Authors put the bite on vampires and their ways

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Actor Robert Pattinson of theTwilight movies (CP)

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(AP)

Blood Oath

By Christopher Farnsworth

Putnam, 400 pages, $31

Reviewed by Nick Martin

In this entertaining thriller, the president of the United States has his own personal vampire operating as a super-secret agent.

OK, let's get the laughter and incredulity and head-shaking out of the way right up front.

Blood Oath could be ludicrous, it could be gimmicky, it could be a single novelty stretched thinly over 400 pages.

Instead, American screenwriter and journalist Christopher Farnsworth's first novel is an absolute delight, an engaging political thriller with supernatural overtones.

It's a perfect summer read -- not for the sunlit beach, but for after dark, long after dark, out on the cottage deck by tiny reading light, preferably close to deep dark woods, moonlit shadows and the unfamiliar subtle noises of the night.

Apparently in real life, U.S. President Andrew Johnson -- who succeeded the assassinated Abraham Lincoln -- pardoned a murderer in 1867 for reasons unknown, a murderer whom the yellow press of the day dubbed a vampire.

Farnsworth takes that little tidbit of history and runs with it. Vampire Nathaniel Cade took an oath in 1867 to serve the president for as long as he remained undead.

As Blood Oath opens, ambitious contemporary White House staff member Zach Barrows has a new assignment that's taking him to a hidden sub-basement of the Smithsonian Institution.

Barrows has seen too many episodes of The West Wing, and he's just been caught engaging in indiscreet activities in the bed of the president's 19-year-old daughter.

Barrows learns he's Cade's new liaison with the White House, and like any sensible human being meeting his first real vampire, he freaks.

But he's soon off with Cade on the trail of terrorists targeting the U.S. with a diabolical threat.

It somehow involves Dr. Johann Konrad, Cade's nemesis who's been delving Frankenstein-like into DNA and genetic manipulation for centuries -- yes, centuries -- as well as another vampire, a sinister ultra-covert government agency with its own agenda, and assorted traitors and heroes and critters and knaves.

It's all terrifically entertaining.

Cade has taken a vow of abstaining from drinking human blood, though he splatters it about a-plenty in the presidential service.

Close your eyes every couple of pages if you have a thing about pig's blood.

Political junkies will love the connections Farnsworth hints at between Cade and real-life events under previous administrations.

Each chapter opens with excerpts from confidential government reports about sentient reptiles, creatures inside the Earth, the living dead, or experiments to measure Cade's undead powers.

Farnsworth has wisely chosen not to tell the reader too much too soon. He scatters tidbits of information tantalizingly, as Barrows slowly learns about the deep and moody Cade's past and the dark forces, both natural and supernatural, from which he's saved the U.S. since the 1860s.

Nick Martin is a Free Press reporter and suspected vampire.

Evolve

Vampire Stories of the New Undead

Edited by Nancy Kilpatrick Edge, 283 pages, $17

Reviewed by David Jón Fuller

We've all heard enough about vampires recently.

Everyone knows they look like frumpy old ladies, overjoyed that an aging population means they fit in nowadays. Or that they keep humans penned up as food, and having sex with a human is tantamount to bestiality. Or that when a vampire slayer starts killing them off, they go right to the police.

Wait, this isn't sounding too much like Twilight or True Blood -- but they're some of the ideas introduced in the new Canadian anthology Evolve, edited by Nancy Kilpatrick.

The Montreal-based Kilpatrick is no stranger to the genre, having written numerous dark fantasy and horror novels herself. She previously edited the erotic vampire collection Love Bites, and co-edited Edge's horror anthology Tesseracts 13.

Tesseracts 13 was the first horror title published by Edge, a predominantly sci-fi and fantasy publisher in Calgary. The success of that book prompted this new all-vampire anthology.

There are some big-name contributors, such as Kelley Armstrong (writer of the Women of the Otherworld books) and Tanya Huff, known for Blood Books series featuring detective Vicki Nelson.

Most of the pieces are short and innovative. Claude Lalumière's All You Can Eat, All the Time puts a twist on immortality: a vampire's memory can only hold so much. Every century or so he needs to leech away a new personality and body, forgetting all that came before.

Colleen Anderson's An Ember Among the Fallen is told from the perspective of a vampire throwing a dinner party, perusing the humans he has penned up to pick the best vintage of blood to serve. But facing his ex-girlfriend at the party -- when you're immortal, there's centuries of emotional baggage -- proves too much, and afterwards he finds himself becoming a "meat mater," a vampire who, well, plays with his food.

More satirical is Rebecca Bradley's The New Forty, in which a 64-year-old woman is made a vampire and mocked, for centuries, by others of her kind endlessly frozen in their beautiful youth.

But by the 21st century, she observes with glee, "the brief lives of mortals began to stretch ... I was amazed to find I was a relatively youthful and potentially attractive woman."

And the vampires who used to deride her don't know what they're missing among the senior set. "Immortality, like youth, is wasted on the young," she cackles.

Not all the stories are as strong. Armstrong's Learning Curve isn't much more than an anecdote about a vampire being challenged by a less-experienced supernatural creature.

Chrysalis, by Winnipeg's Ronald Hore, starts off as an intriguing tale of teen rebellion, in which a girl deduces her distant father is a vampire. But when she comes into her own as a human-vampire hybrid, the story ends before she actually does anything.

Anthologies are notoriously hit-and-miss, but Evolve offers much to enjoy and delight, especially for readers sick of the usual tropes.

If there were a hip vampire dialect, you could say it really sucks -- and that's a good thing.

David Jón Fuller is a Free Press copy editor.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 17, 2010 F8