Bloodlinks by Lee Killough

SPOILER ALERT!

Bloodlinks, a novel by Lee Killough, is a sequel. This review contains information which will give away much of the plot of Bloodhunt; the first in the trilogy.

I haven’t read the first volume yet, so you might wish to leave off reading this. I’m guessing that the first one is fine.

If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair. Wild garlic, for preference.

This is a good-guy vampire novel, in which the hero with the drink problem has external worry upon worry piled onto him from all directions, whilst dealing with his own growing angst as the thirst grows within him, and as he grows further apart from his mortal friends and relatives. He has not told most of them that he has been transformed, and he lives in a practical, cynical world that does not believe in the supernatural. He is a cop; a San Francisco detective living in exile by doing the night shift in a small town police service in the Midwest. The Kansas town concerned is the one in which he at last found the vampire woman who had attacked and turned him (in the first part of the trilogy), and in which he buried her; albeit under a different name.

Garreth Mikaelian suffers from nightmares in which his doubly-dead assailant taunts him about the lies that he has to tell to colleagues, lovers, friends and family, in order to disguise his new, undead nature. How do you date when you can’t eat or drink? How to avoid giving to the blood transfusion service? A couple of years after the investigation that turned deadly for him, he is drawn back from his rural existence as the trail of the vampire warms up once more. His entombed tormentor seems to be in San Francisco, and he must join his big-city colleagues again.

The problems start to pile up from the start. His former partner and his wife; his closest friends from that past life, can no longer be fobbed off with the excuses with which he left them when he moved to Kansas. In their Oriental home food and drink are abundant and delicious and sharing them is regarded as an essential sign of friendship – a sign that he can only feign. His camouflaging behaviour soon wears thin; which is exactly what his hard-drinking and hearty-eating former SFPD colleagues think that little old blood-drinker Garreth has done. His old partner’s new partner has never served with him and owes him nothing and is suspicious of him from the start, and his old boss is just too plain clever to believe in his evasions for too long.

Much of the man’s suffering is compounded by his sense of duty. He was and remains an honest policeman who wishes to preserve the lives of the innocent, but since his nocturnal habits and diet compel him to make evasions to those who formerly trusted him. He is quickly alienated from the law enforcement machine that should be helping him find whoever or whatever is killing both humans and vampires across the city.

This is a fun detective novel. Solidly detailed (other reviewers point out it’s a fine police procedural, but what do I know? – I work in an office). How his dead and staked creator has escaped from her rose-covered grave in Kansas to build up a brand new body count in San Francisco forms the mystery at the heart of the novel. The tension is produced by the widening gulf that his afterlife obliges him to place between Garreth and the truly living. The SFPD with its Kansan former colleague as a ridealong proceed to investigate the apparent re-emergence of Garreth’s secretly dead ‘attacker.’

He plunges back into the world of city cops and city crimes and soon discovers things that he had not had time to notice in his last, dying days in San Francisco; at least two different and unconnected-seeming vampire milieux and the criminals and respectable people amongst whom the undead live; local doctors who notice some strangely altered cadavers on their dissecting tables over the years; blood storage charities. Tantalizingly, whenever he encounters a vampire-related clue or witness statement, the local cops pursue it from a law and order perspective, and Garreth is once more obliged to use subterfuge to misdirect or delay them so that he can follow it up himself.

In the end, his only choice is to team up with an English thriller writer (and former horror novelist) who is on a PR junket with the police, but whose life too has been touched by one of Garreth’s creator’s aliases. It is a prickly relationship at first, emphasizing Garreth’s alienation from his human friends and his growling loneliness, but the novelist is resourceful and intelligent enough to be worth riding along with.

The book is no slaughterhouse as some horror novels go, but there is a good balance between the ordinary and the supernatural to keep vampire fiction fans engrossed in the action and suspense, and this is balanced against not-too-much of Garreth’s angst at drifting away from human company.

The villainous monster is nicely drawn; believable enough and human enough to be more than a mere grotesque, and Garreth’s showdown with the killer is intelligently and imaginatively done. Garreth’s partial resolution of his trust problems with former friends and some of his family is touchingly done, and bode well for the third volume in the trilogy.

