Sunglasses After Dark

'Sunglasses After Dark' is the first book in a book vampire series. Published in 1989, it was one of the books that kicked off the Urban Fantasy genre. It was a debut novel that was so ground-breaking that it won the Bram Stoker award.

Sad to say, I'd never heard of it. I was just looking for a book written or set in the 1980s that I could use for my Stranger Things Halloween Bingo square. I didn't have particularly high expectations. I thought a thirty-two-year-old book that kicked off a genre would be showing its age and be mainly of historical interest, but 'Sunglasses After Dark' strutted onto to stage of my imagination with all the bravado of the young tough and talented and demanded my attention, looking me in the eyes and saying show more with confidence that felt like a threat, 'My name is Sonja Blue and you've never met anyone like me'.

I gulped the novel down in two days. It was fresh and clever and filled with casual, graphic violence and transactional sex that felt raw and real rather than contrived and exploitative. Sonja Blue lives in a world splattered with blood, much of it her own work. Sonja Blue lives a heartless, vicious, violent world so completely lacking in glamour or romance that it makes other vampire books seem like Disney World.

The story starts in classic gothic style with the nightshift warder at the mental asylum who, hardened by decades of experience, is unafraid of the patients on the Danger Ward. Except for the women kept in an unfurnished padded cell, who wears nothing but a straightjacket and who scares him even in his dreams. The book launches into rapid, violent action that unleashes the strange woman on the world and introduces us to the two identities who share a body, one a teenage American heiress and the other a predator who is always hungry. Then we meet the baddy. A woman evangelist in a blonde wig and a gold lamé pantsuit who has her own TV channel where she performs miracle cures live on air. The pace slows a little, the timeframes widen and the geographic settings become more exotic as we get the backstory of both women both of which are filled with abusive men, violence, rage and more than human abilities. From there we build to the inevitable ballet of hate-driven violence as Sonja Blue confronts who she is and seeks retribution.

As I read the novel I was struck by how its strengths were those of a graphic novel: vivid original, uncompromising images, strong lead characters each with a distinctive style, strange creatures in exotic settings, a fast-moving plot, an atmosphere of evil and corruption and spectacular bloody carnage at regular intervals. Sonja Blue would have been at home on the pages of '2000AD' in the Eighties.

The books were turned into graphic novels in 2014 with stunningly stylish artwork by Stanley Shaw.



'Sunglasses After Dark' was a fun ride from beginning to end and a great start to a new series. I'll be reading the other three books in the coming months. show less

Stylishly dated, somewhat slight vampire fiction from the late 1980s. After ‘Salem’s Lot (1975), Interview with a Vampire (1976), The Delicate Dependency (1982), and Fevre Dream (1982) but before Lucius Shepard’s The Golden (1993). Unfortunately, Sunglasses After Dark isn’t comparable to any of these other, better novels. So, what does it have to offer (other than its vastly superior cover, by Mel Odom: seriously, look at that lusciously stark cover art, and imagine it coolly regarding you from a wire stand in an Ohio airport in the first year of George H. W. Bush’s only term)? The novel follows the lurching story of Sonja Blue, once an heiress with a bright future and now virtually orphaned after being brutally attacked and show more cast aside. Much of the novel (its best passages) sketches out the trajectory of Sonja’s second maturation. She moonlights as a prostitute in Europe, befriends an occult scholar, learns how to kill (there's a striking scene where she kills a vampire who's been snaring his prey by pretending to be the ghost of Jim Morrison, near the singer's grave in Paris), and makes new enemies in the largely disguised society of “Pretenders,” which consists of various creatures of the night, both vampires and otherwise. Here you can see gritty urban fantasy in its middle years, halfway between Fritz Leiber’s “Megapolisomancy” and Mike Mignola‘s weird fairytale underground. Collins brings a resolutely punky black-leather-and-mirrorshades sensibility to complement the grunginess of the urban vampire tale (as opposed to the gothic-historical flair of Rice, Talbot, Martin, and Shepard). Partly this comes out in the novel’s surprisingly graphic violence, which borders on splatterpunk, even by paperback horror standards in the 1980s. Partly it comes out in Collins’ ability to translate native gothicisms of the subgenre into spiky, modern prose that wears its cool factor on its sleeve without irony or self-consciousness. An irritating subplot involving a televangelist’s demonic widow (probably modeled after Tammy Faye Baker, whose involvement in Jim Bakker’s downfall was highly mediated from 1987-1989) adds nothing. An excellent taste of Collins’ language: “They were Siamese twins, joined at the groin by a traitorous piece of meat.” show less

This is the horror I've been waiting to enjoy. While it's gruesome, the descriptions don't seem (at least to me) to be there for the shock or horror porn value like many other horror books I've read, which I don't enjoy. The Sonja/Denise/The Other dynamic was confusing at times and I'm not sure it was ever settled, but overall I enjoyed this book and its perfect balance of dark horror vibe with characters and plot I could invest in.

Readers should be aware: there is a lot of graphic rape in this book. There is also a lot of graphic violence, but I suppose that is to be expected in a vampire book. Nancy Collins is an evocative writer with a gift for setting a mood. Sunglasses After Dark was a pretty fresh (in my opinion) take on the genre, where the vampire is a woman wronged, seeking revenge.

I first read this having got the school library to order it for me, I then got 'talked to' for ordering inappropriate books (but they still let me read it). Moving from reading fantasy like dragon lance and earth sea books at the time I remember it having a gritty and real feel.

"Her knee pistoned up smashing into his denimed crotch and rupturing his testicles; it was as if a napalm bomb had gone off in Rafe's jeans."
This stuck with me for the last 20 years (as did the second chat that week from the library staff about my investigation into what napalm was and why I shouldn't be looking for recipe to make it)

I also loved the way that the monsters were in plain sight and it's just people didn't recognise them as such (book explains show more better) and the reactions she has to her new life.

I'm going to read again to see if I really was to young (I was sure I wasn't at the time). show less

#634 in our old book database. Not rated.