Some Girls Bite

REVIEW
Some Girls Bite (softcover)
Author: Chloe Neill
Publisher: New American Library/$26.99
Date of Publication: 2009
Reviewed by James J. Gormley (member, National Book Critics Circle)

Kind of over the puling teenage angst of books titularly related to dusk, moons and dawn? Well then, author Chloe Neill’s Some Girls Bite may be just the book for you. Told in first-person by a character who’s a sharp, sassy and pretty third-year Chicago grad student, Merit, Some Girls Bite introduces us to a world that has, just eight months prior, found out---thanks to a vamp-called press conference---that bloodsuckers really exist.

With some of the freshest writing in vampire fiction today, after Merit is attacked by rogue vampires and then made a vampire by the aristocratic head of high-class Cadogan House, Ethan Sullivan, she writes: “The blood was gone---and I’d been manicured.”

Filled with deft touches that are clever and smart without being cutesie, Neill takes us through Merit’s training as the official protector (Sentinel) of Cadogan House, and shares with us the friendship of her blue-haired housemate with growing witchly powers, Mallory, a sorcerer named Catcher and a houseless vamp named Jeff, for whom Mallory falls head over ruby slippers.

Merit’s Cadogan House is part of a vampiric world of manor-like power centers that feel, to the reader, like a blending of the Talamasca motherhouse in Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles and the vampires’ castle-like manse in Underworld but sans the doilies or the decadence, respectively.

As Merit trains and awes the vampires of Cadogan with her fighting and weaponry skills, there is a growing war that is threatening to endanger the entire undead society that has just been voluntarily exposed.

One of the most satisfying aspects of this book, Neill’s inaugural entry in her Chicagoland Vampires series, is that it taps into the concerns and conflicts of younger (pre-30) people today without becoming shackled by cliché or stereotypes.

Merit really hates her father, but loves her grandfather. She cares about her nails, but can destroy almost anyone (masterly male vamps included) with her sword-wielding skills. The same goes for the secondary characters; Mallory, for example, may be a blue-haired clubgoer, but she’s also a savvy businesswoman.

So, all in all, this debut by Chloe Neill is a bold fresh piece of vampire lit, indeed, and we are truly fortunate that the sequel, Friday Night Bites, has just been released.

REVIEW: Salem's Lot

REVIEW
Salem's Lot
(softcover)
Author: Stephen King
Publisher: Pocket Books/$7.99
Date of Publication: !975/1999
Reviewed by James J. Gormley (member, National Book Critics Circle)

In talking about his inspiration for writing 'Salem's Lot, Stephen King tells us, in an introduction penned in 1999: "I wondered out loud to my wife what might have happened if Drac had appeared not in turn-of-the-century London but in the America of the 1970s."

King envisioned that such a monster could operate with "lethal ease" in a New England burg, and, with that realization, he also drew from many sources, including comics and George Romero's Night of the Living Dead.

In 1999, King wrote that in the post-Vietnam America he "inhabited and still loved (often against my better instincts)" between 1972 and 1975 (when he penned the book): "I saw a metaphor for everything that was wrong with the society around me."

In this, the author's second, novel, King writes of New England, not only of its people and its beauty but also of its hardships and its darkness:

Being in the town is prosaic, sensuous, alcoholic. And in the dark, the town is yours and you are the town's and together you sleep like the dead, like the very stones in your north field. There is no life here but the slow death of days, and so when the evil falls on the town its coming seems almost preordained, sweet and morphic. It is almost as though the town knows the evil was coming and the shape it would take.
('Salem's Lot, Chapter 10)

The vitality and the darkness were attractive to the "Dracula" character in this story, Barlow, who, in explaining to a character why he chose Jerusalem's Lot, said:

The people have not cut off the vitality which flows from their mother, the earth, with a shell of concrete and cement. Their hands are plunged into the very waters of life. They have ripped the life from the earth, whole and beating! Is it not true?

With the main protagonists being a novelist (Ben Mears), a boy (Mark Petrie), a young medical doctor (Jimmy Cody), a high school English teacher (Matthew Burke), a young artist (Susan Norton) and a Catholic priest (Father Callahan), the story is enriched by newspaper clippings, much as Stoker's narrative was largely made up of newspaper clippings, letters and phonographic spool recordings.

While Ben and Mark may be the characters who most steadfastly, and valiantly, try to cleanse the town of the great and implacable evil that has befallen it, amid the the big and terrible tapestry masterfully woven by King in this modern-day re-interpretation of the original Dracula are awful and wonderful threads of sadness, and pettiness and goodness....and ultimately of all the forces and elements that make up a town and its residents, especially in a small, rock-bedecked slice of rural New England called 'Salem's Lot.

WELCOME TO VAMPIRE BOOKS NAVIGATOR!

Greetings fellow authors, vampirophiles, vampire book bibliophiles, librarians, publishers, authors' representatives and publicists, book buyers and distributors, and all those whose interest, passion or business (maybe all three) includes vampire books!

Why would one even want help navigating the choppy (sometimes bloody) waters of books that fall in the sub-genre of vampire books?

One reason: because vampire books are legion and it helps to find reviews that sort the wheat from the chaff, or, er, the blood from the guts.

Since the books reviewed here are all worthwhile vampire books, choosing any (or all) of them, as time goes by, will make our wallets and vampire-loving hearts happy since we won't be misled into buying books that, ahem, suck!

Starting with two of the greatest vampire novels of all time --- Dracula and I Am Legend --- we will cover a wide range of vampire tales, from the classics to books that are just plain fun to read, including, not necessarily in this order:

• Stephen King's Salem's Lot;
• Anne Rice's Interview With The Vampire;
  
• Whitley Strieber's The Hunger;
• Kim Newman's Anno Dracula;
• Laurell K. Hamilton's Guilty Pleasures;
• P.N. Elrod's I, Strahd;
• E.E. Knight's Way of the Wolf;
• Kim Harrison's Every Which Way But Dead;
• David Wellington's Vampire Zero;
• Chloe Neill's Some Girls Bite;
• Celis T. Rono's That Which Bites;

... and many more!

Who's James Gormley and why should we trust him?

Well, I am a published author, a former book editor, a member of the National Book Critics Circle and I was horror book reviewer for Publishers Weekly from 1993 through 1998. I have been a member of the Horror Writers Association and helped develop the writers' guidebook, Writing Horror, with Mort Castle for Writers Digest Books. I am also a member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA).

So there you have it--we're off to a bloody good start!
Authors, publishers, authors' publicists and representatives: please put me on your lists of reviewers to whom advance or first-off copies of books and requests for comment are sent.
Please mail advance and/or review copies to:
James J. Gormley
Vampire Books Navigator
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377 Park Avenue South
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Thanks!
James J. Gormley