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Post by andydecker on Jul 9, 2024 16:26:22 GMT
Barbara Hambly – Immortal Blood aka Those Who Hunt the Night (Unwin Paperbacks, 1988, 306 pages; Del Rey/Ballantine, 1988)  Among the flood of vampire novels at the end of the 80s was American writer Barbara Hambly. She started with classic Fantasy with a feminist bend, which at the time meant she wrote about a heroine instead some generic hero. Capable of producing a eminently readable and slick style, she found lot of work, doing everything from original series to Star Trek to Star Wars. Nowadays she concentrates on her Benjamin January mystery series featuring a free man of colour, a musician and physician, in New Orleans in the antebellum years, which has produced 19 novels to date. As with so many other writers of her generation the series started at Bantam Books with mass market distribution and can now be found at Severn House. Immortal Blood was the start of yet another series, the James Asher Chronicles. At the turn of the century, James Asher, a former spy for Queen Victoria, now teaching at Oxford, and his young wife Lydia are forced by the vampire Don Simon Ysidro into hunting down a dangerous killer of London's vampires. This is a straight historical vampire novel without much sex, concentrating instead of yet of building another vampire universe and a lot of action. It is more adventure than horror, but it is well written. Immortal Blood won the 1989 Locus Award for Best Horror and got a new title in the US. To date Hambly wrote 9 novels about her heroes, the last one of 2019 had WWI as a background. |
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