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i_read_whatSo let's jump in, shall we?
So the story starts in media res. Our 1st person narrator (who will eventually give his name as "Jack Fleming") has just gotten hit by a car. He's interestingly analytical about the whole experience:
"It was a well-engineered accident, involving no small skill on the part of the driver. A body, depending on its size and weight in relation to the speed and position of the car usually does two things: it either goes under the car or bounces over it. Going under, it can get dragged, leaving a lot of bloody physical evidence all over the road and vehicle. If it gets flipped up and over, the driver risks a dented hood and roof or a broken windshield or all three. The professional hit-and-run artist knows how to avoid such risks and will try to clip the target with just the front bumper or fender; that way he has only some scratched paint to touch up or at most a broken headlight to replace."
Jack tells us that he was indeed hit by such an expert and that there was only minimal pain which is quickly receding. We then learn that Jack has recently woke up on a beach, groggy and confused, and had basically staggered his way to the road in a thought-numbing state of shock. He heard a car motor and stuck out a thumb to hitchhike and then got hit.
So anyway, Jack lands belly up, and despite his initial concern about a broken spine, everything is working perfectly. He's very lucky. But perhaps less so, since the car is stopping, and the driver has come out with a gun.
Jack runs for it and is shot in the back for his trouble. Jack tells us that he doubled up, instinctively trying "to hold things in" but the pain vanishes and his hands come away clean. And when the man comes up to shoot him again, in the head this time, Jack grabs the gun and twists it out of his hands and then overpowers the man. Which is when something else happens:
"The man's heart and lungs were thundering in my ears like a train. All my senses were sharp and new and wonderful. I could even smell the blood, an exciting scent when mixed with the sour tang of fear. On his thick, rough neck the skin seemed oddly transparent where the large vein pulsed. First it disturbed, then it tantalized. My mouth sagged open, dry and aching with sudden thirst. I felt drawn to it like a cat to milk.
He gagged and his bladder let go as my lips brushed his throat, then he passed out.
I jerked back, wondering what the hell I was trying to do. Pushing away until I no longer touched him, I lay facedown in the spiky grass, shaking like a fever victim until the thirst faded."
So yeah, Jack's a vampire. But he's new at it, and he hasn't quite figured it out yet.
But Jack's not thinking about that. Right now, he's trying to figure out what the hell is going on, who this asshole is, and why he's trying to kill him. He shoves the guy into the passenger seat of his car and searches him for an ID. His name is Fred Sanderson, Jack doesn't recognize it. He recognizes the town that the guy is from though: Cicero.
We're then given some setting context information: it's been ten years since Capone took over. "Big Al" is in jail. But Sanderson is probably connected to the mob.
Jack searches the guy more and eventually finds a hidden money clip with five hundred dollars, which he pockets "without a single pang of conscience". I think that's fair. He did try to kill you.
Now that the immediate threat is gone, Jack is starting to notice things:
"It was very bright now, the sky all strange with the sun and stars shining improbably together. It was confusing until I realized it was the moon that was flooding the place with such brilliance. Like icewater, fear spread out in my guts and left me shaking at the edges. The night was too bright, it was wrong, totally wrong .
Distraction. I needed distraction. Where was I?"
So, Jack figures out that he's still in Chicago and that he last remembers getting a phone call and rushing out of his hotel to do something, which ended up with him soaking wet on a deserted patch of the Lake Michigan shoreline.
He checks himself for any head wounds and is relieved to find a swelling. He figures a concussion explains the disorientation, memory loss, and over sensitive vision. He imagined the gunshot and took Sanderson out on adrenaline.
He also discovers that, whatever happened, he hadn't been mugged. He still has his wallet and its contents, though everything is quite damp. He also finds a few holes in his shirt front, and a scar just left of his breastbone. He finds some weird scars on his palm, and there's a welt on his right hand.
And he can't feel his heartbeat. Then he looks into the rear view mirror of the car, and the glass is empty. That's when Jack gets a little dramatic:
"Death had come to me that night, unexpected and unfair. Death had changed me, then left, taking with it the memory of that supreme moment we all must face. Eyes shut, I hung on to the steering wheel and vainly tried to adjust emotionally to what had once been a distant and purely intellectual concept. In a way I was more frightened by the idea that someone had wanted to kill me than by the fact that they'd succeeded. It was too much to take in, the best thing was to shut down the feelings for the moment. I'd get used to things soon enough, not that there was much choice about it now. In a larger sense it was what animals and mankind had faced since old Adam found himself outside the garden: adapt or die.
Having died already, there was only one alternative left, even if it was mentally distressing."
