Nancy Kilpatrick - Child Of The Night

[dem bones]

Nancy Kilpatrick - Child Of The Night (Raven, 1996)

Cover image: Pete Rozycki

Blimey! It's not often I feast my sunken eyeballs on a modern vampire novel, far less one sporting a "move over A*ne R**e" alleged endorsement on the cover! Off the top of my head I can't recall being knocked sideways by anything the genre has had to offer since John Steakley's awesome tale of swashbuckling search-end-stake merchants, Vampire$ in 1988, but I'm pleased to have stuck with Child Of The Night as it's really rather horrible fun.

Carol Robins, a thirty-something American law clerk, ups everything and relocates to Bordeaux following what amounts to the collapse of her life. Husband Rob has shacked up with another guy, contracted AIDS and, to pile horror upon horrors, has since confided that he may well have infected her with the deadly virus.

Things can only get better so inevitably, they don't. Hardly has Carol had time to adapt to her new surroundings than a chance meeting with handsome devil and all round nasty piece of work Andre plunges her deep into a new nightmare every bit as awful as the one she's but recently vacated. Having witnessed one of the dapper gent's murders, Carol is bundled in back of his chauffeured Limo, raped and only spared her life when out of sheer desperation she suggests a dreadful compact; for a fortnights duration, she, Carol, will be Andre's obedient slave and then go lose herself on the other side of the globe never to even think of him again. Satisfied with this arrangement, Andre takes her home to meet his 'family',a quartet of weirdies who, like him, claim to be vampires. Nonsense, of course; they're just the run of the mill patently deluded wannabes you meet at many a vampyre-goth do....

Aren't they?

Reluctantly released by her tantrum-throwing, often sadistic host once the two weeks are up, Carol leaves France for home determined to put her shattered existence back together .... only to discover she's carrying the monster's child.

That's roughly the gist of part one of this enticing read and to give much more away would only spoil it for those yet to become acquainted. It's enough to note that Carol is as determined to keep her baby as Andre is intent on seizing it. As Carol is already only too painfully aware, you cross these bloodsuckers at your peril, and so far, by their standards, she's been tolerated in the same way a farmer might take a shine to a particular piglet. But now that patience is a virtue they can no longer afford ....

Carols repugnance of and yet strange attraction toward her tormentor(s) is skillfully depicted by the author, as is her slow but sure transformation from capable but broken and confused victim to resourceful and courageous mother, a tenacious adversary for the worst of 'em as she'll need to be if she's to wrest the tug of love child from the vampires' clutches. The vampires too, initially as unsympathetic a bunch as you're unlikely to encounter this side of a particularly spiteful Lawrence James novel, are far from the ciphers we meet all too often in the realm of the undead. It's not that they're evil for evil's sake, just utterly ruthless in protecting their interests against a numerically dominant species they regard as little more than livestock, so in that respect they're not all that different to yuppies, I guess.