Book Review: Destined for an Early Grave by Jeaniene Frost

Numerous authors are benefitting from the huge spike in vampire popularity since 2005 when Twilight broad-jumped onto the New York Times best-seller lists and took over YA fiction in one fell swoop. Carried along in the slipstream of Stephenie Meyer’s juggernaut are a variety of thriving paranormal romance or urban fantasy series featuring female protagonists involved with vampire boyfriends or lovers. Jeaniene Frost’s Night Huntress series is typical of these. Destined for an Early Grave is the fourth book in a story arc that began in October, 2007 with Halfway to the Grave and continued with One Foot in The Grave (April 2008) and At Grave’s End (January 2009). The titles are available only in mass market paperback or Kindle editions and are being released about six months apart. Frost says on her website that she plans to do seven or eight books in this storyline, but she’s already begun a spin-off series starring secondary characters from the Night Huntress novels.

Frost’s universe and novels owe more to Buffy the Vampire Slayer than Twilight. The first book in the Night Huntress series introduces Catherine, or Cat, Crawford, who hunts and kills vampires out of sympathy for her mother, who hates vampires fervently. To her shock, Cat had finally learned that she is a half-vampire herself, born after her mother was tricked by a bloodsucking seducer, and her ultimate goal is to find and kill her undead father. As a rare “hybrid,” Cat has a number of extraordinary abilities, mostly related to enhanced senses, strength and agility. These don’t help her escape capture by a vampire bounty hunter, Bones, who trains her to assist him. Cat is pulled deep into a supernatural underground that includes vampires, demons, ghosts and ghouls, a government task force keeping the paranormal critters under control, elaborate inter-species politics and a great deal of manipulative conniving. Amid all the adventure, Cat and Bones become lovers, and then “blood bond,” which is the vampire subculture’s equivalent of permanent, monogamous marriage.

Destined for an Early Grave picks up the story when Cat and Bones are recuperating from their last adventure and planning a romantic get-away to Paris. But Cat is having disturbing dreams in which she’s chased by vampire named Gregor who keeps insisting that Cat isn’t really “married” to Bones. Cat starts to realize that a highly significant period of her past has somehow been erased from her memory, and something from that past has now returned to make some major claims on her. Soon Cat, Bones, and other members of the vampire subculture are all collaborating—more or less—to deal with Gregor’s schemes for Cat.

As the fourth book in a series with a tight story arc, Destined for an Early Grave devotes a high percentage of text to explanations of events, characters and relationships established in the previous three volumes. As I mentioned in my review of P.N. Elrod’s Dark Road Rising, authors can be faced with tricky decisions about background information when writing a tightly plotted multi-book series. Frost does a bit too much explaining, slowing her narrative down and making me impatient. But this isn’t the only reason that I feel the current book lacks substance. The entire plot of Destined for an Early Grave revolves around only one real conflict: the crisis in Cat’s and Bones’ relationship precipitated by an aggressive element from her past. Cat bounces around from ally to ally and hiding place to hiding place, but very little actually happens beyond Cat’s unraveling the convoluted truth about Gregor’s claim on her, and repairing her strained relationship with Bones. In order to care enough about Cat’s personal issues to stay involved with the story, a reader has to care a lot about Cat as a character, and I found that difficult. As is often the case with these series, Cat is too much of a “Mary Sue” character. She’s stunningly beautiful, unique, gifted with special powers and abilities, maneuvers skillfully in a world of ancient immortals and god-like supernatural beings, and everyone who sees her loves and desires her (even ghosts). Her falling out with Bones leaves her with a number of alternative friends and would-be lovers with whom to take refuge, and her chief worry is that Bones will be jealous, driving them further apart.

On a more serious note, several aspects of the characters and their relationships disturbed me. While I was reading Destined for an Early Grave, I was also involved in a discussion of the Twilight Saga and whether it models an “unhealthy” or abusive dynamic for young teen couples, as many critics of Meyer’s series claim. But if Twilight’s Edward Cullen is “controlling,” he has nothing on Bones, Vlad, Gregor and the other male antagonists in the Night Huntress world. Cat is locked up, bodily carried around, abducted, refused information, lied to, manipulated, and threatened with death, and for the most part, forgives all of it without a qualm. The only thing that distinguishes her from a ravished heroine in a bodice-ripper romance is that she’s tough, has powers and is capable of killing and beating up nasty critters, but she’s still pushed around and controlled by the men in her life (there are almost no women, besides her embittered mother). In personality, Bones constantly reminded me of Rhett Butler in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. He seems to spend a lot of Destined for an Early Grave clenching his teeth as he rigidly suppresses his violent emotions. This is not a relationship dynamic that appeals to me, although I realize that most romance readers—and Twilight fans—have no issues with it.

Jeaniene Frost’s Night Huntress series is easily digestible entertainment that doesn’t demand much from its readers. Fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Vampire: the Masquerade will find Frost’s universe comfortably familiar, and will probably enjoy her series.

Graphic Novel Review: Dusk by David Doub

Dusk (2009) is a self-published graphic novel written by David Doub and illustrated by four different artists, three on pencils and two doing inks. Although the story and concepts are interesting, the execution is uneven and falls short of the creators' ambitions. Drawn in the heavily chiaroscuro style typical of black and white comic art in general, the art does not always serve the story or the reader in the ways that it needs to.

