Visiting Rite World

BookBub is a book discovery service that was created to help readers find new books and authors through curated lists of discounted titles. Lachesis Publishing used BookBub to promote some of my novels and I signed up to receive their daily mailings some time ago. Since I’ve been working on my new vampire novel, Ordeal of the Scarlet Order, I’ve had my eye out for vampire novels and authors I haven’t read before to see their approach to the genre. In particular, I like to pay attention to what things an author chooses to communicate about the plot, what details are left out, and how they narrate and convey dialogue. I like to compare their word usage to the usages my editors have suggested over the years. In short, my goal is to pay attention to the details and think about how I can best communicate my story. As it turns out, a BookBub mailing at the end of May pointed out that the first book of Juliana Haygert’s Rite World: Vampire Wars was available for free. The novel is called The Darkest Vampire and it looked like it would be right up my alley.

The Darkest Vampire introduces us to a young half-witch named Lavinia. As a child, her parents were murdered and she’s vowed to get revenge on their killers. The only problem is that her mother wanted Lavinia to live as a human and had her make a blood promise not to use her magic. Because of that, Lavinia’s magic is severely limited and the only person who could release her from the blood promise would be her mother. Now, out of school, Lavinia works in a Portland, Oregon tea shop. A demon arrives and says he can help her break the restraints of the blood promise as long as Lavinia steals a mysterious stone from a wealthy area man.

The temptation proves too much and Lavinia breaks into the mansion and steals the stone. However, when the demon arrives to collect the stone, Lavinia learns he had no intention of helping her and just plans to take the stone, which turns out to be more than it appears at first sight. At her touch, the stone opens up and out pops a very angry vampire, who immediately kills all the demon’s henchmen. It turns out the vampire is Killian, a high-ranking vampire who had been trapped in the stone twenty years ago by a sorcerer as part of a spell to gain tremendous power. Even though Killian has been released, he’d not completely free of the stone’s power. If he wanders too far from it, he weakens. What’s more, we learn that Killian’s brother had been killed in much the same way as Lavinia’s parents. And the same killers currently appear to be stalking the witches of Portland.

So, Lavinia and Killian work to solve the mystery of the stone while also figuring out who is killing witches and other supernatural beings. To be more effective, Lavinia also continues to seek a way to free herself from the Blood Promise she made to her mom. As part of this latter quest, the characters make an unexpected side trip to New Orleans, which I enjoyed. I did relate to Lavinia’s love of beignets, but I would have enjoyed this side excursion more if it hadn’t limited itself to Bourbon Street.

Overall, I thought this was an enjoyable supernatural mystery. At the time Killian had been trapped in the stone, he had been on a quest to destroy witches, who he saw as the enemy of vampire kind. However, through the story, we see Killian begin to fall for Lavinia. Unfortunately, Lavinia has it in her head that Killian hates all witches and every time he tries to get close to her, she dismisses him out of hand and won’t let him discuss his feelings. This last aspect was a little too heavy-handed for my taste and kept the romantic tension from working as well as it might. The vampire lore in The Darkest Witch was much like the lore in the last book I read, Chloe Neill’s Some Girls Bite. Aside from their immortality and their need for blood, these vampires aren’t much different from humans. They can eat and drink. Haygert’s vampires will be hurt if they spend too much time in the sun and they do have supernatural strength and speed. They also have, and Killian frequently uses, a strong power of compulsion. Perhaps the most amusing part of the book is how he uses his powers to avoid paying for anything.

To learn more about my vampire world and to get ready for my forthcoming novel, Ordeal of the Scarlet Order, visit: http://davidleesummers.com/books.html#scarlet_order

Against the Day – Part 4

At around 367 pages, Part 4 of Against the Day is the novel’s longest section. This part, which is the length of many novels, shares its title with the novel itself. The title is taken from 2 Peter 3:7 in the Bible. In the King James Version, that verse reads “But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.” Even though this is the longest section, I found it easier to follow the novel’s many plot threads. Some of this is because I’ve now spent enough time with the characters that they’re familiar and some of this is because Pynchon is now bringing his novel to a conclusion. In Part 2, we heard a lot about Kit Traverse’s fascination with mathematics and vectors. Now, in part 4, our characters who are scattered around the world all begin to find their way onto a vector that will carry them through World War I, effectively the novel’s day of judgement, and convergence in Southern California at the beginning of the 1920s.

The 1908 Tunguska Event, a real-life 12-megaton explosion that happened in Siberia, possibly from a comet hitting the Earth proves to be a major event in the lives of many of the characters ranging from Kit Traverse to the Chums of Chance and their Russian counterparts, the crew of the Bolsha’ia Igra. Pynchon notes that the Tunguska Event was so powerful it sent some reindeer flying and even caused some of their noses to glow red. More seriously, it proves to be a transformative event that heralds the coming world war.

