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.
Tag Archives: authors: christopher buehlman
Christopher Buehlman
Those Across The River
Christopher Buehlman’s Those Across The River was one of my favorite books of 2018.
Failed academic Frank and his wife, Eudora, move down to Georgia, where Frank plans to write the history of his family and their plantation, and the terrible things that happened there. He inherits the land, or something like that. The townspeople are nice enough and the quaint rural ways all seem nice and harmless, but there a certain dread that plagues the townspeople. A certain presence. That presence demands sacrifice.
Buehlman does a terrific job of building atmosphere here. We spend a ton of time getting to know Frank and Eudora, and their neighbors. The setting, hot, depression era, rural Georgia where the air is humid and suffocating, plays an intricate part of the story in the sense that as Frank slowly feels oppressed by his circumstances, the reader does too.
It became increasingly clear to me what was haunting to the town, although the clues were quite subtle, I thought. I won’t spoil it here. I will say that I wish more horror stories were done this way; the subtle heightening of tension is brilliantly done and by the last hundred pages or so, you aren’t putting the book down.
There is one thing I did not enjoy about this book, and it’s the way Buehlman wrote Frank’s physical descriptions of Eudora. Jesus, guys, is it really so hard to write about women without comparing their bodies to fruit? Or flowers? We get it, Eudora’s got big boobs. Enough already, stop focusing on them. Additionally, if Frank called Eudora a sphinx one more time, I was going to set the book on fire out of sheer annoyance. These awful depictions of the sex didn’t ruin the book, there wasn’t enough of it in the book for it to ruin it, but good lord, just leave it out next time. Sometimes I think sex is something you do in private because it’s so ugly when you aren’t directly involved.
I do recommend this book. In spite of the cringe-worthy descriptions of sex between Frank and Eudora, I thought the rest of the book phenomenal. Just, maybe, don’t read it at night.
words in scarlet ink 