The book consists of four stand-alone stories that are not obviously sequential in either narrative or timeline. In Chapter One, we meet Eve, an "enhanced" human who works for a vampire named Ash. Ash is a benevolent if somewhat avuncular figure whose interest in Eve seems wholly paternal. Eve herself acts in the capacity of a slayer or enforcer, à la Buffy or Anita Blake: petite and feminine (and appearing younger than her years, according to dialogue in Chapter Three) but able to kick plenty of butt. She is addicted to drinking small amounts of vampire blood, which in Doub's universe apparently doesn't turn a human into a vampire in and of itself. Ash reluctantly supplies her with blood, but it's unclear whether this elixir is responsible for her powers or not. In Chapter One, Eve is sent to track down a rogue vampire, with unhappy results.

Chapter Two shows us more of Eve's history, current living situation with Ash and past relationships. Ten years ago, she fled an abusive husband only to fall into the clutches of an evil vampire who enslaved her. I found the ending of this story rather touching, but it mostly serves as a retrospective on Eve herself. I wish we could have learned more about her experiences with her evil master, Van Kraken, and what happened to him. I really wanted to know more about Ash's "business trip" somewhere deep "beneath the Swiss Alps" (where he still has cell phone service).

In Chapter Three, Eve joins forces with another mortal hunter to stop a rogue vampire. We get more hints here about the vampire subculture which Eve and Ash apparently serve, but very few details.

In a story quite different from the previous three, Chapter Four deals with a bullied high school student who dabbles in black magic. Here, Eve displays a gift for the magical arts as she tries to stop the student from pulling a Carrie on his high school tormentors.

Artist Maki Naro (inks by Chris Scott) makes the most creative use of layout and composition in Chapters One and Two. However, sometimes creativity interferes with comprehension, and it's a little hard to follow what's going on. This is especially true in a couple of the action/fight sequences. The panels tend to have too much solid black, so that the black overwhelms the imagery rather than highlighting it by contrast.

Chapter Three, with pencils and ink by Jerry Gonzales, almost lost me completely. The art is a muddled mess, with characters who are indistinguishable from each other and long action sequences in which I couldn't figure out what the heck is going on. Blasting guns don't translate well to static graphics for panel after panel. Whole panels of dialogue are in unelucidated Italian or German, as well, and I'm afraid I'm a bit rusty in those languages. I'd have appreciated subtitles.

I'm glad I kept reading, however, because Chapter Four is the best of the book. Artist Franc Czuba (inks by Chris Scott) does a fine job here, albeit with a slightly jarring inconsistency with the interpretations of the characters in the previous three chapters. By the time I got to the very end of Dusk, which is not paginated, and saw Czuba's "Eve/Ash cover" full page graphic, I thought, "Wow. If only the whole book was that good!" I have no idea why Doub used multiple artists for this short work, or how he selected them, but he definitely did not get uniform results.

To the extent that I could tell from the stories, Doub's fictional universe is intriguing, and I'd like to learn more about it. Ash is an interesting character, and Eve herself is complex and multi-layered. The vampire protocols avoid cliché and establish some refreshing new conventions, and I'd love to have seen more explanations and details (and less gunfire for panel after panel). Doub is planning a second volume, and I hope that the artwork improves in consistency and clarity. I see a lot of potential in Dusk and its characters, and they deserve further development. Readers can keep updated on Doub's work at his page on Comicspace.com.

Book Review: Dark Road Rising by P.N. Elrod

The field of 21^st century vampire fiction is crammed with prolific and enthusiastic authors, most of them female and nearly all of them having published their first vampire story after the year 2000. Every one of them owes a large debt to the handful of authors who have been publishing vampire novels for decades, and who now have to fight for attention in the genre they helped to define.

Texas author P.N. Elrod is among the bona fide “ancestors” of such up-to-the-moment pop culture superstars as Stephenie Meyer and Charlaine Harris. Elrod has been publishing vampire fiction since 1990 and has created several memorable and varied vampire protagonists, including the 18^th century American Tory Jonathan Barrett, the ruthless despot Strahd, and Elrod’s revisionist take on Bram Stoker’s Quincey Morris.

But Elrod’s most complex and affecting character is Jack Fleming, a 1930s Chicago journalist who falls afoul of the Chicago Mob and is murdered—and subsequently embarks on the misadventures detailed in the Vampire Files series. Launched by Ace in 1990 with Bloodlist, the next five books of the series (Lifeblood, Bloodcircle, Art in the Blood, Fire in the Blood and Blood on the Water) shot off the presses within two years as mass market paperbacks. They shrank behind the laughable cover art typical of pulp vampire novels at the time (depicting a long-nailed, white faced ghoul with fangs hanging down to his chin like walrus tusks), but the quality of the books themselves attracted the attention of reviewers and serious vampire fans.

At that time, Anne Rice was the reigning queen of vampire fiction and her mass-murderous, utterly inhuman vampires defined the trope. Jack Fleming fit into a different and far more authentic model. Like Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Saint-Germain, Fleming retained a conscience and a connection to humanity, and he didn’t need to kill humans to survive. In fact, he tried to avoid preying on humans at all, and became a nocturnal habitué of the Chicago stockyards for his fresh meals. In the first book, Fleming is befriended by an English actor-turned-private-detective named Charles Escott, who offers the newborn vampire a badly needed job. But Fleming’s unlife is complicated by the fact that he can’t untangle himself from his connections to the organized crime network in Chicago—the harder he tries, the deeper he seems to get. It doesn’t help that he falls in love with a singer and former mobster’s moll, Bobbi Smythe, or that several of his best friends are gangsters, including African-American Shoe Coldfield.

