Christopher Buehlman

You start to imagine that Beuhlman had a print of Bruegel's "The Triumph of Death" hanging over him while he was writing this, the prose so successfully evokes the feeling of a barren world peopled only by laughing tormentors and hopeless, terrified peasants. In this story, the black death and the second crusade are cast as salvos in the unfolding biblical apocalypse, and only an excommunicated knight and a divinely inspired tween girl can hold off the forces of The Adversary. I really show more enjoyed this book, really really really. I probably made a mistake by taking it with me on a camping trip, because the many disturbing horror scenes (which would delight in the daytime) became a little spooky in the middle of the woods at night. show less

4.5/5 stars!

Vampires and American muscle cars. It's like this book was tailored to me personally. And on top of that, it ROCKED!

A family is on a road trip on an American highway one night, with their young son in the back seat. A car with no lights on pulls up next to them, grabs the arm of the boy, (he had his arm out the window), and poof, the boy is gone. Next thing you know, the car is crashed on the side of the road, with both mom and dad badly injured. Where did the boy go? Who took show more him? Will he ever see his father and mother again? You'll have to read this to find out.

There's no sparkling here and there's no romance, (well, maybe a little, but it's a different type of romance.) Instead, these vamps traveled in a pack during the late 60's. For me, the time period was a perfect, refreshing setting because: 1. the cars were all American,(this was a time before the invasion of imported cars), 2. I'm an American car gal AND I love muscle cars and 3. there were no cell phones or other technologies distracting me from the story.

At this point in my horror-reading life, I'm vampired out. It takes a special book to get me excited about them, and this one was it. I loved the return of vampires with hypnotizing skills, (remember when Dracula did that hypnotizing thing?), ones that can make you do his/her bidding and then forget you ever saw them. I enjoyed the fact that these vampires had other special skills which I'll leave you to discover on your own, (but trust me the skills were COOL). I loved that these monsters were just that: MONSTERS in capital letters. Lastly, I also loved the fact that the protagonist was strong and female, never exactly sure of her strength but pressing on just the same. Jude was one to root for and root I did.



Now I'm sad that I only have one Christopher Buehlman book left to read. If you're out there, sir, I hope you're working on something new!

If you haven't read any of Mr. Buehlman's work as of yet, you should rectify that-and quickly! I doubt you'd be disappointed with any of them, but I highly recommend The Suicide Motor Club! It might just restore your faith in vampire horror stories and give you a new author to read!

You can get your copy here: The Suicide Motor Club

*I obtained my copy through my awesome public library because I'm usually broke. Libraries RULE* show less

'Does the world need another book about vampires?', I imagine you asking me. I think about all the derivative, money-for-old-trope vampire fiction that gets turned out each year, glamorising violence with a dab of romance and a hint of compulsion and the illicit joys of willing submission and I know why you ask the question so I pause before I respond with:

'The world needs a vampire book by Christopher Buehlman. It might even need any book by Christopher Buehlman. He has re-thought the whole show more vampire thing from the ground up. He doesn't pull any punches and he isn't just writing to entertain. He's writing to talk about how the powerful succeed on preying on the weak, not just because they are powerful but because the weak delude themselves about their own strength and their commitment to survival.'

Yeah, I know, it sounds as exciting a writing a philosophy essay, but Buehlman's gift is to be able to demonstrate these big ideas in a story that is full of larger-than-life people, violence and enough surprises to keep you turning the pages eagerly right up to the last page.

He also writes rich prose that sticks in the memory. Like this:

Happiness is the province of those who ask few questions.

Buehlman's book is about deception, especially self-deception, and he illustrates this not only by giving the book a structure designed to deceive but by telling us that he's doing it, knowing that despite what's he's told us, we're going to fall for the deception anyway.

The deception is announced on the first page. It's a page that made sense to me the first time I read it. It was stylish and fun and even made me smile. I wonder if fish smile when they bite down on the hook beneath the lure? It's also a page that meant something entirely different when I re-read it after finishing the novel. The whole novel reminds me of an optical illusion where a single drawing shows either a young woman or an old woman, depending on how your brain interprets what your eyes see. It's easy to see the young woman but once you see the old woman, it's hard to unsee her.


So on that first page, our narrator, Joey Peacock, warns us:

If you’re looking for a story about nice people doing nice things, this isn’t for you. You will be burdened with an unreliable narrator who will disappoint and repel you at every turn.

It turns out that Joey Peacock is the most unreliable narrator I've ever met and I discounted his warning as a sales pitch.

Then Joey tells me what the book is really about. He continues:

Still with me? Too bad for you. I can’t wait to break your heart. I’m going to take you someplace dark and damp where good people don’t go. I’m going to introduce you to monsters. Real ones. I’m going to tell you stories about hurting people, and if you like those stories, it means you’re bad. Shall we go on? Good. I hate people who pretend they’re something they’re not.