I have a confession to make; I did not enjoy the Anne Rice vampire books.

Nothing wrong with her ideas, her secret history and vampire politics and the like, but there was something about her prose style that just…annoyed me. This was a shame because I learned very soon to dislike poor, tormented Louis who, after all, had even more to feel angst-ridden about than Garreth Mikaelian. Louis’ vampirism obliged him to kill, if memory serves. The only problem is…I wanted to clout him one and tell him to pull himself together and buy a ranch - or a whorehouse - and stop mooning about all the time. Garreth’s reaction to his pain is more measured; perhaps it appeals to the stiff upper lip Englishness I still admire. No grieving and gloomy widower he: Garreth’s pain is concerned with losing living friends to his need for secrecy.

Just as the routine nature of human life in the Alaska of 30 Days of Night and the dusty routine of those wide open spaces in Near Dark offer us a real-seeming world for vampires to threaten, so Garreth’s Midwestern and Californian homes are ordinary enough to recognise as being inhabited by real people.

People for whom we can be afraid, when the monsters come calling.

AB

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Welcome to the Real World

Sunglasses After Dark by Nancy A Collins.

The Real World is full of vampires and they hide in plain sight. Humans see them as winos and junkies; whores and street thugs; as drab office workers and plain shop girls. They have their aristocrats too; intellectual dilettantes preying on the passions of rival philosophers and artists, as well as their blood. These Nobles are suave jet-setters and fetish nightclub proprietors, and these survive as the hangers-on and beneficiaries of the vilest criminals and psychopaths that the human race produces; both within and without government circles. The base emotions once called sins are their psychic food. You can guess the uniforms that Nancy A Collins dresses them in, and the cults she has them drawing sustenance from.

The newly risen are clumsy and ignorant as an infesting demon invades the corpse of its parent’s victim. Most of these die again; barely remembering to resemble humans as potential prey approaches, or not remembering at all to shelter from the risen sun. Others survive to become the enslaved servants of their creators; compelled to fight and die in their endless power struggles, alliances and wars. Of these, a minority grow (and hide this growth) into Nobles. Free will arrives at last and they break away from – or through – their former sires and owners. They begin to climb up the vampire social ladder to power and rank and the position where they can produce their masterworks of psychic vampire art; atrocities, massacres and cruelty of the grossest kinds.

Nancy A Collins has created a rich and complex world for her vampires to inhabit, and the thrill of the first three Sonja Blue novels is the intricate relationships and power struggles of the camouflaged vampires and the other supernatural monsters (collectively dubbed ‘Pretenders’), as they struggle for wealth and dominance.

And then there is Sonja Blue.

The ragged, tortured creature that awakes in the Danger Ward of the Elysian Fields mental hospital soon reveals herself to be a supernatural creature; one who walks through the dreams of her fellow inmates, spreading hysterical fear in their already-deranged unconscious minds. She escapes and her stalking of the psychiatric nurse whom she had escaped from introduce the reader to the ruthless lengths to which the powerful will go to keep her a secret.

The vampire Sonya Blue, it transpires, is a conflicted monster. She is tormented either by a split personality or by the actual existence of more than one intelligence inside her mind. Much of the personal experience and growth of the character involves the opposition and clashes between the conscious Sonja Blue and the mysterious ‘Other.’ Sometimes the Other takes control and when Sonja returns to consciousness and the command of her own body, terrible things have happened.

Sonja means well. Once she regains her intelligence and self-possession sufficiently to learn enough about the Real World, she realizes that most of its inhabitants are harmful to mankind, she sets out on a continent-wide vampire hunt; tracking them down an slaying them with no mercy. And shameful, erotic joy. Sonja is sexy and sexual; an uber-punk dhampir in leather jacket and heavy work-boots, with enough lambent power to alert and scare away most ordinary inhabitants of the Real World. This makes her hunting more difficult and she is obliged to accept the offer of a seedy underworld telepath to act as her stalking-horse in the bloody world of the Pretenders.

