As a vampire story, "Undead Philosophy 101" surprised me. Maybe I don't read a lot of the genre, but I was not expecting the plot to fall out the way it did at all. The heroine is a freshman university student in Ann Arbor, MI, and has discovered that one of her professors is a vampire...and another vampire is about to turn her roommate into a slave. She doesn't like her roommate too much, but she definitely doesn't want to share living space with someone enthralled to a vampire, so she approaches the professor to see if he'll help her out. What happens then is what surprised me and made the story so much fun, by playing with my expectations. The vampires here seem to be in the Dracula mold when it comes to vulnerabilities and powers, which was refreshing after so many other kinds of vampires I've read about over the years.

This was a perfect short story for me, in that the length was just right. While I was curious to learn more about the setting and the heroine, I was very satisfied with the story that was told and didn't feel like it went on too long or wasn't long enough - an occasional problem with the form, as I found in my creative writing classes. ( )