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Post by dem bones on Apr 15, 2008 10:12:32 GMT
Bernhardt J. Hurwood - By Blood Alone (Charter, 1979) First There Was Interview With The Vampire: Now There Is By Blood Alone.
'I was born Zachary Lucius Sexton In the city of New York on August fifteenth, eighteen eleven."
Thus begins the taped account of the unusual man who consulted Dr. Edgar A. Wallman, Manhattan psychiatrist — in the year 1979.
Who is Zachary Lucius Sexton? What is his bizarre delusion? Or is it a delusion? These are the questions that plague private detective Russell Dorne and Dr. Edgar Wallman.
It is a strange case for both the detective and the doctor. Dorne must find the murderer of a young playboy and solve the mystery of the fully clothed skeleton in a crypt at Wildwood Cemetery. The doctor must solve the mystery of Zachary Sexton. For both, time — as they know it — is running out. For Sexton, whose strange story this is, the chilling climax may just be the beginning ...."I'm not one of those TV PI's who goes around making a career out of antagonizing cops."Manhattan, 1979. Russell Dorne, a Private Eye in his mid-fifties, is hired by notoriously publicity shy millionaire Jason Everett Garson to find out who murdered his drug-partying pimp of a son. They weren't close, but you can understand Mr. Moneybags' sense of outrage as Garson jnr.'s corpse wasn't the stuff of open-casket funerals - he'd been decapitated and drained of blood. Dorne visits his old buddy, Deputy Police Commissioner Carl Mariani who's currently being driven to distraction by the antics of "another Jack the Ripper" preying on not only prostitutes but pimps, druggies, derelicts and sundry street people, the more transient the better. Garson's killer could well be the same man, but why should the butcher suddenly opt for so high profile a victim? Meanwhile, in Brooklyn's Wildwood Cemetery, the black clad skeleton of a man who died 150 years ago is discovered up and out of it's vault. The clothing is relatively recent, and his wallet contains over $100 and the card of noted psychiatrist, Dr. Edgar Wallman. Dorne consults Dr. Mike Leonard, a young pathologist, who tells him a blood-soaked handkerchief found in the jacket pocket bore substantial traces of LSD while the rare blood type is identical to that of Garson. What is going on? and what is the relevance of that extra coffin in the Gorse mausoleum? To be continued .....
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Post by dem bones on Apr 18, 2008 7:49:25 GMT
One more post should do for By Blood Alone, but first, here's a little interlude for vampire buffs ("Buffy's"?).
The rest of the novel (p.70 -245) is devoted to a transcript of psychiatrist Dr. Wallman's sessions with Zachary Lucius Sexton's, the suicidal vampire. These are all very well until Sexton gets onto the thorny subject of vampire literature: "I can assure you, sir, that every word ever written on the subject has been nothing more than a shadowy reflection of hidden truths". This chapter is really all about the author reminding us that he's an authority on matters undead, hence references to Krafft-Ebing, Dom Calmet's Phantom World, Ernest Jones' On The Nightmare, Summers' Vampire In Europe - the usual. Then:
"It is my opinion that there are only two works of fiction on the subject worthy of survival. One is Le Fanu's Carmilla, subtle in its presentation and deep in its implications. The second work of value is the recent Interview With The Vampire. In it, Ms. Rice, the author, came closer to the truth than any purported non-fiction ever produced. It would not surprise me if she had indeed conducted such an interview at one time, and presented it as a work of fiction knowing that it was the only way in which she could present the facts."
Now, what is wrong with that paragraph? I'll give you a clue. It starts going awry with the words " The second work of value is ...." Still, I guess it's best to keep the over-rated old bat sweet if you're gonna rip off her premise to the extent By Blood Alone does.
Thankfully, Wallman gets him off the subject and onto the story of his life. Turns out that the young, pre-undead Sexton was the American equivalent of a Hooray Henry whose landowning father's generous allowance and patience finally ran out when young Lucius was embroiled in one scandal too many - the pregnant lover he abandoned killed herself. Fortunately for him, the fledgling police force were on the look out for young men of breeding to form an elite, highly secretive detective unit, independent of the roughneck cops who sometimes took their pledge to uphold law and order to heart and arrested men of influence! Sexton was corrupt and unscrupulous enough to do very well for himself until the entire industry was threatened with regulation. He hot-tailed it to Paris, continuing his debauch until that fateful night in Pere-Lachaise cemetery when he was accosted by what he first took to be the hunted graveyard ghoul - Sergeant Bertrand - whose necrophiliac ways were the talk of France. His assailant was far deadlier - a vampire!
"Women and children, particularly at this low stratum of society were the most satisfactory victims. Luring them to their deaths was simplicity itself. Invariably my female victims believed that they had found a protector .... The children, gullible little waifs that they were, often as not were homeless bastards, offspring of prostitutes and beggars, unloved and unwanted in most cases. By terminating their miserable existences I was doing them and society a favour."
Sexton's tips on how a vampire should dispose of his or her victims' corpse (to prevent it coming back: who needs the extra competition ?) make for compelling reading but they're the only really nasty bits in the story give or take his radio phone-in politics. He could never be accused of cramming too much unliving into his 165 years, though. Meeting someone who claims to have been Edgar Allan Poe's drinking buddy on his last binge - you and me both, sonny - and arriving at Millers Court just moments too late to catch Jack the Ripper in the act of butchering Mary Kelly are as exciting as it gets if you disclude his strange relationship with his long-term undead girlfriend, Cicely, fifty years his senior but condemned to retain the body of a beautiful 24 year old until someone stakes her. For all their alleged eroticism, according to Sexton, animated corpses can't experience the thrill of sex or any emotion beyond anger.
Dr. Wallman takes his patient's elaborate, paranoid fantasies in good spirit, until grisly newspaper reports seem to bear out Sexton's story. By the time of his disappearance and the discovery of the skeleton, Wallman has him down as a ten carat psycho and is on the verge of calling in the police. Finally, too late, he knows that his patient was the real deal ...
I'd probably have enjoyed this more if I'd not read Arabella Randolphe's staggeringly insane The Vampire Tapes (Futura, 1978), still by far my favourite of the Anne Rice rip offs, but this is a painless read and at least the vampire chances upon a novel demise!
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