In 1998, the series resumed with A Chill in the Blood, but now Ace was releasing the titles in hardcover editions first, and they appeared at much longer intervals. From Book 7 on, the novels form a very tight story arc, each successive volume continuing the narrative from the previous books with scarcely a beat pause. Dark Road Rising (Ace: September 1, 2009) is the twelfth in the series, and readers have been waiting four years since the initial release of Number 11, Song in the Dark.

Dark Road Rising opens a few minutes after the ending of Song in the Dark, with Fleming driving Gabriel “Whitey” Kroun, one of the few other vampires he’s met since his own turning, to a safe place where Kroun can recover from the violent events that concluded the previous book. Fleming has been recovering himself from the aftereffects of severe trauma following his brutal torture by a gangland thug in Cold Streets, book 10 of the series. Some of his vampire powers, such as the ability to hypnotize others, have been lost or sharply curtailed, and Fleming has no idea how to heal himself or whether he even can. He is therefore very interested in the fact that Kroun lacks some of Fleming’s gifts, such as the capacity for dematerializing, which Kroun attributes to the fact that his death left him with a bullet permanently lodged in his skull.

There are other differences between the two, but most intriguing to Fleming is the fact that Kroun has no memory at all of how he was “infected” by vampirism or what kind of life he had before he awakened in his grave. While Dark Road Rising does advance some of the characters’ stories slightly, it focuses principally on Kroun’s efforts to unravel the mysteries of his own identity and how he came to be dead and a vampire. Kroun appears to know things about vampires that Fleming does not, but he doesn’t share Fleming’s driving need to learn more about what he knows and how he learned it. As Kroun persists in tracking down ever more disturbing clues about his past, Fleming’s own recent history sneaks up behind him and catches him while he’s preoccupied with Kroun.

Because of the strong focus on Kroun and his story, Dark Road Rising is structured differently than any of the preceding books in the series. Elrod favors the first person point of view, but all her previous books have been narrated by their protagonist. Dark Road Rising features a dual first person narrative, with chapters alternating between Fleming and Kroun. This device was used by Adrienne Barbeau and Michael Scott in Vampyres of Hollywood, but I think Elrod pulls it off much more successfully. The two narrative voices are more distinctive in Dark Road Rising, although I tend to feel that first person narrative is very limiting for an author.

Dark Road Rising is the best book yet in the Vampire Files series, further developing the numerous complex characters and taking us, once again, into some very rough territory. My sole criticism is that I found the story a little difficult to follow. I used to grumble that the early Vampire Files novels spent too much time reiterating basic facts and past events in each book, for the benefit of those readers “just tuning in.” Elrod has definitely overcome that tendency. Unfortunately, she has now swung a bit too far in the other direction, especially given the fact that the last few books have been released several years apart. Dark Road Rising assumes that the readers will have read Lady Crymsyn, Cold Streets and Song in the Dark and remember them all in great detail. It continues all the story threads without explaining them even briefly, and there isn’t a way to quickly look up the Cliff Notes version and refresh one’s memory. Given that Song in the Dark was published four years ago, and that the series has evolved a large cast of characters and a complicated tapestry of plot, just a little backing-and-filling in Dark Road Rising would have been very helpful.

Despite this caveat, I highly and enthusiastically recommend Dark Road Rising. Jack Fleming is a “good guy vampire” but these are not romantic stories. Elrod doesn’t flinch from gritty details, or the kind of brutal violence that you’d expect from the series milieu, 1930s Chicago. The supernatural elements—vampires and at least one ghost—are treated with matter-of-fact respect, as Elrod emphasizes character and plot rather than gimmickry and camp.

It’s hard to say whether the Vampire Files series will continue. The first six books have been reissued in a two-volume omnibus edition. A new signed and numbered Jack Fleming novella, The Devil You Know, is currently available for order exclusively on Elrod’s website. Fleming also appears in an occasional short story.

Book Review: Vamped by Lucienne Diver

From the very first page, Vamped suffused me with an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. I have all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD. Vamped is like watching an eighth season of Buffy. I could almost hear the soundtrack music in the background. The fashion-obsessed Cosmo Girl ‘tude of the heroine, the perfectly coifed and gowned Evil Villainess in designer spike heels, the creepy cannibal guy with the weird speech patterns, the geek who turns out to be amazingly cool...it’s all so strangely familiar.

Gina Covella wakes up in her coffin six feet underground and immediately deduces that she’s a vampire. (“Okay, there was only one way I knew to wake up dead—well, two, but I didn’t feel like a flesh-eating zombie.”) It’s never clear why this is a natural conclusion for Gina to form—most people would spend just a bit longer in denial. She claws her way to the surface (right through her coffin lid), where her trauma is instantly alleviated by the sight of bright red Macy’s shopping bags. Bobby, the geek who nibbled her neck at the senior prom and “infected” her so she awakens undead after a fatal car accident, has shown up to meet her in the cemetery. He’s brought new clothes, which was prescient of him, because Gina’s top concerns are her bedraggled appearance, the white eyelet lace dress she was buried in and the fact that she can’t see her reflection. When Bobby says that they need to stop at the mall “for a quick bite,” Gina insists on heading for the salon so she can turn her stylist.

The stylist gets away, and so do Gina and Bobby when a gang of thugs raiding the sporting goods store recognize them. The next day, the thugs capture Bobby and Gina and take them to the well-appointed luxury lair of vampire arch-villainess Mellisande. There we learn that Bobby’s unexplained death and turning has caught everyone by surprise, and he’s something special. A mysterious blue gem emits dazzling light when he’s near it. Gina is spared only because Bobby objects to her being harmed, and she ends up locked in a cell in the basement while Bobby stays with the big shots, and remains mostly off-screen.

