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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