Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Tales of the Slayer Books

The Slayers' lives are short, and not very sweet. The Watchers' Journals are full of their tales -- their battles, their triumphs, and ultimately, their successors. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is but the latest in a long line of women warriors stretching back to the dawn of humankind. As long as there have been vampires, there has been a Slayer. Usually called in her teens, the Chosen One leads a brief life full of conflict and doom. From the Anasazi villages of A.D. 1250 to Shanghai, China, in 1866, from Hollywood in the '40s to Buffy's predecessor in Tokyo of the '90s, Slayers have always risen above their most recent defeat. Four best-selling Buffy novelists come together in a collection of novellas chronicling tales of Slayers past. Christopher Golden, Nancy Holder, Mel Odom, and Yvonne Navarro each present a new entry in the historic line of Slayers.

"I can't be...just a person, I can't be helpless like that...." -- Buffy, "Helpless" At eighteen, each Slayer must face a terrifying trial: the Tento di Cruciamentum. This time-honored, albeit cruel, rite of passage forces each Watcher to drain the Slayer of all her physical powers and then send her to vanquish a powerful vampire using only her wits. When Buffy Summers underwent her Cruciamentum, she managed to defeat Kralik, a vampire who had been committed to a sanitarium as a human for torturing and murdering more than a dozen young women before he was turned. However, not all Slayers have been so cunning. Tales of the Slayer, Vol. 4 chronicles the Cruciamentum of eight earlier Slayers. From Prohibition Chicago to beatnik New York City, from the sideshows of a traveling carnival to a small Irish farm, from the fifteenth century to the twentieth, the Cruciamentum has tested the prowess of Slayers throughout history. Each of them has had to fight: for her job, for the lives of those she loved, and for her own existence....