One of the sporting goods store gang turns out to be Rick Lopez, the jock buddy of Gina’s cloddish ex-boyfriend. Rick’s status has devolved from sidekick to minion, and he sneaks into Gina’s cell to offer her an exchange: he’ll help her get away if she’ll turn him. Instead, Gina tricks Rick and locks him in the cell. To her great surprise, she discovers that a large number of her high school classmates have all been turned into vampires and are bunking down together in a concrete-walled dormitory in Mellisande’s basement. None of them seem unhappy about their changed state, and one girl tells Gina that becoming undead has freed her from a lifetime of crippling asthma. When Gina encounters one of her best friends among the vamped teens, it’s only a few minutes before they’re both squealing, “Makeover!”

Gina is allowed to stay with the other teen vampires, largely due to the influence of Bobby, who apparently has impressive powers and some connection to a “prophecy.” (Echoes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, once more—every season revolved around some “ancient prophecy.”). She gradually figures out that she and the other teens have all become part of a larger vampire subculture and a tangled scheme of Mellisande’s. Being the heroine of a YA novel, Gina takes charge and interferes with the plans of all the tiresome old fogies (i.e. the centuries-old vampire Elders)—but she’s got a few big surprises waiting for her.

Vamped is written in the first person from Gina’s point of view, and the narration has all the usual disadvantages of that limited voice. Gina is so hip, flippant, and self-involved, we never get a detailed sense of who she is as a character (except that there’s not much to her). Most of the supporting cast are little more than cardboard cutouts, not even blessed with names. Gina refers to various assistants in Mellisande’s camp by labels like “Hawkman,” “Thing One,” “Sparky,” and “Chickzilla,” while she gives Mellisande a variety of rude nicknames, such as “Melli-noma.” A vampire second-in-command is actually named Connor, but he’s such a cipher, I couldn’t remember who he was when he put in a second appearance, and had to page back through the book to check. All of this makes the action hard to follow, and that’s a problem because the book has a lot of action. The story is fast-paced and zips along like telephone poles past a commuter train window.

I grant that it’s only my personal taste that leaves me unimpressed by vain, shallow, shopping-obsessed Gina. But I can’t help wondering if the target audience for this story will really find it that amusing. The young women I know who are high school age have far more serious concerns than what their hair and clothes look like, and their eyes don’t glaze over at the sight of a Macy’s bag. Vamped is completely devoid of the crushing adolescent angst that gave Buffy the Vampire Slayer such melodramatic authenticity. On June 6, 2009, a Wall Street Journal article discussed the popularity of grim, gritty themes in YA fiction—a trend that goes back at least a decade, according to this July, 2000 article in the New York Times. I have difficulty imagining that many young adult readers will relate to the characters in Vamped. Isn’t this Valley Girl thing like, just so 1990s? Well...given the explosion of “vampire chick-lit” for adult readers, maybe not.

Lucienne Diver is a literary agent, and Vamped isn’t a bad book. It lacks originality, but it’s nicely written. I look forward to seeing Diver do something a little less trendy. If you enjoy light satirical fantasy like Mary Janice Davidson’s “Queen Betsy” series, you’ll probably appreciate Vamped. It isn’t my cuppa, but that’s not a crime.

I'll be giving a talk on June 4th

I'll be appearing at The Rabbit Hole bookstore in Fitchburg, Massachusetts on June 4th, giving a talk and slide show about vampire fiction. Click the link below for more details.

"Before Twilight: How Vampires Got to Be So Hot"

Everyone is welcome!

Book Review: The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers

There are many fans of vampire fiction who have never heard of Tim Powers’ The Stress of Her Regard. Powers, like Stephen King (Salem's Lot) and Suzy McKee Charnas (The Vampire Tapestry) is not a “vampire author.” His oeuvre is a style of fantasy known as “secret history.” Powers begins with real life people and events and weaves alternate versions of their “official” stories, suggesting unknown, and usually magical or occult, influences at work behind the recorded facts. Powers is one of the original authors whose style inspired the “steampunk” genre which has become so popular, and which naturally overlaps with a great deal of vampire fiction set in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries.

But Tim Powers’ work defies easy categorization, and in many ways fits the newly recognized realm of Instititial Arts: creative work that combines, transcends or falls between standardized genre definitions. The Stress of Her Regard (reissue edition 2008, Tachyon Publications) is fantasy, horror, literary fiction, historical fiction and vampire novel all at the same time. Originally published in 1989, at the beginning of a massive revival in vampire fiction, it’s unquestionably one of the most unusual vampire tales written in the last six decades.

This is a literary novel in the classic sense: long, leisurely, meticulously crafted, and full of allusions to literature and cultural motifs. The plot spans six years and multiple countries, although the story, altogether, forms a sweeping epic beginning at the dawn of time. Powers never drops big expository boulders on his readers’ heads, though--the complicated mystery of the lamia, or Nephelim, whose “regard” for their beloved victims is so destructive, unwinds bit by bit as the tale progresses. Readers will need to pay attention and keep a good memory for small details, because even the tiniest may be an important clue.

The story opens in 1816, introducing Powers’ alternate universe versions of Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin, John Polidori, and Mary’s stepsister Claire Claremont. They’re in Switzerland on the lakeside summer get-away that so famously resulted in the penning of Frankenstein and “The Vampyre” by Mary Godwin and Polidori, respectively. However, it becomes apparent that Shelley’s greatest concerns aren’t literary. Twice he’s thrown into a panic by the appearance of a powerful, and evidently malign, phantom figure that resembles a woman. Shelley is being pursued by something very persistent, and he seems prepared to die rather than be overwhelmed by it.

