Nancy A. Collins - Sunglasses After Dark

[dem bones]

Nancy A. Collins - Sunglasses After Dark (Futura, 1990: Pan USA 1989)

Erotic Dreams, Bloodsoaked Nightmares

When first we meet her, Sonja Blue is trussed in a straitjacket, the inmate of a padded cell in Elysian fields lunatic asylum. Don't worry for her though, for in only slightly less time than it takes to tell she's made good her escape, leaving Dr. Claude Hagerty to wonder how on earth she managed it. It's not really his month. He's tormented by the image of Sonja leaning over the corpse of a warden lapping blood from his gored neck, and why were the authorities so insistent on covering up the murder. Meanwhile, Sonja's busy celebrating her freedom by decimating a mean crew known as the Blue Monkeys who have the effrontery to attempt to gang bang her in a bar.

So we've established that Sonja Blue is one tough lady, magnificently well equipped for getting herself in and out of trouble, but why is she so feisty? It all began when she was plain Denise Thorne, the sixteen year old daughter of obscenely wealthy parents, who caught the eye of Sir Morgan, a King Vampire, who raped her in the back of his Rolls Royce then dumped her in the street to fend for herself. Sunglasses After Dark follows her adventures from that day forth culminating in a showdown with evil televangelist Catherine Wheele and an atrocity to rival the Rev. Jim Jones' antics in the jungles of Guyana (the media love this last episode which gives rise to the screaming headline Mad Night). To say it gets very convoluted along the way doesn't really do it justice - Collins sure crams plenty into 250 pages. As a fledgling undead, Denise is taken in by stage cockney geezer Joe Hunt and embarks on a successful career in prostitution, adopting the name Sonja Blue to give herself an air of steaminess. But Hunt is a paranoid, violent man, and after one too many beatings, she turns on her pimp and tears him to pieces. Sonja flees to the continent where she continues to ply her trade, by now specialising in "fancy passions", until she teams up with sympathetic occultist Erich Ghilardi and embarks on a long-term search and destroy mission versus her own kind. These include a child vampire in a Frankfurt slum that once served as the Gestapo's HQ and a creature of the night masquerading as Jim Morrison's ghost in Père Lachaise!

When the loyal Ghilardi dies of natural causes - about the only character in the novel who does - our heroine returns to London by the scenic route (ie, via Japan and Hong Kong), intent on avenging herself on Sir Morgan. Teaming up with Chaz, a small-time hood who operates as her Judas Goat, she sets about cleaning the City of it's undead, one of whom, Jordie the Glaswegian ogre happens to be Morgan's chauffeur, so it can only be a matter of time. But by now her nemesis Catherine Wheele is onto her - Dierdre's mother has offered this charlatan a fortune to locate her missing daughter - and has her committed to the asylum where she's filmed behaving like a circus geek, biting the heads off chickens, ever on the lookout for larger, bloodier prey ...

Collins expanded Sunglasses After Dark into the 'Sonja Blue Chronicles' as is apparently the law with vampire novels, whereupon i completely lost interest, but i enjoyed this for it's lunatic pace and incredibly busy plot, just not as much as everybody else seems to have when it came out. Within a few years kickass vampire babes would be prominent, but Collins deserves credit for resisting the easy "let's write another Interview With A Vampire clone" option and there's plenty of sex and agro to distract you from the sporadic a-woman's-got-to-do-what-a-woman's-got-to-do/ a-heroine-is-always-alone mawk.

Bloody hate that cover, though.

[andydecker]

I loved this book. Kinda sad that Collins never wrote a thing as good after that. There were some nice short stories, she sure displayed a mean streak when she wanted to.

But her other novels were always just kind of mediocre. And her comics were terrible. Especially her run of Swamp Thing.

Still, Sonia Blue spawned dozens of pale imitations, especially in comics - I don´t want to know how many creators of the Bad Girl craze read this book.

Oh, and you are right. Lousy cover.

[andydecker]

Nancy A. Collins - Midnight Blue: The Sonja Blue Collection (White Wolf Publishing, 1995, tp, 560 pages)

Cover: Thom Ang

This omnibus collects three Sonja Blue novels Sunglasses After Dark (1989), In the Blood (1991) and Paint It Black (1995).

It is a bit sad that the first novel never got the cover it deserved, and the sequels didn't either. Sunglasses after Dark is still a good tale with a convincing anti-heroine and a lot of supernatural mayhem. Like Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire it can be described as a Foundation novel. Collins' concepts were often (shamelessly) copied in dozens of later urban fantasy series about vampires.

Considering the efforts White Wolf Publishing put into their new editions of Michael Moorcock or Fritz Leiber, this is kind of dull and very basic. But it did its job and is long OoP, the current eBook editions are clumsily 'modernized' in places with the inclusions of cell phones and such.