Genre: Vampire fantasy
Description:
“For a hundred years, Jerome Atherton has
roamed the world in a fruitless search for a cure for his vampirism. Now he has
returned to the family home – a crumbling mansion that sits, brooding, on a
bluff above the river town that bears his family’s name – and his faithful
manservant, a gargoyle named Kamen. Jerry falls for a TV news anchor named
Lauren Whitacre, but when Lauren discovers his secret, he must flee again. But
not for long. Not for nearly long enough.
Upon his return, another TV news personality
intrigues him: reporter Callie Dailey. But Jerry Atherton is not the first
vampire Callie has run into and she is not interested in complicating her life
with another. Yet Jerry needs Callie’s help to find out why an out-of-town
developer is so interested in his family's old shipyard. Will he have to use
his vampiric powers of persuasion on Callie? If he does, he may lose her
forever…”
Author:
Lynne Cantwell’s
biography tells us she has been writing fiction since the second grade, when
the kid who sat in front of her showed her a book he had written, and she
thought, "I could do that." The result was "Susie and the
Talking Doll," a picture book illustrated by the author about a girl who
owned a doll that not only could talk, but could carry on conversations. The
book had dialogue but no paragraph breaks.
Today,
after a twenty-year career in broadcast journalism and a master's degree in fiction
writing from Johns Hopkins University (or perhaps despite the master's degree),
Lynne is still writing fantasy. She is also a contributing author at Indies
Unlimited.
Appraisal:
Nosferatu
(the movie) scared the bejazus out of me at an early age. Imprinted on my hind
brain forever is the image of the ghoulish shadow thrown onto the wall of the
staircase as the creature creeps upwards, towards the bedroom of his beloved
victim. Thereafter I came to terms with vampires as scary but comedic entertainment
through dear Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She sure got through ‘em, with
her trusty stake and sharp one-liners. I mention all this to show that I can go
either way with vampires.
There is romance in the novel, and the story
isn’t really dark, so I have been pondering what genre this occupies. You can
judge the result of my deliberations for yourself if you give the book a whirl.
This vampire tale kept me on the edge of my
seat whenever the vampire was on stage as I examined every utterance for a
careless invitation to step inside, and occasionally shouted at the Kindle in
my hand ‘don’t look into his eyes!’. So tension is kept high.
There is, however, rather little staking – without
which the vampire genre inevitably feels a little thin. Reasoning with a
vampire, with any expectation of not ending up with a sore neck and an aversion
to daylight, seems to this reader to be a fool’s game. It’s all about the
catching and the biting, with vampires, isn’t it? Cantwell does, however, give
something of the story of the vampire in history and its transmogrification
into a fiction staple. This she does through one of her engaging narrators, Callie
Dailey – a local TV news anchor, very much in the Tess Showalter mould (see the
Magic series). She has the Cantwellian, spunky heroine ‘come on, what’s the worst that can happen?’
approach to danger, and Gretchen the video operator follows gamely at her heels.
The second narrator is, however, more fun
even than the ever-inquisitive reporter and her sidekick. Kamen functions under
a glamour laid upon him by his master. He is the magical factotum of Jerome, the
Atherton vampire, and through Kamen’s glum narrative we are given a quite
different slant on events. Kamen is rather like Marvin the Paranoid Android
from Hitchhiker’s Guide, but with wings. And better at catching rats at
need. Kamen has a favourite line: “if a creature of stone could feel [insert
emotion], then I would feel it now.” For dogged goodness, which he constantly
downplays, Kamen is without doubt the most appealing character in the novel. He
considers himself dull. But he is not. The vampire gets a sense of civic duty
(although I still don’t trust him), the reporter gets a boyfriend, but Kamen
gets a soul. Nice.
As ever, it is the cast of characters which
invigorate this new novel of Cantwell’s. She gives each one breadth, depth and
life (even the dead ones …). The pages turn briskly.
Buy now
from: Amazon US Amazon UK
Format/Typo
Issues:
An accomplished and well-edited work of
fiction. No infelicities to report.
Rating: ****
Four Stars
Reviewed
by: Judi Moore
Approximate word count: 40-45,000 words
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