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Blood Lust by Rhys Wilson
Pub: Vanguard Press. 254 page enlarged paperback.
Price: £ 8.99 (UK). ISBN: 1-903489-85-7
check out website: http://website.lineone.net/~mannafanna
A
vampire story set in Leeds of all places - what will happen to Brian's
fish and chip shop?
Cameron's day starts badly and gets worse. All his worldly goods
are repossessed and he ends up on the pavement in his boxers. Setting
off for home, he considers it a good idea to get to his girl-friend
in Leeds.
Gillian
may just be the love of his life if only they had spent more than
23 days together in the year and a quarter since they started going
out. Meeting a nutter on the way, Cameron finds out just what he
believes in and things start to get even worse.
Over at the bank, John Settle is also having a really bad day,
which only marginally improves when he gets killed by a vampire...
Taking revenge on his bank manager is just the beginning. Before
long he has turned his family and all the vampires in Leeds are
coming out of their coffins.
It gets to page 114 before Buffy even gets a name check but this
comical and really very violent (only if you stop to think about
it), book owes a lot to the hard-hitting, verbally adept, young
lady of the night.
The novel draws on several sources and owes something to the humour
of 'The Young Ones' and probably some later student stuff I don't
know about. It also reminded me of 'Night Of The Living Dead' as
these vampires are completely driven by hunger and become a mass
mob.
The older 'B' movie legends also get a look in. Student life is
made up of watching Australian soaps and going down the pub after
the occasional lecture so having to save the world (Leeds, anyway)
comes as a bit of a shock.
Playing with the vampire genre, Wilcox uses the old and new clichés
to good effect and with a keen ear for dialogue creates some witty
verbal exchanges between the characters. Superbly visual, this book
cries out for a big budget film treatment as an antidote the dire
hack and slash movies so favoured these days.
Mr Wilcox has combined much comedy and horror and produced, well,
a great, fast-paced comic-horror novel that demands a one sitting
read. I couldn't put it down but I'm not sure about the population
of Leeds.
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