Book and Movie Review: Vampire$, by John Steakley
Hunting vampires is a hellish and violent occupation.
Roc, 1990, 368 pages
You don't just kill vampires for the money, you do it for the satisfaction. You do it because somebody has to. You do it no matter what it does to you. And you drink'a lot. Some jobs just suck. This one bites.
But nobody does it better than Jack Crow, the leader of VAMPIRE$ Inc. His crack team of hunters takes down the blood suckers with a lethal combination of cojones and crossbows.
After members of Jack's team are ambushed and slaughtered; however, the survivors need to rethink their strategy. With a new recruit from the Vatican - A priest who's not afraid to wield a stake - and a sharpshooter loaded up with silver bullets, it's payback time. The only problem is that the vampires have no intention of going down easy. They have their own hit list, and Jack Crow's name is scrawled in blood right at the top.
John Steakley only finished two novels before his untimely death: Armor and Vampire$. He seemed to like writing violent, bloody fiction about macho dudes with guns and deathwishes introspecting about the stupidity of their profession.
I like a good vampire novel, especially when they are not romanticized or humanized. The vampires in this book are violent, bloodthirsty monsters with little moral ambiguity. Vampires need killin', and John Crow is a professional vampire killer.
A profane and vulgar mercenary backed by the Vatican, Crow leads a crew that cleans out vampire "nests" for a fee. Usually the small towns he saves are not grateful and have a distressing tendency to not want to pay up.
Early in the book, Crow and his hard-drinking crew are celebrating their latest successful job when a master vampire shows up and slaughters everyone. Only Crow and one of his men escape. Worse, the vampire calls Crow by his name.
It appears the vampires have become organized, and are now hunting the hunters. Crow gathers a new crew, including a priest and man named Felix who's a crack shot but not nearly as sanguine as Crow about being exsanguinated. Then they set off to fight what Crow describes as an endless battle that can only end in all of them dying.
Vampire$ is a pretty straightforward book with serviceable prose, full of bloody fights with fragile meatbags taking on undead monsters who are stronger, faster, and tougher than anything living. The hunters use a variety of weapons and tools but always seem outgunned, and rarely win a battle without taking losses.
The book isn't all bloodbaths and fight scenes, however. There are several interludes which give us more insight into Crow's relationships with other characters, like Felix, and show us just how depraved vampires are. They are more or less "traditional" vampires who start as "goons," little more than mindless thralls to their master, but eventually they can become master vampires who appear sexy and hypnotic to mortals and like to play with their food in sadistic orgies of torture and humiliation. These vampires reminded me a lot of Joss Whedon's vampires in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That show was funny and campy and yet had a real undertone of darkness, especially when depicting vampires, who were basically demons walking around with the face and memories of the person they'd once been. Likewise, Vampire$ alternates between over-the-top violence and gunfights (you can't kill a vampire by shooting it, but you can really piss it off) and perverse examinations of human nature seen through the lens of people crazy enough to hunt monsters.
While not a brilliant book or even really a classic of the genre, it's a very readable book for Spooktober.
John Carpenter's Vampires
John Carpenter's 1998 film was based on Steakley's book, but like most Hollywood treatments, it deviates a great deal from the novel after the opening scenes.
Carpenter gave the film a very Western vibe (much more so than in the book), with the vampires performing lots of massacres in churches and monasteries in the Southwest. As you'd expect from John Carpenter, there is lots of gore, but it's extremely dated now. The bodies being ripped in half, stakes being pushed through foreheads, buckets of blood splashed everywhere, it all appears rather cheesy and fake now that we're used to ever-more-realistic CGI SFX. Nowhere is this more evident than the scenes of vampires being harpooned by crossbows and then winched out into the sunlight by truck cables. This is a tactic that was described in the book, but in the movie, it's almost comic watching scarecrow-like dummies stuffed with fireworks get dragged out and lit up.
The bones of Steakley's story are here: Jack Crow is a vampire hunter backed by the Vatican, he teams up with a priest and a buddy after his previous team gets slaughtered. But Carpenter added a whole new story with "Valek" the master vampire seeking an ancient artifact that will let him walk in daylight.
There are a lot of scenes of people making what they know are useless attempts to shoot or stab vampires, and then improbably running away and somehow escaping, even though we've previously seen vampires outrunning cars. Less intelligent than the lowbrow novel, John Carpenter's Vampires has its moments, but it's pretty much an artifact of its time and its director.
