Mad scientist vampires! Yes! ( )

Mad scientist vampires! Yes! ( )

Perhaps I'm just easily amused, but when I learnt that Hal Duncan - a man not afraid of throwing around phrases like "boulomaic modality" or writing the odd essay about the literary theories of Tzvetan Todorov - had written a novella with the charmingly direct title Die! Vampire! Die!, I was pretty curious to see what he'd do with it. The fact that it's available as a free download (or "FREE DOWNLOAD!", to quote the author directly) from Duncan's blog didn't hurt either, of course ...

At under fifty pages, any real plot synopsis seems a bit much; suffice to say that, yes, it is about vampires, yes, it is rather gory and yes, it's actually pretty funny. Perhaps I'd have got rather more out of it if I were more familiar with other cases of vampire-themed fiction (my knowledge of this field ending somewhat shy of the sixth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer), but really no more knowledge than you're liable to have picked up through the usual cultural osmosis seems necessary to enjoy this. This is basically an exercise in poking holes in the most common ideas behind the usual vampire concepts ... or, as Duncan himself puts it, "taking the hoary old vampire trope out back and clubbing him into the ground with a baseball bat", but it's also a perfectly good self-contained story in its own right, told in what is, for Duncan at least, an easy-to-follow linear way.

I did wonder briefly why all the characters (all the named characters, at least) of the book seemed to be further instances of the archetypes Duncan was playing with in The Book of All Hours - the story here doesn't seem quite consistent with the themes of that work, making it seem unlikely it was originally meant to be a part of the duology - but 'why not?' seemed a perfectly good answer to stop at. Perhaps Duncan just really likes the names Jack and Thomas. (And none of this should worry anybody who hasn't read Vellum or Ink)

If a black-humoured pastiche of vampire novels sounds like something you'd be interested in, this is well worth reading.