I have never read a more Halloween Father’s Day story than “A Kiss with Teeth” by Max Gladstone.

In this dark but ultimately heartwarming tale, Dracula has moved to suburbia to raise a family, but begins to grow apart from his wife Sarah and his son Paul as he suffers from the seven-year itch. It is one of the stories collected in the anthology The New Voices of Fantasy, edited by Peter S. Beagle and Jacob Weisman, which presents some of the strongest up-and-comers in the fantasy genre. Weeks ago I promised to review stories from his landmark anthology of new voices and today I make good on that promise.

“A Kiss with Teeth” is remarkable for the way in which it draws upon centuries of vampire lore to construct a portrait of a vampire dad who must suppress his primal killer instinct beneath a veneer of suburban normalcy. Every moment in Vlad’s life is spent hiding his monstrosity and his uncanny supernatural abilities from not only the normals around him, but from his own family. On the surface, Vlad seems surprisingly well-adjusted to the white picket fence American way of life. He has retracted his bright-white fangs and instead wears false teeth “blunt as shovels,” which he “coffee-stains … every night in a mug with WORLD’S BEST DAD written on the side” (73). But deep inside, Vlad remains a medieval bloodsucker from Eastern Europe. Like the classic all-American dad, he may wear “a baseball cap” (74) while watching his son swing from home plate, but he will do so while entertaining fond memories of cavalry charges breaking onto walls of Turkish pikes. Vlad prefers the sound of cracking sterna to the sound of a cracking baseball bat.

Soon, Vlad must take time off from his day job as an accountant to speak to his son’s teacher about Paul’s bad report card. As a dutiful father, he makes the appointment and enters the school while “squeaking the soles of his oxblood shoes against the tiles every few steps–a trick he learned a year back and thinks lends him an authentic air” (77). This movement, carefully rehearsed to conceal the surreal lightness of his step, betrays his sense of being an impostor. It is but one of the many carefully rehearsed movements that enable him to live normally in our world. Upon meeting the teacher, however, Vlad is taken in by her scent of “bruised mint and camellias” (76). Vlad’s marriage to Sarah has dulled over the years, but Paul’s teacher provides the tantalizing opportunity to go on the hunt again.

Sarah, who used to be a vampire hunter, “has not tried to kill him since they married” (73). They met during an epic confrontation in a Transylvanian castle, but these days, there’s a sense that the romance of that relationship is gone. The temptation to suck Paul’s teacher’s blood is powerful and begins to dissolve his carefully constructed identity: “This is no way to be a father. No way to be a man. But Vlad was a monster before he was a man” (86).

Vlad gives into his instincts. He stalks Paul’s teacher from the rooftops of the city as she returns to her apartment one night. The thrill of the hunt is exhilarating. But as he watches her sleep from outside her window, he cannot decide on the opportune moment to strike. He begins to question whether the school teacher can really satisfy the fantasy he craves. Vlad “wants her to chase him around the world, wants a moonlit showdown in a dark castle” (90), but she cannot give him that. After all, she’s a normal person, a school teacher. The badass woman he craves, the only woman with whom he can ever feel complete, is his own wife, Sarah.

Also back on the hunt after all these years, Sarah spots him on the rooftops and places him in the sites of her vampire hunting rifle. He swoops down to reconnect with her. What results are probably the most emotionally wholesome moments in vampire literature ever written–at least, based on the vampire stories I have read.

“What made you stop?” asks Sarah.

He answers, “She wasn’t you” (91).

This, and the final, heartwarming scene where Vlad and his son play catch in a park–one of the most Halloween father-son moments you will ever read in literature–together conclude a self-affirming and heartwarming story that will leave no doubt in anyone’s mind that Vlad is worthy of the title World’s Best Dad.

You can read “A Kiss with Teeth” at Tor.com
My review of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.