James A. Moore, Blood Red (Earthling Publications, 2005).
Black Stone Bay, Rhode Island is a fairly affluent coastal community. After a new resident moves into one of the estates along the Cliff Walk, people start disappearing. This is not a coincidence.
Blood Red is a vampire novel. The story contains plenty of sex and enough blood and graphic violence to satisfy casual readers. There are some critical areas where the novel falls short, though, and I wound up being quite disappointed. Frankly, I expected better from an author as experienced as James A. Moore.
The vampire legend is one that is very familiar to horror readers these days. In order to grab and hold a reader's interest, an author needs to offer something new and unique, a perspective or interpretation that goes beyond the expected and opens new territory for exploration. Moore has not done this here. Though he does twist the mythos slightly, he remains within well-explored bounds and offers nothing beyond the usual clichés.
The human characters in Blood Red also fall well short of my expectations. Monster-driven horror, like vampire stories, depends on believable and sympathetic characters for its effect. Unless the reader can put himself into a character's mind and experience the fear first-hand, there is no story. It is just words on paper, all sound and fury, signifying nothing. By trying to expand the story to cover multiple characters and sets of characters, Moore fails to deliver even one that warrants the label of "sympathetic."
Maggie Preston, who is as close to a main character as anyone in the story, is emotionally cold. In all fairness, her character is that way by design, and the author states as much when she is first introduced. Unfortunately this produces a character about whom it is very hard to muster any feeling at all. Of all the other characters, only Ben is shown in enough detail to be considered a main character, and even he is nothing more than a cardboard cut-out of the typical "computer geek" character. He is cliched to the point of being irritating. Detectives Boyd and Holdstedter share that shortcoming with Ben. They are nothing more than typical wise-cracking talking heads used to put information in front of the reader. They never develop any real personality or humanness.
The rest of the townspeople are apparently morons who cannot tell up from down. Having lived in a small town all my life, I can assure you of two things. First, if thirty people disappear in a period of less than two weeks, everyone in town will know about it, and the uproar will be unbelievable. If the police are unable to cope with the situation, the people will take matters into their own hands. Second, the prime suspect, and the person soon to be found hanging from a tall tree, will be the strange newcomer who moved into the area shortly before the disappearances started. In Blood Red, the townspeople remain blissfully unaware and uncaring of their friends' and neighbors' disappearances and continue to expose themselves to danger at every turn. They might as well be sheep, and that is about how much sympathy this reader could muster for them.
Finally, we come to the person of Jason Soulis, the instigator of the disappearances. If there is a vampire cliché that Soulis does not exhibit, I cannot think of what it is at this time. He is the typical dark, mysterious, vaguely European rich man. He is polite and well-mannered, but distant and condescending to his neighbors and the other people with whom he comes into contact. His major weakness, though, is that he has no weakness.
A horror story depends on the ability of the heroes and/or heroines to defeat the monster. If they have no weapons, and he has no weaknesses, there is no tension. The conclusion is foregone, and the story lies flat and dead on the page. That is the case with Blood Red. Soulis is impervious to sunlight and religious symbols cause him no more than an inconvenience. No one has enough sense to try any other traditional vampire remedies in this book, so we never find out if they have any effect.
The Earthling Publications edition of Blood Red is a signed and numbered limited edition with a cover price of forty dollars. I cannot in good conscience recommend that anyone pay this price for a novel that falls short in so many different ways. The only people who might have an interest in this book are those who collect Moore's works or those who have a compulsion to own a complete collection of contemporary vampire fiction. If you are not one of these people, your money would be better spent elsewhere.