So what we can get from this is that Jack seems to know what's going on. Not the specifics, of course. But he knows what the lack of heartbeat and lack of reflection means. He knows he's dead. And he doesn't actually seem that shocked about it. Distressed, sure. But not shocked.
He's confused about HOW he died. NOT that he's up and moving around again. Interesting.
So he ties Sanderson up, fishes through the glove compartment and finds some road maps, and figures out how to get back to the hotel. He drives the car for about thirty minutes before coming to a safe secluded spot in a dead looking business district.
Sanderson is awake, but faking unconsciousness. Jack can tell because he can hear the man's heartbeat. Jack uses the man's handkerchief to wipe his fingerprints from the steering wheel, dashboard, and gear shift. He also has the man's gun. Then he questions him.
The guy is initially uncooperative, but Jack loses patience and "for the first time took a great deal of pleasure hitting a man", though he pulls his punches because he doesn't want to kill him. Sanderson spills: his boss is a man named Frank Paco. And he apparently wanted Jack dead because he wouldn't talk. Paco apparently wanted a list.
When Sanderson freaks out about having shot Jack in the heart, Jack quickly states that he had a bullet proof vest. Clever.
Anyway, Jack gets a little more out of Sanderson: He had been on a boat called the Elvira, and he'd gotten the list from a man named Benny Galligar. Soon enough, Sanderson's out cold. And then:
"Outside the car, I wiped the handles clean with the bottom of my coat and repeated the action on the passenger side. Sanderson's head was lolled over, leaving his neck taut and vulnerable, with the blood-smell rising from his body like perfume. I stepped back quickly before something regrettable happened, and hurried down the street.
Sooner or later, God help me, I would have to feed."
So Jack definitely knows what he is at this point. Which would indicate that he already knew about vampires ahead of time. Sanderson doesn't seem to know, though. Since he panicked at the thought of having shot Jack in the heart.
Anyway, Jack gets to the hotel room to find more weirdness. He asks for his room key and discovers that he lost a lot more time than he thought. He'd checked in on Monday. Now it's Friday morning. Fortunately they still kept his things for him.
Jack leaves the hotel and notes that the sky is getting brighter. He finds another hotel, pays fifty cents for a room (which he considers a severe overcharge) and gets a monk's cell with a single window. He secures the door, both by the cheap lock and a chair. Jack is concerned about sunlight coming in through the window, but he rules out sleeping under the bed after a look at the floor: "I had joined the ranks of the Undead, but still retained firm ideas about basic sanitation."
He ends up draping a blanket over the window and starts washing up using the wash bowl. He discovers bruises all over his body, many short rows of crescent marks that he identifies as coming from brass knuckles. His wrists are raw: he'd been tied down, and he thinks he's been kicked.
Jack's seen this kind of thing before, but only on bodies in the morgue. And he has no idea why this has happened.
As he's getting ready, he suddenly feels himself getting stiff and sluggish: the sun just came up. Jack grabs a pillow and linens to block the light and then locks himself into the closet to sleep.
Apparently, vampire sleep isn't all it's cracked up to be. Jack finds himself basically frozen in place, getting the occasional sensory message, and mostly stuck in nightmares, which are conveyed in choppy paragraphs of imagery. In my favorite paragraph, Jack criticizes his dream as having cheap birth symbolism, but the midwife had brass knuckles and a gun."
Most of the flashes are violent and disturbing, but there are a few that are different: about a woman with sky blue eyes. There's a reference of giving her blood, while she "gave [him] heaven on earth in return." Then the chapter ends.
Okay, well, I'm realizing that I probably won't be able to review this with unbiased eyes, because so far, I really like it. And I'm remembering why.
Jack is a great viewpoint character and his narration amuses me. I think the mystery is a good hook, and I don't think I've seen a vampire story that takes this approach: first, it's relatively rare that the story involves someone newly made into a vampire to begin with, but the interesting aspect is that Jack clearly knows what's happening. He knows that he'll need to feed. He knows that he has to avoid sunlight. This part isn't a brand new idea to him. (And the dream flash gives a probable reason why.)
What we end up with is a vampire who is too young to have built up all those vast reservoirs of guilt and self-loathing so common to the genre. But also one who isn't particularly shocked or horrified by his state either. He doesn't want this to have happened, but he clearly has some practical idea of what to do. Now he just has to deal with it.
That review I mentioned in my intro post is right, really. This story doesn't have any of the vampire novel tropes that I'm used to. If anything, it reminds me more of a Golden Age superhero comic. For me, that's a selling point.