We meet the book’s central protagonist, Dr. Michael Crawford, as he travels with several inebriated friends to his second wedding. Crawford, in his 30s, has a past marred by several deaths. Before long we have hints that the loss of his first wife in a fire occurred under suspicious circumstances, and that bitter memories are the least of the evils haunting her widower. When the wedding party stops at an inn, Crawford makes an unthinking mistake. He places his fiancée’s wedding ring on the finger of what he believes is a statue while he assists one of his friends. He loses the ring when the statue first changes position, then disappears. Like Victor in Tim Burton’s film The Corpse Bride, Crawford has unwittingly given Something Else reason to think he’s married to it.

The wedding takes place as planned, but the following morning, Crawford awakens next to the lifeless body of his bride Julia, who has been crushed to a pulp while Crawford slept. To avoid certain conviction for murder, Crawford flees. Disguising himself as a medical student in London, he meets John Keats. It’s Keats who explains the Nephelim, or lamia, to Crawford: an ancient race of vampires who attach themselves to selected individuals and jealously destroy their families and anyone else who might compete with the vampire for its loved one’s affections. The lamia’s feeding, through either blood-drinking or sex, conveys unearthly erotic euphoria. Keats introduces Crawford to the global underground network of lamia-addicts, or “Neffers” who will do anything to attract an encounter with a vampire. Like the slaves of Shambleau in C.L. Moore’s short story, the Neffers are recognizable and despised, but they’re also a tight community, like an organized secret society.

The Nephelim are able to bestow artistic inspiration on their chosen partners, and it turns out that all of the Romantic poets in The Stress of Her Regard are their reluctant bridegrooms. Crawford leaves England for the Continent, tracked relentlessly by Julia’s vengeful twin sister, Josephine. He encounters Shelley and Byron in Switzerland and all three embark on a long journey, together and independently, to escape the Nephelim. Over time, Crawford gradually learns the history of the Nephelim, why they have a physical nature of stone and metal, how they came to walk the modern world as part humans, and how they cause human dead to return as “undead” vampires. Crawford’s medical specialty, obstetrics, will turn out to be uniquely suited to resolving his situation. Byron, meanwhile, joins the Carbonari, a group that history claims was devoted to Italian nationalism, but which, in this story, has a hidden role as resisters of the Nephelim and their predation.

The Stress of Her Regard brilliantly twists fantasy together with historical fact, and many details that sound like horror fiction are actually true. The original characters of Crawford and Josephine, whose rejection of her own identity leaves her vulnerable to the wiles of the lamia, are strongly drawn, complex and memorable. Powers’ framing of a vast, mysterious conspiracy, with ancient supernatural powers, hidden riddles and secret societies, rivals anything written by Umberto Eco, let alone Dan Brown. I only wish that I had read this book much sooner! Now that it’s back in print after fourteen years--with breathtaking cover art by Ann Monn--I urge all serious vampire fiction fans not to wait as long as I did. The Stress of Her Regard is an intelligent and original variation on the vampire theme.

Book Review: The Vampire Tapestry by Suzy McKee Charnas

The Vampire Tapestry was first published in 1980, at the end of the Carter recession and the cusp of the Reagan era. Americans were bored with vampires. Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976) and Stephen King's Dracula Americana, Salem's Lot (1975) had both been best-sellers. But Rice wouldn’t publish her second book, The Vampire Lestat, until 1985, and King never wrote another vampire-themed novel. The first two Saint-Germain novels by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro had been published, but attracted less attention than they deserved. The TV cult sensation, Dark Shadows, and Hammer Films' vampire series had fizzled. Science fiction and fantasy, led by Star Wars and Tolkien, dominated the pop culture zeitgeist.

The great vampire renaissance we’re seeing now began building in the mid-80s and exploded in the early 90s. Maybe this dry spell is why several books released around 1980 gave the vampire theme unusual and creative twists. Like Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954), also published at a low point of vampire popularity, Suzy McKee Charnas’ The Vampire Tapestry startled readers with its revisionist depiction of a blood drinking character. Charnas’ book still has a solid core of fans who state that it’s not only their favorite vampire novel, but the best vampire novel ever written.

Despite this high regard from some very estimable people, I had never read The Vampire Tapestry. I’d only read one of the novella-length chapters, anthologized separately as “Unicorn Tapestry.” I came to the new reissue edition of The Vampire Tapestry (2008: Tom Doherty Associates) with fresh eyes, but a different context than readers had in 1980 when vampire fiction was largely defined by Dracula. Today, fictional alternatives to the “traditional” supernatural vampire are many and varied. Matheson (and the 1945 movie House of Dracula) broke new ground in imagining vampirism as a biological disease rather than a spiritual one. Charnas was among the first writers to present vampires as natural and normal members of another humanoid species. (She was not the very first to use this idea, since it was also the premise of the comic book series Vampirella, but The Vampire Tapestry was the first novel to develop the concept.)

Dr. Edward Weyland is the sole remaining member of his race, as far as he knows. Infinitely old, he periodically enters a state of hibernation, from which he emerges with no memory of his past to create a new identity for himself. He has no conscious knowledge of how he came to exist, exactly what he is or why there are no others like himself. He is a casual predator of humanity, but he isn’t a random killer. Herein lies his contradiction, because Weyland is by no means a cold-hearted murderer who disdains human beings as mere cattle. Intelligent, sophisticated and civilized, Weyland becomes more involved with the prey who so resemble him than I expected. Anne Rice’s vampires are far more alien, murderous and dangerous, from a human being’s perspective, than Charnas’ anti-hero.

