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Post by andydecker on Apr 18, 2022 10:49:21 GMT
Christopher Golden - Spike & Dru : Pretty Maids all in A Row (Pocket Books, hc, 2000, 305 pages)  Christopher Golden is a American writer who has published more than 100 novels and a lot of comics, switching between his own work and media tie-ins. He began his career with the horror novel Of Saints and Shadows, a vampire novel, in the 90s, but quickly diversified into YA, novelizations and comics. Golden is one of those writers who has a slick, readable style which combines larger-than-life characters and often comic booky plots. It makes for easy reading. Concerning the Buffyverse, he was there at the beginning of the tie-in flood, both in prose and comics, later often with co-writers. Amongst other works he did produce one of those Urban Fantasy series together with Buffy actress Amber Benson called Ghosts of Albion, a strange mixture of Historical Fiction and the Supernatural where you have young people fighting Evil in Victorian times, this time with the help of the ghosts of Byron, Nelson and Bodicea. This novel concentrates on two of the more popular villains of the show, the vampires Spike and Drusilla. The story takes place in 1940 - which takes it out of continuity of the tv-series and makes this mostly a stand alone story - and is the usual mix of a lot of comic book demons running around and the villains being anti-heroes. Golden has a good ear for tv-characters and his Spike & Dru are pretty well done. It is a competently written novel if you don't mind fiction being superficial and the horror watered down.
For Buffy nerds may be interesting that Golden actually manages to to foreshadow plots later used in the tv series. A short scene early in the novel has Spike and Dru invading a German U-Boat which just has torpedoed their transport to Britain and killing the whole crew. An Angel episode in season 5 also takes mostly place on a German U-Boar during the war with Angel and Spike. Also part of the plot are the "Potentials", the future Slayers.
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