After reading Those Across The River in 2018, I decided to finish up Christopher Buehlman’s published novels in 2019. Or at least the ones available to listen to in my library. I listened to these while fixing up my home before moving in, so they were great for passing time.

Those books were (in the order that I read them):

The Lesser Dead
The Suicide Motor Club
The Necromancer’s House

But let’s do this backwards, because I didn’t finish The Necromancer’s House and was less impressed with The Suicide Motor Club. The Necromancer’s House was a snoozefest. The premise was super promising – a guy can speak to the dead through film and ends up being chased by a monster out of Russain folklore – but I just couldn’t get through it. Maybe I’ll try again, maybe I wasn’t paying close enough attention, but it just didn’t grab me.

The Suicide Motor Club was a revenge story. It takes place in the 1960s and involves a group of nomadic vampires driving around highways in muscle cars, taking victims from car wrecks (that they cause). They accidentally leave a live witness after wiping out her entire family, and she joins a convent in the hopes of finding peace. Years later, she’s approached by a group of vampire hunters, with a goal of wiping out all the vampires, especially the ones in the fast cars. She’s the only one who can recognize them. This one was pretty good but it dragged a bit in the middle, and it wasn’t as good as the The Lesser Dead, which it was tied to through a character named Clayton.

The Lesser Dead was definitely the best of these three books and the scariest fiction book I read in 2019. If you want to feel discomfited through an entire book and especially at the end of a book, this is the story for you. The book follows Joey, a vampire living in the New York underground in 1978. Joey was turned by Margaret in the 1930s, as revenge for getting her fired from her job as a cook.

Anyway, in spite of this antagonistic relationship, Joey is now part of Margaret’s nest of vampires, along with some others. Vampires are corpses that are all in varying states of decay, and have to use their glamor magic to project the image of health to humans and other vampires, and this is how Joey in particular sustains himself: he goes to night clubs and parties, picks up women, and drains them.

The nest of vampires encounters a bunch of child vampires, who are constantly hungry, and not very discreet, which goes against the group rules. The children are so constantly hungry that Joey thinks they might be another species of vampire entirely, but this is eventually found not to be the case. Still, the vampires find themselves feeling sorry for the children, who they think were turned for pedophilic purposes, and feed them their own blood.

Obviously things are not quite what they seem, and the reader learns this as Joey does too.

I will say it’s a little slow to start, but it’s clearly building to something, and overall I loved The Lesser Dead. It was thoroughly creepy and unsettling. I will probably revisit it and it’s the strongest reason for revisiting The Necromancer’s House. I really can’t emphasize how good this book was. I listened to the audiobook, which Buehlman actually narrates and it’s outstanding. It was a fantastic experience and I can’t recommend it enough.

Tagged: authors: christopher buehlman, books: the lesser dead, books: the necromancer's house, books: the suicide motor club, books: those across the river, genre: fiction, genre: horror