Sina Karimi Karimi itibaren 8184 Baierdorf-Dorf, Austria
Feeding on blood is a tough way to make a living. -- Bill Schutt, Dark Banquet: Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood-Feeding Creatures This novel is really five closely linked short stories, of which the second, third and fifth are very good; the fourth, barely mediocre; and the first, eye-rendingly awful. I recommend speed-reading, tinted goggles, and health insurance. (I hope your policy covers this sort of thing.) There is no magic in this book, no turning into bats, no unaccountable difficulties with running water or cloves or garlic. This book is the answer to a question: what would a vampire -- an obligate sanguivore of human appearance, requiring human prey -- be like, if it were a real species that had to make a living in the world as we know it? Charnas' answer is Dr Weyland. He is tougher, stronger and smarter than most humans; also cold, brutal, contemptuous. He understands our habits, and indeed our feelings, when he really has to. He finds empathy inconvenient (and in this, I suppose, he is as human as a West Bank settler, diamond trader or firearms lobbyist). He is moved by human music, and resents us for it. You probably won't like Weyland. (I doubt antelopes much care for cheetahs.) Don't read this book if that's important to you. But you'll miss out on something very special. I'll try to describe it, but I'll have to be a little abstract; to spoil it would be criminal, or at least uncouth. I've never read a detective novel with a solution I found satisfying. But if someday I do, I think it will feel like reading the last chapter of The Vampire Tapestry. With one difference: in this book, we're not told there's a mystery; I discovered its existence only at the moment that I glimpsed the solution. But it's there, hidden in plain sight and with the utmost fairness, from the very beginning. And it unfolds itself elegantly, inevitably, from this book's underlying question: what would a vampire have to be, in our world, to make a living?