It is a bloody world twice over; both violent and also haunted by vampires. There are also shape shifters and were–creatures of many kinds. There are possessive fire demons that melt their hosts’ body fat down. There are incubi and succubae that prey on the sexually desperate or depraved. Everywhere there are human espers whose telepathy when untrained sends them insane in the psychic din of the unshielded thoughts of the human race. These flaky and damaged individuals often accept jobs as renfields to vampire Nobles, acting as spies and diplomats between master vampires and their enemies. This is a cold, harsh, merciless world. The strong invariably use or destroy the weak without thinking about and it appears, no capacity to think about, the pain felt by or value of other people.

How the body of Sonja Blue comes to be inhabited by a vampiric intelligence and how she subsequently gains her exceptional powers over her fellow blood-suckers is a gruesome tale of teenage dreams exploited by lies and destroyed by betrayal. The events of her death and metamorphosis are described in stark and unsentimental prose that brings to awful life the worst nightmare of any parent of a daughter - with the added awfulness of the supernatural. Awakening for the first time as a vampire, the girl/woman escapes her confinement, and an empty personality and the thirst for meaning and structure in her life propel her into a shabby world of sexual exploitation, crime and brutality. Unlike the abandoned gets of most Nobles, she has help, of sorts, to survive and grow stronger. Technology begins it and an exploitative protector feeds and houses her while her powers and mental alertness develop. When she rapidly reaches a higher level of self-awareness, the Other makes its first appearance in her new life. Climbing out of the very lowest layers of the British criminal underworld, she moves on to other places in Europe and a higher class of criminality and vice. Along the way, she discovers the pleasure and nutrition that she can find in the violence and hatred of human beings, and her moral resistance against her hunger for them is the battleground in which Sonja struggles against the Other.

In Europe she encounters a vampiric mental parasite – her first Noble and her first, shocking sight of what Pretenders actually look like without their camouflaging glamour – but is soon whisked away from any educational or corrupting influence that he might bring to bear on her. Instead she is introduced formally to the Real World by a human student of the supernatural, and together they begin her vampire-hunting career. Guilt tortures Sonja, and the destruction of her fellow vampires in some measure goes to assuage this guilt. Always, Collins shows us, there is anger at her own murderous faults, at the lesser crimes of other Pretenders, and at the betrayal that created her. Her European travels teach how other vampires use their psychic powers to delude and then feed on the unsuspecting and weak-minded. And she begins to have visions of the past and learns more about her creator/enemy and vile Secret History of which he is a part. She kills many, many evil creatures as she passes by.

It isn’t the master vampire who brings about the psychic battle with a Pretending foe and the grief of further and bitter betrayal. The climax is ultra violent and spectacular, original and exciting, and begs for a wide-screen adaptation.

There is always pain but also goodness in Sonja Blue. Despite the cynical viewpoint with which Collins presents her sordid hidden universe and the sick corruption of the phenomenal world that unenlightened mortals only ever see, something of the human survives her journey of death and rebirth. She has amoral standpoint. She is capable of love and duty and dedication. She holds herself responsible for the lives of those whom she touches, and she risks a variety of hazards to fulfill that responsibility. This is what makes her a great fictional hero. It’s not the super-strength or the athleticism, nor the regenerative power or the dream-walking. It’s because, whatever her body and mind have been twisted into by the treachery and callousness of others, her human conscience survives. In some ways and on some occasions, that conscience does its job. It inspires a vampire to do what is right.

And she kills many, many evil creatures as she passes by.

AB


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The Dragon Waiting, by John M. Ford.

There are many vampires in The Dragon Waiting.

Either central to the action or alluded to, including two celebrated ones we know and love. There is also a very historical pair whose notorious disappearance now seems to make sense.

This is a historical novel, and many of the characters and events are ‘real’ and as they a taught and studied by professional historians.

