Okay, I’ll admit it. I’m a sucker for a good vampire story. But not the Anne Rice, sipping-blood-so-it-doesn’t-drip-onto-the-silk-cravat kind of vampire. I like the throat-ripping, blood-slurping, tear-the-throat-out, bestial-monster kind of vampire.
Luckily, that’s what I got in Steven Savile’s INHERITANCE, which is the first of a trilogy of novels set in the world of Warhammer. In a publishing climate where there are 50 new vampire titles out a month, with half of them being cutesy chick-lit romances involving vampires and the other half involving vampire P.I.’s, this was a very welcome surprise. I dug this baby like a gravedigger with a backhoe.
The plot is a little hard to pin down, mostly because the protagonists tend to bounce around as the years go by. I know, I know … I ragged on another book which shall not be named (or remembered) because it did not stick with a single protagonist throughout the story, but to my recollection, that book did not have protagonists being messily killed and reanimated by evil vampire lords. That little plot point makes all the difference in the world.
The story takes back in the vampire-clogged country of Sylvania, where light bulbs are harvested and evil stalks the land. Count Von Carstein is the Big Daddy belle of the ball, and he’s slowly taking over the entire world (or trying, at least) with his army of the undead — vampire/zombie hybrids that go all berserker in the middle of a battle and can be animated or stopped with a twitch of Von Carstein’s evil little finger. And when I say these “zompires” are nasty pieces of work, I mean they are nasty little buggers. There were sections of INHERITANCE I read with a big, cheesy grin on my face because they were just so damn cool.
That said, the only problems with this book are the simple facts that: a) it’s the first of a trilogy; therefore, all the background has to be stuffed into this one; b) if you’re not into the Warhammer gaming experience, the setting and characters might seem a little alien (for example, the time period jumps from the 1700s to 2010 to 2051 — is that our future or the game’s future or what?); and c) there’s not a cohesive narrative holding the book together. The only constant is Von Carstein, and even though I forgive this book for not having a single protagonist, it would be nice to keep at least one around for more than a couple of chapters.
Even so, this book did the only thing I ask of a horror novel: It entertained the hell out of me. Sevile is a solid writer, with a good grasp of dialogue and the ability to write great action scenes. My main quibble is that I would have liked more of the zompire battles, but hey … who wouldn’t? –Rebecca Brock
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