Weyland is a living being, but he shares several of the powers attributed to “supernatural” vampires, including enhanced strength (explained in anatomical terms), resistance to injury (he survives a direct gun shot) and accelerated healing. Many readers are especially impressed by Weyland’s unique method of feeding. He uses a sort of dart under his tongue to pierce his victim’s skin, rather than fangs. But in 1980, long canine teeth fangs were a comparatively new vampire convention, which only started appearing in movies in 1958. Prior to that, fiction sometimes described puncture wounds but was vague about the physical mechanism that inflicted them. Weyland’s stinger is reminiscent of the grooved underside of a vampire bat’s tongue, which may have been Charnas’ inspiration for the idea.

The book’s title is descriptive. Although labeled a novel, The Vampire Tapestry consists of five long chapters that are connected, but can each be read as a free-standing and independent story. This gives the book an episodic narrative line--a “tapestry” of stitched together tales. The first three chapters focus on protagonists whose paths cross Weyland’s for very different reasons. These character studies are drawn with detail and skill, and each character is as memorable as Weyland himself. In “The Ancient Mind at Work,” Katje is an older white woman who was born and raised in colonial Africa and now works at the college where Weyland is a professor. She perceives him for what he is, with violent results. The second chapter, “The Land of Lost Content,” is told from the point of view of Mark, a teenager whose neglectful parents foist him off on his sleazy uncle Roger. Roger’s association with some very unsavory people leads to his having Weyland in captivity in his apartment for some time, and Mark forms an alliance with the vampire. The third chapter, “Unicorn Tapestry,” introduces Floria, a burned-out psychotherapist who reluctantly takes on Weyland as a client, and eventually crosses professional boundaries with him.

The final two chapters center on Weyland himself, and develop his character in ways that surprised me. I had often heard The Vampire Tapestry praised for its unsentimental depiction of vampires--Weyland, I was told, was a cold predator, not a mushy romantic hero. The final chapter of the book, however, belies this generalization. Weyland has deeper emotional tangles than he wants anyone to know.

The Vampire Tapestry has a few weaknesses. Some of the supporting characters, and some of the events, strained my credulity, especially in the second chapter. The narrative style contributed somewhat to this. Charnas apparently wanted to avoid using the authorial voice as much as possible. This means that all the exposition is done in the form of dialogue among the characters, and that means that most of the characters do too much explaining. Even Weyland ends up being the biggest vampire blabbermouth after Rice’s Louis, because he has to explain himself if there is no omniscient author to do so. It doesn’t seem to fit his personality or his precarious situation. Weyland needs about a pint of blood a day, which he obtains, without usually killing, from humans through all different kinds of subterfuge. Just for his own protective camouflage, you wouldn’t think he would talk about vampirism quite so much. The stories were written at the end of the 70s and are framed as simply, “the present,” so the assumptions and details are a bit dated now.

These are minor quibbles, however. The Vampire Tapestry is an entertaining and well-crafted book. It stands out from the vast sea of vampire fiction as one of the very few that achieves true originality. Its greatest disappointment is its lack of any sequels (or prequels). Weyland is a character whose longevity and history would lend themselves to an almost endless number of stories. Many questions about his species and origins are left unanswered, especially the two biggest ones: why are there no other vampires, and how did Weyland survive for so long? Alas, readers will simply have to speculate about these mysteries. However, Weyland does appear again in a novelette, “Advocates,” co-written with Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, which is anthologized in Under the Fang (Pocket Books: 1991), edited by Robert R. McCammon.

Book Review: A Dangerous Climate by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

A Dangerous Climate (Tor: September 30, 2008) is the twentieth novel by author Chelsea Quinn Yarbro detailing an episode in the very long life of her benign vampire hero, Count Ferenz Ragoczy Saint-Germain. It would be understandable, after so many books, if the Saint-Germain stories fell into a pattern. Having long outlived the Etruscan civilization of his birth, Saint-Germain is the eternal outsider, making temporary homes for himself until xenophobia and suspicion force him to move on. When he does, he usually must leave behind the female lovers he has trusted and helped. Despite this repeating motif, the Saint-Germain novels have taken a variety of forms. In an interview for Blogcritics in May, 2008, Yarbro said that her hero surprised her in the fifth novel, Tempting Fate, “and he can still surprise me now.” Saint-Germain proves her right in several ways in A Dangerous Climate. I’ve been a fan of Yarbro’s Count for thirty years, and I found this outing one of the most enjoyable in the series.

The foundation of every Saint-Germain novel is a vivid and meticulously researched portrait of one or more times and places in world history, often one that is not commonly presented in fiction. A Dangerous Climate takes us to the year 1704 and the founding of the Russian city of Saint Petersburg (Leningrad from 1924 to 1991) at the mouth of the Neva River on the Baltic sea.

Piotyr Alexeievich Romanov, six feet, eight inches tall and known to history as Tsar Peter I or Peter the Great, reigned from 1689 to 1725. He was an energetic and progressive ruler who forcibly dragged Russia from the Medieval into the early modern age. An absolute monarch, he utilized Draconian tactics to achieve his ends. He even mandated that nobles shave their beards and dress in European style clothing. His tour de force, the city of Saint Petersburg, was built in a decade, thanks to the massive mobilization of workers and resources that Piotyr ordered to labor on it. Enthralled with Dutch culture, Piotyr gave his city a Dutch name, Sankt Piterburkh, and referred to himself by the Dutch name Piter.

