Anne Billson - Suckers

[dem bones]

Anne Billson - Suckers (Pan, 1993)

Tom Stimpson

Blurb:
Modern vamps wear pinstripe and pearls in search of their prey ...
As the chic glass towers of the Docklands rise above the old castles of the City, a new tide of greed and hunger is sweeping London. The writing is on the wall:
Feast and enjoy.
Dora, a hard-nosed and cynical 'creative consultant', is dismayed at what she is witnessing. She thought the menace eliminated a decade before ... chopped into small, easily hidden pieces.
But now black is back and for the first time in years night-time is the right time!
There are killings to be made and we're not talking financial ...


Yuppie vampires! This looks like it's going to be a fast read, and that's mostly down to our heroine, the perma-cynic Dora, whose hobbies include persecuting poor Patricia Rice, the young woman who unknowingly gazumped her on that ground floor flat near Waterloo Station. As if sending anonymous messages informing her that "her every move was being watched by mR BoNes and his BoDy ROt CReW, members of a Californian killer-hippy cult which was plotting to take over the whole world, starting at Lambeth", Dora takes it all one spiteful step further by feeding her luckless victim a hefty dose of Def Leppard album over the telephone. Presumably, this sadistic streak comes in handy in her career as a creative consultant for the more vacuous glossy style mags. It certainly seems to have been an asset when, a decade earlier, together with Duncan, she endured the nightmare that would haunt them both for the rest of their lives.

Dora is still in love with Duncan but he's now married to a model, Lulu, a low-wattage bimbo with big tits the way Dora tells it though her opinions of other women do tend toward the catty. At least Lulu doesn't go in for little black dresses like every other woman in the city. Dunc and Dora share a phobia about those who affect black clothing after ... her. And now, on the evidence of a spectacularly tasteless Bellini magazine photo-shoot, she's back and taunting them - her, the monstrous vampire they carved up thirteen years ago. Dora pays a visit to the publishers at Multiglom Tower in yuppie capital Canary Wharf, to see what she can find out ...

To be continued ....

[franklinmarsh]

Yay! I hope I've still got this. Good old Anne Billson - along with Kim Newman a City Limits film reviewer- her celluloid of choice was horror films and gross-out humour I seem to recall. Did she ever write anything else - apart from the BFI guide to John Carpenter's The Thing?

[dem bones]

Yep. Earlier she did Dream Demon for NEL in 1989, and later Stiff Lips (Pan, 1997) plus a non-fiction Buffy book among others, not that i've read any of 'em.

i'm liking Suckers. It's all very London and seems to be one of those novels where the 'good' guys, the 'bad' guys and everyone else are equally detestable. Not much by way of horror in the first 40 or so pages (if you disclude references to the Isle Of Dogs, Yuppies and Def Leppard) but i'm quiety confident Ms. Billson will get there.

[dem bones]

" I homed in on the source of the sound, and found myself creeping along a passageway lined with pillars; to the right they opened on to a moonlit courtyard; to my left they stood guard over the dim outlines of family tombs.
I had my ideas, most of them far-fetched. I thought she might be involved in espionage, or terrorism, or a spare-parts surgery racket. Or a black-magic cult whose members danced naked and sold their stories to the News of the World. I was an incurable romantic with a vivid imagination, but it stopped short of embracing the paranormal as a part of everyday life. I had always liked horror movies, but had never imagined the creatures they depicted were real. I didn't believe in vampires. But the process by which disbelief turned to acceptance was fairly swift, and it started around the next corner.

Not made as short work of Suckers as i'd hoped, but it's been brilliant so far. Part one ends in brutal murder and that puts an end to Dora's inspired reign of terror versus little miss gazump.

In part two, we learn about Violet, the three-hundred year old vampire, and how she stole Duncan from under our horrible heroine's nose, just when she was finally shaping up to pounce. Dora takes to stalking the mystery beauty over London as there's something distinctly not quite right about her. Eventually she trails her to Kensal Green Cemetery and catches her in the act! As vampire's go, Violet at least spares some thought for her victims. On this occasion, the doomed donor is a vagrant who she first plies with Lamb's Navy Rum, Carling Black Label and speed so at least he goes out like a trooper. Having feasted on his blood, Violet herself is so out of it, she doesn't notice Dora lurking in the shadows. But a sinister hippie does ....

[dem bones]

"Grandpa used to call her Veilchen. And he used to tell me stories, like that one by Gogol, The Viy, and he said Gogol had known her too and had written the story about her. It used to scare the shit out of me. Do you know what I'm talking about?"
"No", I lied. The story was in my Roger Vadim's Book Of Bloodsuckers."

Don't know why i put off reading this for so long, it's brilliant! Seventy pages to go and i really don't want it to be over. Part two having ended in a satisfying welter of vampire slaying, dismemberment and a crafty snack on human finger, we return to the present day crisis. Dora has festooned her flat with garlic bulbs and religious icons, her body similar, until she looks like a refugee from Christian Death circa their pop period. Duncan has hit the bottle. His wife, Lulu of the enormous knockers has been taken on by the International Murasaki Conglomerate (Multiform are their Canary ... sorry, Molasses Wharf satellite), thoroughly vampirised and fast-tracked into overnight stardom on the back of a violent perfume commercial ("Kuroi: They'll die for the woman who's wearing it"). Dora obtains incriminating photographs of the Mutliglom executives at play and fires them off to all the news agencies together with a hilarious anonymous letter, but only one ever picks up on it. "The Sunday Sport ... had plastered the headline LONDON SHAKEN BY VAMPIRE EPIDEMIC across its front page, with a fuzzy reproduction of Dino's photographs dwarfed by a large colour shot of a busty blonde with fangs." As it happens, The Sport are on the money and the Vampires really are taking over! Lulu returns home to sink her fangs into Duncan but is dispatched gruesomely in the bath, Dora (who is not a little on the twisted side) barely bothering to conceal her glee.

And now, Goth-ed up to the hilt, Dora has infiltrated the Bar Nouveau, the yuppie vampire hangout in the shadow of the Multiglom building, slightly appalled that death hasn't improved the clientele any, their talk is still dominated by money, business, mortgage, blah. But then a hapless Canadian tourist ambles in and it all turns very the Midnight Mess sequence from Vault Of Terror ....