Even with this clear statement of intent, I failed to recognise the monsters and was caught by surprise when very bad things happened to people I'd grown to care about. When I read the page for a second time, the last sentence of that quote read like a taunt. Of course, by then I understood that even the title didn't mean what I'd thought it meant.

For the first quarter of the book, I watched Joey Peacock, vampire, strut his stuff around the clubs and the subways of 1970s New York City. At first, he seemed to be all appetite and attitude but by the end of Part 1, I knew he was more than that but I didn't know what.

Shortly after that, Buehlman gave me another signpost to what he was doing, although I read it simply as a clever Dialogue. Cvetko, an intellectual vampire from Europe is asking Joey to make up a story and tell it to him. Joey glibly says:

'“Oh, you want me to lie?"

Cvetko's reply makes some Literary Fiction look limp by comparison. He says:

“A mundane lie hiding an exotic truth is deception; an exotic lie hiding a mundane truth is storytelling. Deception may be necessary to preserve life, but storytelling makes life worth living. So make my life worth living.

At that point, I should have asked myself, 'How do I tell the difference between deception and storytelling?' The answer I'd give now is: 'You can't. Not until the lying is over and you see the nature of the truth that's been hidden."

Beuhlman warned me he'd break my heart. I should have realised that to do that, I'd have to fall in love first. Yet, I was still surprised by the intimacy in Joey Peacock's storytelling. I became Joey's confidante, even if he didn't always tell the truth. It felt like full disclosure, like an offer of friendship or perhaps just a complete indifference to criticism. It certainly felt like a need to be understood. That was hard to resist.

About halfway through, I thought I had started to understand what Joey had meant when he told me on the first page that he was an unreliable narrator. I could see he was hiding something and it seemed to me that Cvetko nailed it when he told Joey:

'You do not believe the myth of your own ignorance. But you perpetuate it out of habit, out of a desire to align with the ideals of American pop culture. Charisma, action, dumb luck.'

I thought then that Joey was hiding his own comprehension. I was almost right I was also completely wrong. I moved on, happy at my own insight, and eager for more exchanges between Joey and Cvetko. Here's one I enjoyed. Joey is complaining about their leader's reluctance to punish someone who has broken the rules the vampires live by. When Joey says, "It's not right.", Cvetko gives a wonderful series of replies:

“Neither was the suppression of Hungary by the Soviets. Or the invasion of Tibet by the Chinese.”

“Yeah, I remember people saying something about Tibet. The Dalai Lama, right?”

“Yet both acts went unpunished. Why?”

“What’s that got to do with anything? I’m talking about our neighborhood.”

“It is only a question of scale. Why did not the brave American army march into Budapest and save the Hungarian resistance who begged Mr. Eisenhower, in the name of democracy and freedom, to take their side? Why did we sit by while the Soviet tanks rolled in and hammered the beautiful old city?”

“That happened?”

“You have just written the epitaph of America."

One of the things I liked most about 'The Lesser Dead' was how the monsters kept becoming more monstrous as I got to know them. The worst monsters in this are so bad that I failed to imagine the scale of their badness and so underestimated them throughout the book. The violence kept escalating but what was more frightening was my slowly growing awareness of what the violence meant.

I was very impressed by this book. It was fun. It was scary. It was much deeper than it seemed to be and it never lied to me, it just let me lie to myself.

Christopher Buehlman is now on my must-read list. I've already ordered his fantasy novel. 'The Blacktongue Thief' that's due for publication on 13th May. show less

Frank Nichols had carried on an affair with Eudora Lehman for two years before her husband discovered them. Disgraced and blacklisted, Frank has been unable to find another job in a University, but, in what appears to be a great stroke of luck, he inherits a house from his late mother’s sister. She warns him to just sell the house – to not move down to Georgia – but he decides that it would be a good idea to write a book about his great-grandfather who, after the end of the civil war, show more refused to release his slaves and treated them so badly that they rose up in revolt and killed him, his family and all his livestock. So, he and Dora move to Whitbrow, Georgia, where Dora has been offered a teaching position to replace Frank’s aunt in the high school. However, it’s not long after they arrive that Frank begins to notice the superstitious awe with which the townfolk view Megiddo forest, across the river. Once a month, on the full moon, they send two pigs over the river – no one is really sure how this began, although there are a lot of rumors. However, times are hard, and the townfolk decide to stop wasting pigs they could be eating. That’s when things begin to go horribly wrong. That’s when people begin to die …

I’ve read a lot of creepy books over the past couple of months; I think this is the creepiest. The build-up of suspense and horror starts slowly and subtly, with hints and clues and vague allegations. However, once those across the river are revealed completely, things progress rapidly. A crescendo is reached and it seems like that might be the end, only for things to start back up, reach another crescendo … it’s like watching a horror movie when you think the monster is dead, but they aren’t really and they pop back out at you time and again. I loved it - I think it might give me nightmares, but I loved it! If you like horror, you will LOVE “Those Across the River.” show less