A Dangerous Climate is set at the beginning of this endeavor, when the marshes and bogs at the river mouth were still being drained and the city itself was being hammered together as fast as possible from wood, soon to be replaced with stone. Workers, many of them convicts and prisoners of war, died by the hundred in the harsh weather, while upper class artisans, architects, engineers and other specialists enjoyed spartan comforts at best. Piotyr “was determined to create a Baltic Amsterdam,” Yarbro says in her “Author’s Notes” to the novel. But like all pioneers (voluntary and otherwise), the first residents of Sankt Piterburkh lived, as Yarbro puts it, “in conditions that resembled a survival camp in a construction zone.”

In such conditions, law enforcement tends to be less than efficient. Over the course of the Saint-Germain series, we have seen the Count suffer through horrendous physical injuries, torture and beatings, while barely escaping from far worse. Yarbro’s vampires enjoy very few supernatural powers or advantages over mortals. Like the humans they once were, they must evade misadventures through ingenuity and resourcefulness, which often aren’t enough. In most cases we see inevitable disaster looming, but in A Dangerous Climate, the disaster opens the book. In the first chapter, night watchmen discover Saint-Germain right after he’s been beaten so severely that he can’t remember exactly what happened. A living man wouldn’t have survived. Since Saint-Germain does, he spends the rest of the book trying to determine what happened, who wants him dead and when they’ll make another attempt. The opening chapters describe his slow recovery, complicated by his need to conceal how well he’s really doing from the physician and healers who are treating him.

We soon learn another unique aspect to Saint-Germain’s situation in this story: he is not in Sankt Piterburkh as a lone “foreigner.” The Count is visiting in disguise, pretending to be Arpad Arco-Tolvay, Hercegek Gyor, the missing husband of a Polish aristocrat, Zozia, Ksiezna Nisko. A gifted diplomat and spy for the Polish monarch, Augustus II, the Ksiezna must be escorted by a male relative in order to move freely among the foreign dignitaries in Sankt Piterburkh. With the agreement of Augustus II, Saint-Germain has taken on this role, presumably in name only. As the story progresses, their mutual needs draw Saint-Germain and Zozia into a much more intimate--and perilous--involvement than originally planned. Along with all the other concerns raised by Saint-Germain’s unorthodox lovemaking, there is always the chance that the Ksiezna’s real husband could turn up and expose the ruse.

In order to play the role of Zozia’s Hungarian spouse, Saint-Germain is obliged to change some of his normal habits. He abandons his signature style of black, red and white clothing to dress in the lavish fabrics and bright colors fashionable at the time. Guests at the Russian court were expected to feast to excess with their hosts, on pain of committing an unforgivable insult. We have always known that Saint-Germain is unable to consume food or drink--in A Dangerous Climate we find out what happens to him if he does.

Saint-Germain’s beating directly leads to his acquaintance with the independent Ludmilla Borisevna Svarinskaya, a Russian matron who has been rejected by her husband and is running a care house in Sankt Piterburkh. She earns Saint-Germain’s admiration and respect, and eventually a closer relationship. But even as he juggles clandestine liaisons and extremely delicate politics, Saint-Germain is confronted with a crisis in his own affairs. While he has gone underground to impersonate the Ksiezna’s husband, he learns that somebody else is impersonating him. His title, property and estates, under the care of a steward who sends regular reports to him in Sankt Piterburkh, are being claimed by an impostor. Now he has another problem to untangle, without unmasking his real identity to Piotyr and the other residents of Sankt Piterburkh or threatening the Ksiezna’s mission.

A Dangerous Climate features more in the way of complicated puzzles and elaborate maneuverings than raw action. The plot spins out against the finely described backdrop of newborn Sankt Piterburkh--crude, muddy, cold and inhospitable, and yet filled with high born diplomats and ambassadors displaying all the luxury expected in a royal court, because Piotyr insists upon it. By the end of the book, we feel as though we’ve lived in Piotyr’s city ourselves. As often is the case with Yarbro’s novels, we’re also deeply grateful that we don’t live there now. In a 2005 interview with Linda Suzane, Yarbro said, “The Saint-Germain novels are called historical horror novels for a reason: history is horrifying...I try to show the various periods as they saw themselves as much as I can, and to focus on the status and circumstances of women and the constraints of their societies.” In practical terms, this means that the Saint-Germain novels usually have rather grim conclusions, especially when it comes to the fates of the female characters. A Dangerous Climate diverges somewhat from this tendency, another pleasant surprise for me.

A Dangerous Climate takes its place among my favorite of the Saint-Germain novels. Saint-Germain, along with other characters in the books, consistently demonstrates that problems can be resolved without violence even in extremely violent environments. Although he has watched civilizations decline into barbarism countless times, he himself never abandons his own hard-won principles, and he seeks out those individuals who rise above their circumstances by their own inner light. The Saint-Germain novels always contain a note of optimism. No matter how grim the story and how great his loss, Saint-Germain remains determined to survive and look toward the future. In A Dangerous Climate he earns a happier reward for his resilience than he has sometimes seen. Fans of the Count and new readers alike will thoroughly enjoy this book.