Also by John Steakley: My review of Armor.
My complete list of book reviews.
Roc, 1990, 368 pages
You don't just kill vampires for the money, you do it for the satisfaction. You do it because somebody has to. You do it no matter what it does to you. And you drink'a lot. Some jobs just suck. This one bites.
But nobody does it better than Jack Crow, the leader of VAMPIRE$ Inc. His crack team of hunters takes down the blood suckers with a lethal combination of cojones and crossbows.
After members of Jack's team are ambushed and slaughtered; however, the survivors need to rethink their strategy. With a new recruit from the Vatican - A priest who's not afraid to wield a stake - and a sharpshooter loaded up with silver bullets, it's payback time. The only problem is that the vampires have no intention of going down easy. They have their own hit list, and Jack Crow's name is scrawled in blood right at the top.
John Steakley only finished two novels before his untimely death: Armor and Vampire$. He seemed to like writing violent, bloody fiction about macho dudes with guns and deathwishes introspecting about the stupidity of their profession.
I like a good vampire novel, especially when they are not romanticized or humanized. The vampires in this book are violent, bloodthirsty monsters with little moral ambiguity. Vampires need killin', and John Crow is a professional vampire killer.
A profane and vulgar mercenary backed by the Vatican, Crow leads a crew that cleans out vampire "nests" for a fee. Usually the small towns he saves are not grateful and have a distressing tendency to not want to pay up.
Early in the book, Crow and his hard-drinking crew are celebrating their latest successful job when a master vampire shows up and slaughters everyone. Only Crow and one of his men escape. Worse, the vampire calls Crow by his name.
It appears the vampires have become organized, and are now hunting the hunters. Crow gathers a new crew, including a priest and man named Felix who's a crack shot but not nearly as sanguine as Crow about being exsanguinated. Then they set off to fight what Crow describes as an endless battle that can only end in all of them dying.
Vampire$ is a pretty straightforward book with serviceable prose, full of bloody fights with fragile meatbags taking on undead monsters who are stronger, faster, and tougher than anything living. The hunters use a variety of weapons and tools but always seem outgunned, and rarely win a battle without taking losses.
The book isn't all bloodbaths and fight scenes, however. There are several interludes which give us more insight into Crow's relationships with other characters, like Felix, and show us just how depraved vampires are. They are more or less "traditional" vampires who start as "goons," little more than mindless thralls to their master, but eventually they can become master vampires who appear sexy and hypnotic to mortals and like to play with their food in sadistic orgies of torture and humiliation. These vampires reminded me a lot of Joss Whedon's vampires in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That show was funny and campy and yet had a real undertone of darkness, especially when depicting vampires, who were basically demons walking around with the face and memories of the person they'd once been. Likewise, Vampire$ alternates between over-the-top violence and gunfights (you can't kill a vampire by shooting it, but you can really piss it off) and perverse examinations of human nature seen through the lens of people crazy enough to hunt monsters.
While not a brilliant book or even really a classic of the genre, it's a very readable book for Spooktober.
John Carpenter's Vampires
John Carpenter's 1998 film was based on Steakley's book, but like most Hollywood treatments, it deviates a great deal from the novel after the opening scenes.
Carpenter gave the film a very Western vibe (much more so than in the book), with the vampires performing lots of massacres in churches and monasteries in the Southwest. As you'd expect from John Carpenter, there is lots of gore, but it's extremely dated now. The bodies being ripped in half, stakes being pushed through foreheads, buckets of blood splashed everywhere, it all appears rather cheesy and fake now that we're used to ever-more-realistic CGI SFX. Nowhere is this more evident than the scenes of vampires being harpooned by crossbows and then winched out into the sunlight by truck cables. This is a tactic that was described in the book, but in the movie, it's almost comic watching scarecrow-like dummies stuffed with fireworks get dragged out and lit up.
The bones of Steakley's story are here: Jack Crow is a vampire hunter backed by the Vatican, he teams up with a priest and a buddy after his previous team gets slaughtered. But Carpenter added a whole new story with "Valek" the master vampire seeking an ancient artifact that will let him walk in daylight.
There are a lot of scenes of people making what they know are useless attempts to shoot or stab vampires, and then improbably running away and somehow escaping, even though we've previously seen vampires outrunning cars. Less intelligent than the lowbrow novel, John Carpenter's Vampires has its moments, but it's pretty much an artifact of its time and its director.
Also by John Steakley: My review of Armor.
My complete list of book reviews.