So the story starts in media res. Our 1st person narrator (who will eventually give his name as "Jack Fleming") has just gotten hit by a car. He's interestingly analytical about the whole experience:
"It was a well-engineered accident, involving no small skill on the part of the driver. A body, depending on its size and weight in relation to the speed and position of the car usually does two things: it either goes under the car or bounces over it. Going under, it can get dragged, leaving a lot of bloody physical evidence all over the road and vehicle. If it gets flipped up and over, the driver risks a dented hood and roof or a broken windshield or all three. The professional hit-and-run artist knows how to avoid such risks and will try to clip the target with just the front bumper or fender; that way he has only some scratched paint to touch up or at most a broken headlight to replace."
Jack tells us that he was indeed hit by such an expert and that there was only minimal pain which is quickly receding. We then learn that Jack has recently woke up on a beach, groggy and confused, and had basically staggered his way to the road in a thought-numbing state of shock. He heard a car motor and stuck out a thumb to hitchhike and then got hit.
So anyway, Jack lands belly up, and despite his initial concern about a broken spine, everything is working perfectly. He's very lucky. But perhaps less so, since the car is stopping, and the driver has come out with a gun.
Jack runs for it and is shot in the back for his trouble. Jack tells us that he doubled up, instinctively trying "to hold things in" but the pain vanishes and his hands come away clean. And when the man comes up to shoot him again, in the head this time, Jack grabs the gun and twists it out of his hands and then overpowers the man. Which is when something else happens:
"The man's heart and lungs were thundering in my ears like a train. All my senses were sharp and new and wonderful. I could even smell the blood, an exciting scent when mixed with the sour tang of fear. On his thick, rough neck the skin seemed oddly transparent where the large vein pulsed. First it disturbed, then it tantalized. My mouth sagged open, dry and aching with sudden thirst. I felt drawn to it like a cat to milk.
He gagged and his bladder let go as my lips brushed his throat, then he passed out.
I jerked back, wondering what the hell I was trying to do. Pushing away until I no longer touched him, I lay facedown in the spiky grass, shaking like a fever victim until the thirst faded."
So yeah, Jack's a vampire. But he's new at it, and he hasn't quite figured it out yet.
But Jack's not thinking about that. Right now, he's trying to figure out what the hell is going on, who this asshole is, and why he's trying to kill him. He shoves the guy into the passenger seat of his car and searches him for an ID. His name is Fred Sanderson, Jack doesn't recognize it. He recognizes the town that the guy is from though: Cicero.
We're then given some setting context information: it's been ten years since Capone took over. "Big Al" is in jail. But Sanderson is probably connected to the mob.
Jack searches the guy more and eventually finds a hidden money clip with five hundred dollars, which he pockets "without a single pang of conscience". I think that's fair. He did try to kill you.
Now that the immediate threat is gone, Jack is starting to notice things:
"It was very bright now, the sky all strange with the sun and stars shining improbably together. It was confusing until I realized it was the moon that was flooding the place with such brilliance. Like icewater, fear spread out in my guts and left me shaking at the edges. The night was too bright, it was wrong, totally wrong .
Distraction. I needed distraction. Where was I?"
So, Jack figures out that he's still in Chicago and that he last remembers getting a phone call and rushing out of his hotel to do something, which ended up with him soaking wet on a deserted patch of the Lake Michigan shoreline.
He checks himself for any head wounds and is relieved to find a swelling. He figures a concussion explains the disorientation, memory loss, and over sensitive vision. He imagined the gunshot and took Sanderson out on adrenaline.
He also discovers that, whatever happened, he hadn't been mugged. He still has his wallet and its contents, though everything is quite damp. He also finds a few holes in his shirt front, and a scar just left of his breastbone. He finds some weird scars on his palm, and there's a welt on his right hand.
And he can't feel his heartbeat. Then he looks into the rear view mirror of the car, and the glass is empty. That's when Jack gets a little dramatic:
"Death had come to me that night, unexpected and unfair. Death had changed me, then left, taking with it the memory of that supreme moment we all must face. Eyes shut, I hung on to the steering wheel and vainly tried to adjust emotionally to what had once been a distant and purely intellectual concept. In a way I was more frightened by the idea that someone had wanted to kill me than by the fact that they'd succeeded. It was too much to take in, the best thing was to shut down the feelings for the moment. I'd get used to things soon enough, not that there was much choice about it now. In a larger sense it was what animals and mankind had faced since old Adam found himself outside the garden: adapt or die.
Having died already, there was only one alternative left, even if it was mentally distressing."
