The Edge Online - Reviews: Anne Billson

Suckers
Anne Billson
Pan paperback, 315 pages, £4.99
Published January 1993
ISBN 0330328069
Macmillan Atheneum hardback, 312 pages, $20 (US)
Published October 1993
ISBN 068912189X
Pan paperback, 315 pages, £5.99
Published October 1996
ISBN 0330329987
Review by Gerald Houghton (1993)

If we discount (and it comes as no hardship) the novelising of that atrocious, lazy British ‘horror’ movie Dream Demon, the path is clear to declare to Suckers Anne Billson’s full-length debut. It’s the end of the eighties, London is awash with smart young things, and those chic glass towers of Docklands still vibrate with a sense of potency and prestige. It’s just that when Dora Rosamund Vale, narrator and ‘creative consultant’ (she invents market research for clients, viewing it as conceptual art), goes visiting the headquarters of the uber-voguish Bellini magazine she discovers that the majority of its business is conducted at night.

A long-time thorn in the side of trendiness and commercial pose through her intelligent and consistently entertaining film criticism, Billson is intensely aware that there is no mileage to be gained from milking the ‘mystery’ surrounding the strange nocturnal habits of Bellini’s editorial board. Instead she plays on audience preconceptions of the traditional vampire novel, welding a surprisingly orthodox structure (although the ancient female vampire using modern methods in her rise to power recalls Hammer’s hammy The Satanic Rites of Dracula) to a cruel, sadistic satirical edge, where it’s not always possible to tell whether the yuppie scum is actually better alive than dead, where the bloodsucking is at least literal.

However, what elevates Suckers far above the morass of undead literature is the exceedingly clever and subtle characterisation Billson wields. Dora may be our guide through events, but through her spiky asides and a beautifully executed section of back history, only just clings by her fingernails this side of sympathetic; witness the revenge she exacts upon a woman whose cardinal sin was to gazump her on a flat. The novel revolves around Dora and an ongoing romantic obsession with the odious Duncan, which will leave most readers scratching their heads, roaming as he does the full stretch from pathetic to vacuous arrogance. Indeed, when Duncan’s now-wife seems to have fallen prey to the creatures of the night, Dora sympathises, but uses the opportunity to make a move on him.

To be a fully paid-up member of the vampire club, any author has to deliver in the corpuscle stakes, and despite the neatly rendered bloodsucking attacks themselves, Billson saves the majority of the offal and gore for two hysterically messy, blood-drenched scrum downs with a pair of female vampires, and answers that age-old question – just what comes in handy in the modern flat for dealing with the undead? Both episodes would be more than enough to elect her to the hall of splatterpunk fame, being as they are the grandest of Grand Guignol.

Suckers is a consistently sharp, genuinely funny nail gun of a novel that lands somewhere between Bram Stoker and Julie Burchill (there’s a tasty running gag about the ‘little black dress’). And refreshingly, it keeps its chilling nerve to the very end with an exquisitely spiteful final line. Besides, any novel that can come up with an incident as funny and icy as the one in the toilets of the vampire pub is more than a cut above any norm. Absolutely delicious.