psychologists. With the former, Sturgeon was clearly inspired by the opening chapter of Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury" (i.e., the portion "told by an idiot"), but Sturgeon makes it completely his own --- moreover, the "George" character, rustic and psychopathic though he is, cannot be summarily dismissed as moronic without obscuring Sturgeon's intentions)."Some of Your Blood" should be studied (like all Sturgeon's best work) as a model of stylistic virtuosity. You cannot really understand Sturgeon (any more than one can understand Bradbury) by focusing on plot alone. One could question some of the psychological elements in the book --- one critic, for example, spurned its use of Freudian association tests and Rorschach blots as dated bric-a-brac, but this strikes me as absurd. We might as well criticize 14th century medical tracts for their references to leeches and bloodletting. In any case, Sturgeon also used psychology in other works like "Baby is Three" (the middle chapter of "More Than Human"), which more than likely stemmed from Sturgeon's experience as a psychology patient. For more in this context, I'd recommend Sturgeon's non-fictional pamphlet, "Argyll," where the author recounts his agonized relationship with his stepfather --- surely one source of the angst Sturgeon suffered throughout his life (and which may partially account for the many episodes of writer's block which plagued him in later years).By all means read (or listen to) "Some of Your Blood." Like poetry --- and poetry it definitely is --- it begs to be read aloud. Open your ears as well as your mind, and you will not be disappointed."

— Paul Kesler (5 out of 5 stars)