Book Review: The Saint-Germain Memoirs by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

The Saint-Germain Memoirs is the third collection of stories featuring Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s popular vampire hero, Count Rogoczy Saint-Germain. The Saint-Germain novels are long, leisurely, meticulously researched books set in historical time periods ranging from dynastic Egypt to the twentieth century. Saint-Germain, who debuted in 1978 in the novel Hotel Transylvania, was among the first wholly sympathetic and moral vampire characters in literature, but his unique nature and his extremely long history (he is some 4,000 years old) make him challenging to depict fairly in a shorter work. The Saint-Germain Memoirs incorporates five tales of varying lengths: two short stories, two novelettes, and the book’s centerpiece, a 42,000-word novella. Of these, the novella is unquestionably the best piece in the book, encapsulating the finest elements of the Saint-Germain series as a whole.

I’ve read nearly all of the Saint-Germain novels, so I can’t gauge how a reader with no previous experience of Yarbro’s character would experience the stories in The Saint-Germain Memoirs. However, as I read them, I sensed that I was picking up on a lot of subtle hints and details that required extensive background information to appreciate. In her Introduction, Sharon Russell argues that the stories have something to offer readers regardless of their familiarity with Saint-Germain, but I remain unconvinced. Individuals who already have a good working knowledge of the character and his history will get the most from these brief glimpses into his life.

“Harpy,” originally published in the anthology, The Secret History of Vampires, is a good example of a story that is full of meaning for those who already know Saint-Germain, but may be puzzling to new readers. One of the Amazon reviewers for The Secret History of Vampires identified the enigmatic “Ragosh-ski” in the story as Dracula! Although “Harpy” presents an interesting character study of a historical person rarely given much thought--I can’t say who without spoiling the twist ending--it took me a while to pin down the time period based on the descriptions. This is a peril of setting a story in a location, Athens, that has been consistently occupied under the same name for 2,500 years. I also remained uncertain, by the story’s end, as to why Saint-Germain picked out this woman for assistance--whether he knew her by reputation or was able, as the story hints, to sense some special quality she possessed.

“A Gentleman of the Old School,” originally published in Dark Delicacies, is one of the very rare Saint-Germain tales set in the present-day. This story concentrates much more on its mortal characters, with Saint-Germain appearing as a wealthy man of mystery who feeds an eager female reporter some clues in a serial murder case. In her Afterword, Yarbro describes her writing process, explaining that her character “talks to her” and that “I’m one of those writers who has to have characters come alive before I can write about them...I immerse myself in the environment of the story, the history, the circumstances, and as much actual information we have regarding how people of the time saw themselves and their world.” I completely sympathize, because I write the same way. But some years ago I had a conversation with Ms. Yarbro and asked her why she hadn’t written a novel about Saint-Germain in the present day. She told me that for some reason, those stories just wouldn’t easily gel for her. “A Gentleman of the Old School” has that in common with the other modern-day Saint-Germain stories: somehow, Yarbro’s hero hasn’t quite found a natural place in the post-Y2K world.

The novelette “Intercession” was originally published in Repentants. Presented in epistolary style, “Intercession” consists of letters written by Saint-Germain’s manservant, Rogerio, in his efforts to free his master from incarceration in 17th century Spanish territory in the New World. Readers of the novels already know that Saint-Germain is imprisoned when his oldest friend, the vampire Olivia, dies in an explosion in Rome. This story includes that event. However, I found “Intercession” to be the weakest of the five pieces in this collection. To me, it merely seemed repetitive: the years go by as Rogerio writes letter after letter seeking answers or aid. The point--that in such historical times even a wealthy person could be unjustly imprisoned indefinitely without hope of redress--is made long before the story ends. Including Olivia’s death in that time frame without any mention of its effect on Saint-Germain leaves too large a gap. “Intercession” demands that the reader imagine how Saint-Germain must be feeling: helpless, cut off from all friendly communication and aware that Olivia is gone. This can be an effective device, but in “Intercession,” it simply doesn’t work for me.

The novelette, “Lost Epiphany,” doesn’t actually tell a story, but it delivers a highly entertaining account of how Saint-Germain maneuvers his way among several groups of colorful and hostile antagonists. Despite his vampiric state, Saint-Germain possesses few supernatural powers. He survives primarily through his own resourcefulness and his long knowledge of the human psyche. In “Lost Epiphany,” set in the early first millennium A.D., Saint-Germain’s merchant ship has been captured by pirates in the Mediterranean, and one of his only advantages, enhanced strength and endurance, is severely curtailed by starvation and exposure to running water. Given an opportunity to go ashore on an island and negotiate with a monastery there for supplies, Saint-Germain uses his wits to gain an edge for himself with the monks--who have some surprises of their own. “Lost Epiphany” is an ingenious object lesson in how an immortal might survive a crisis without any of the deus-ex-machina tricks that are usually associated with vampires.

The novella “Tales Out of School” forms the heart of The Saint-Germain Memoirs in every sense. I thoroughly enjoyed this story. Set in 14th century Padua (then Padova), Saint-Germain attempts to help a widow suffering from a terminal disease, as he negotiates the tricky political and social issues related to his teaching alchemy and herbalism to students at Padova University. “Tales Out of School” is rich with historical detail, colorful and interesting characters, and true human drama. Containing all the core elements of the novels, it is complete as is: any longer, and it would be over-stuffed and lose its strong narrative threads. It is worth the price of the book alone.

The Saint-Germain Memoirs was initially issued in a signed and numbered hardcover edition by Elder Signs Press. It includes a brief, but informative Afterword by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro discussing her character and how the series began and evolved, and an Introduction by Sharon Russell. I enthusiastically recommend it to any reader who has enjoyed at least some of the Saint-Germain novels. Those who are new to the character may be mystified by the stories, but can find some answers to their questions on Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s official website.