So what we can get from this is that Jack seems to know what's going on. Not the specifics, of course. But he knows what the lack of heartbeat and lack of reflection means. He knows he's dead. And he doesn't actually seem that shocked about it. Distressed, sure. But not shocked.
He's confused about HOW he died. NOT that he's up and moving around again. Interesting.
So he ties Sanderson up, fishes through the glove compartment and finds some road maps, and figures out how to get back to the hotel. He drives the car for about thirty minutes before coming to a safe secluded spot in a dead looking business district.
Sanderson is awake, but faking unconsciousness. Jack can tell because he can hear the man's heartbeat. Jack uses the man's handkerchief to wipe his fingerprints from the steering wheel, dashboard, and gear shift. He also has the man's gun. Then he questions him.
The guy is initially uncooperative, but Jack loses patience and "for the first time took a great deal of pleasure hitting a man", though he pulls his punches because he doesn't want to kill him. Sanderson spills: his boss is a man named Frank Paco. And he apparently wanted Jack dead because he wouldn't talk. Paco apparently wanted a list.
When Sanderson freaks out about having shot Jack in the heart, Jack quickly states that he had a bullet proof vest. Clever.
Anyway, Jack gets a little more out of Sanderson: He had been on a boat called the Elvira, and he'd gotten the list from a man named Benny Galligar. Soon enough, Sanderson's out cold. And then:
"Outside the car, I wiped the handles clean with the bottom of my coat and repeated the action on the passenger side. Sanderson's head was lolled over, leaving his neck taut and vulnerable, with the blood-smell rising from his body like perfume. I stepped back quickly before something regrettable happened, and hurried down the street.
Sooner or later, God help me, I would have to feed."
So Jack definitely knows what he is at this point. Which would indicate that he already knew about vampires ahead of time. Sanderson doesn't seem to know, though. Since he panicked at the thought of having shot Jack in the heart.
Anyway, Jack gets to the hotel room to find more weirdness. He asks for his room key and discovers that he lost a lot more time than he thought. He'd checked in on Monday. Now it's Friday morning. Fortunately they still kept his things for him.
Jack leaves the hotel and notes that the sky is getting brighter. He finds another hotel, pays fifty cents for a room (which he considers a severe overcharge) and gets a monk's cell with a single window. He secures the door, both by the cheap lock and a chair. Jack is concerned about sunlight coming in through the window, but he rules out sleeping under the bed after a look at the floor: "I had joined the ranks of the Undead, but still retained firm ideas about basic sanitation."
He ends up draping a blanket over the window and starts washing up using the wash bowl. He discovers bruises all over his body, many short rows of crescent marks that he identifies as coming from brass knuckles. His wrists are raw: he'd been tied down, and he thinks he's been kicked.
Jack's seen this kind of thing before, but only on bodies in the morgue. And he has no idea why this has happened.
As he's getting ready, he suddenly feels himself getting stiff and sluggish: the sun just came up. Jack grabs a pillow and linens to block the light and then locks himself into the closet to sleep.
Apparently, vampire sleep isn't all it's cracked up to be. Jack finds himself basically frozen in place, getting the occasional sensory message, and mostly stuck in nightmares, which are conveyed in choppy paragraphs of imagery. In my favorite paragraph, Jack criticizes his dream as having cheap birth symbolism, but the midwife had brass knuckles and a gun."
Most of the flashes are violent and disturbing, but there are a few that are different: about a woman with sky blue eyes. There's a reference of giving her blood, while she "gave [him] heaven on earth in return." Then the chapter ends.
Okay, well, I'm realizing that I probably won't be able to review this with unbiased eyes, because so far, I really like it. And I'm remembering why.
Jack is a great viewpoint character and his narration amuses me. I think the mystery is a good hook, and I don't think I've seen a vampire story that takes this approach: first, it's relatively rare that the story involves someone newly made into a vampire to begin with, but the interesting aspect is that Jack clearly knows what's happening. He knows that he'll need to feed. He knows that he has to avoid sunlight. This part isn't a brand new idea to him. (And the dream flash gives a probable reason why.)
What we end up with is a vampire who is too young to have built up all those vast reservoirs of guilt and self-loathing so common to the genre. But also one who isn't particularly shocked or horrified by his state either. He doesn't want this to have happened, but he clearly has some practical idea of what to do. Now he just has to deal with it.
That review I mentioned in my intro post is right, really. This story doesn't have any of the vampire novel tropes that I'm used to. If anything, it reminds me more of a Golden Age superhero comic. For me, that's a selling point.
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Date: 2019-06-01 07:14 pm (UTC)