Vampyrhhic RitesSimon Clark
Hodder and Stoughton, hardback, 505 pages
ISBN 0340819405
Also in paperback: Hodder Headline/NEL, ISBN 0-340-81941-3
Review by David Clark (2003)
Vampyrrhic Rites is the sequel to 1998’s Vampyrrhic. Three years on, the four main characters from the previous book – including the one who was bumped off – reunite, kind of, in a Yorkshire village called Lazarus Deep, which features a lake, under which lurk the vampires. As Clark regulars might guess, there’s a lot of gloomy Yorkshire atmosphere.
David Leppington is in London, having tried to move on, having trouble with his schizophrenic ex. Bernice is also in London, where she has gone a bit Goth (nothing wrong with that) and is collecting shoes (OTOH . . .) Anti-hero Jack Black is in various places, or parts of him are. Various graves, that is. Electra still runs the Station Hotel in Leppington, still hankers after Jack, and has a vampire website, Hotel Midnight, which attracts some peculiar emails. All of them are having bad dreams, except for Jack, who is in the dreams but doesn’t speak, something to do with being dead, presumably. The vampires, now into mind control but still kind of old, dead Vikings (historically, there were tons of Vikings in Yorkshire, of course, and for all I know Clark’s descended from them himself), want David as general of their army – although there is now an alternate candidate – and to take over the world in a sort of Ragnarok. There are new characters too, who come to the fore as Rites progresses.
Although
this comment may be seen by some as bordering on the blasphemous, Clark isn’t the best writer of all time.
Things don’t always flow as well as they might and, even in the ‛horror’ genre (Clark has described himself as
a ‛horror’ writer, though he’s written SF and frequently included SF elements in his novels), he isn’t as good
as Clive Barker or Ramsey Campbell at their best (or, rather, as good as they
were when they were at their best). In fact one might well make an
unflattering comparison with vintage Campbell. Clark isn’t as good as Poppy Z. Brite or Caitlin R. Kiernan
either, and some of his books could take being a little shorter, something he has in common with many
writers.But Clark is better than most. He writes a kind of latter day equivalent to those old James Herbert paperbacks, and he knows how to make you feel sick, write set piece scenes, and so on. Clark’s a kind of ‛Brit horror author, the next generation’, when considered in relation to James Herbert, Graham Masterton, the ghastly Guy N. Smith, and so on, a kind of contemporary version of the better British horror novelists of the 1970s to the 1990s. Clark’s books are perhaps a little more well-written although like the above authors, Clark knows how to please his readers. He’s said in interviews and elsewhere that, to some extent, he tailors his books to suit.