Brandon H Bell

- Keep an eye on M-Brane SF for the pending release of their first quarterly print edition. In promotion of the M-Brane Double, featuring novellas by Alex Jeffers and me, the quarterly features stories from each of us. Mine is a reprint first published in the now defunct Nossa Morte, and is my one straight zombie story. Well, a zombie-apocalypse extrapolation of King Lear featuring masks of flesh, dead birds, and Crick pamphlets. It's called Found Objects and I think it's a nice, creepy little tale.

- Along the right side of my blog, you will find a small audio player with a picture of snowmen. Click play, turn up your sound, lean back with something warm to drink, and venture out into a cold night where hearts eclipsed with the greatest loss imaginable risk the unknown so that one more tiny life might survive. Animate snowmen and darker things.

And for all the vampire lovers out there... and I don't mean these shiny-skinned eternal teenagers that come (a long way) after Anne Rice. No, I mean the readers who longs for a big, bad, mean vampire tale... Forget The Fall, Guillermo Del Toro & Chuck Hogan's follow-up to by-the-numbers but fun enough The Strain.

Whereas The Strain presented readers with a pretty nice setup in its first third, the remainder of the book fell back on some fairly standard Vamp genre cliches. Its biggest virtue proved the story that might follow in the remaining entries is this trilogy. The Strain arrived before Justin Cronin's The Passage, and hinted at a vampire apocalypse to follow in the subsequent volumes. Not original by any means, but a possibly a nice change of pace.

Too bad we get The Fall instead.

The Fall reads like an alternate history Blade 3: just not as good. I'm a big Del Toro fan... that is to say, I'm a big fan of his movies. I suspect the imaginings that led to this story will eventually make a decent vampire movie saga. It probably should have remained in that realm. One of my biggest criticisms is that the first fifty pages telegraphs all the important events of the first book and the character relationships. If a writer is going to do this, just info-dump it in a short 'here's what's happened so far' at the start ( I think King takes this approach in the later Dark Tower books), and then get to telling the tale. The story improves a bit once that first fifty pages is done, but just barely.

I don't do a lot of negative reviews, and it's pretty safe to bag on such a large property: The Fall will sell like hotcakes whatever I have to say. I love genre fiction, and a good vampire adventure tale like McCammon's They Thirst is like few other pleasures. I can't decide if The Fall is simply too cynical in its best-seller-ism delivery, or if it is the case of too much vision and not enough heart. Ohhh, wouldn't it be cool if we have a Luchador vampire hunter? What about a bunch of blind kid vampires?!

Oooooo, and lets have all the gang-bangers form an alliance to fight the vampires... because killing shit and being bad-ass is their blood, right? Writing this, it really should be cooler than it is.

In all fairness, I am over half-way through, and other books have won me over past this point. The Scar is one that didn't really click for me until Mieville's characters arrived at the island with the mosquito people. Now that was some bad-assery.

Justin Cronin, though doing quite well with The Passage has also received some slights to the effect of 'oh, a literary dude has decided to out-genre the genre guys and gals'. I have no clue how true that is and it doesn't matter to me either way. The Passage is a fine entry into the vampire/apocalyptic horror subgenres exemplified by I Am Legend, They Thirst/ Swan Song, Salem's Lot/ The Stand, and even Mieville's The Tain.

My next read is Stephen Chapman's The Troika. I can't take any more vampires. :)

BB