Plantagenets war with Italian sorcerers and murderous Jesus-worshipping Scots borderer rievers. The Medicis at the height of their grandeur are faced with vampire dukes and shape shifting magicians. The defeated royalty of Europe plot and seethe in the no-man’s land crushed between two conflicting countries: France and Gaul.

And all the while, cruel Byzantium intends to shatter the world and reassemble the broken parts into a heartless and merciless universal empire. The alternative history which makes The Dragon Waiting a damned-near perfect novel is based on two conceits. The first is that the Romans of the East revived paganism in Constantinople so successfully that their Empire never declined as the Christian one did, to fall to the Muslim hordes – and therefore no crusaders to finish off the power of the City itself. In fact, as we hear about the Zoroastrian Saladin befriending the Apollo-worshiping King Richard Coeur-de-Lion, we realise that there were no Muslim hordes at all. The second is that magic survives from the ancient world and is developed throughout the Dark Ages of Western Europe and the enduring Byzantium, so that it is used as readily as some technology. There is always a price to magic, and how people pay that price for reasons of love or hate, ambition or pity, gives the novel great soul and the characters depth and conviction.

Have I mentioned it’s my favourite novel in the whole world yet? It’s my favourite novel in the whole world. The heroes are people you fall for immediately, and feel for, and really want them to survive and thrive. And they face so many perils; plots newly-hatched or centuries old; against individuals, or families, dynasties, nations, and the very idea of freedom itself. The four main heroes are all injured, and in so many ways, by Byzantium’s seemingly-invincible spies, sorcerers, and armies, and so beset by a series of concentric conspiracies like Russian dolls, and it seems that the forces of freedom can never prevail against the resources and amoral will of the East.

Vampires are variously monstrous killers, pitiful victims, or tormented heroes who struggle against their blood thirst to bring some value to their lives and a little more justice to the world. There’s something for most sort of vampire fiction fan here. The chick-lit sort is absent, but everything else is so rich and mysterious and grand as the protagonists strive and suffer and go on against the Byzantine heart of darkness, that I defy any lover of vampire fiction to have nothing good to say for the vamps and their friends in this.

The novel is brilliantly constructed, with three increasingly long and elabourate first sections introducing the heroes and their world with all its strangeness and familiarity. We meet the fourth in a gem of a locked-door mystery, which might also be a tale of espionage and magic and politics in a peninsula falling into Byzantium’s clutches.

A narrator merely tells you a thing up front: ‘He could tell that she was a vampire as soon as she spoke.’ It’s a fact. So what?

A storyteller shows you something, through the words and actions and feelings of his characters, and through his vocabulary and from the conclusions that we readers draw from them, and thus he involves us intellectually and emotionally in his tale: ‘Forgive me Father, for I have sinned. It has been three hundred and sixty-eight years since my last confession.’

Ford shows us. As his characters go from place to place they discover more treason and more terror by seeing events unfolding, and by thinking about them. The gods know; they find it difficult to trust themselves in this novel; let alone the statements and writings of strangers.

Along the way, a Welsh wizard, a renegade Byzantine, a heartbroken doctor and a mercenary gunsmith travel through glittering royal courts and frozen wastelands. They meet and defeat magicians and murderous exiled queens, some very familiar cavalrymen, and finally come ashore in Britain where killing curses can be heard from mountainside to mountainside in the hope of healing a broken land and keeping it free from the East. How they attempt this, and how the vampires try to accommodate themselves to the living world (or to crush it), is told in tense, beautiful prose. You will learn to want to pay full attention to every sentence. Ford is a storyteller, remember. Amidst all the detail and daring-do; the likeable characters and real-seeming magic, he opens up huge and fascinating prospects of how the world might be, and how and what vampires are, as tantalizing asides that we can dwell on and treasure and envy. There are a handful of love affairs and passions in this novel that touch and convince and win sympathy, almost in passing, as Ford rushes off to some fresh triumph of mind to thrill and dazzle us.

The dragon is the best I’ve ever read about

If you never read another book with vampires in it, or another fantasy novel, or any novel, read this one. After nearly twenty years it still comes down from the shelf three or four times a year and it always delights.

AB-

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