Much of part 4 follows Yashmeen Halfcourt, Reef Traverse, and Cyprian Latewood as they form a three-way romance. Over the course of that romance, Yashmeen becomes pregnant. In part because of that, stopping the oncoming war in Europe becomes a priority for her. Reef’s family has fought for unions and in this section, he uses his skills to attempt to prevent the war. Unfortunately, the oncoming storm is too powerful and their efforts are doomed to failure.

Meanwhile, Reef and Kit’s brother Frank is in Mexico caught among the tides of revolution ahead of World War I. He becomes a freedom fighter and is nearly killed before tending to the machinery on a coffee plantation. Eventually he escapes Mexico and finds his way back home to Colorado where he witnesses the death of Scarsdale Vibe, the man who was ultimately responsible for his father’s death.

We spend World War I itself with the Chums of Chance aboard their airship, the Inconvenience. Initially, they’re sent to find the Bolsha’ia Igra, which has vanished. When they find the Russian airship, they discover the crew are helping people weather the storm of war. The Chums abandon their mission and help the Russians on their mission of mercy, delivering food to people in need and carrying wounded soldiers to safety. After the war, they receive a job offer in California. While the offer itself proves to be a sham, they encounter Merle Rideout, the photographer and inventor from the beginning of the book who has found his way to Hollywood. Rideout has not only learned about motion pictures, but he’s learned that he can extrapolate information from photographs to find out what happened before and after those pictures were taken. The one catch is that he doesn’t always see what happens in our timeline. Sometimes he sees different possible futures.

We close out part 4 as Merle catches up with his daughter Dally using an old photograph. What we don’t know yet is whether this is Dally as she is, or whether this is Dally as she might be. It’s like the Iceland Spar and Bilocation of earlier sections. People have choices and different choices make different realities.

I’ll have one last post after I finish part 5 to discuss final thoughts about this expansive novel along with my takeaways.

Vampire-Human Relations

In 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Marita Crandle, owner of Boutique du Vampyre in New Orleans, and Steven Foley put together the Vampyre Library Book Club. Each month, Steven would select a book, members would read it, and at the end of the month, Steven would interview the author and readers would have a chance to ask questions. I was honored that my novel Vampires of the Scarlet Order was one of the book club’s selections alongside such works as Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris, Dracul by Dacre Stoker, and The Casquette Girls by Alys Arden. My wife and I participated in the club after my book was featured and I discovered a number of great books. As the COVID-19 pandemic began to wane and life began to return to normal, I wasn’t able to read every book. One of the books I missed was Some Girls Bite by Choe Neill. I finally had a chance to read the novel a few days ago.

Some Girls Bite tells the story of a University of Chicago graduate student, Merit, who falls victim to a rogue vampire attack. Fortunately, vampire Ethan Sullivan, the master of Chicago’s Cadogan House is on the rogue’s trail, finds Merit and makes her a vampire, thus saving her life. We soon learn that Merit wasn’t the first victim of the rogue vampire. A couple of nights earlier, the vampire attacked and killed another young woman. At issue is that the vampire houses only recently made themselves known to humans and they want to show that they can live alongside humans. The vampires in the houses don’t attack people. Most drink donated blood in bags and those who drink from people, only drink from willing donors. So, the rogue vampire’s actions are threatening to bring an angry mob of humans down on the vampires.

As the story progresses, we learn that Merit is the daughter of one of the richest businessmen in Chicago. Ethan Sullivan sees her as someone who might help him maintain and hold a position of trust among humans. What’s more, Merit’s grandfather is a retired police officer who has taken the job of ombudsman between the Chicago’s supernatural and human communities. Vampires aren’t the only supernatural creatures who have been hiding in the shadows. There are also sorcerers, water nymphs, lycanthropes, and more. Still, vampires are the only ones who are known to most humans. Merit, though, doesn’t appreciate being a pawn in this developing saga of vampire human relations. She also resents being made a vampire against her will, even though it may have been the only thing that saved her life. Fortunately, after becoming a vampire, Merit has developed skills that allow her to find an important position of her own in House Cadogan.

As Merit navigates her way through her family relationships and the relationships with the vampires in her life, she learns about the vampire houses and how each one maneuvers to gain advantages over the others. Of course, now that the vampires are known to exist, they are playing politics in the human world as well. I’ve long found it interesting to consider how humans would interact with a non-human, intelligent species living in their world. Vampires make an especially interesting case, since they’re predators. Even though they’re predators, it would be a bad idea for vampires to destroy all of humankind. After all, that would destroy their food source. Whether vampires are known to humans in general or not, vampires would have to find a way to live in a world dominated by humans. I thought Chloe Neill presented an interesting vampire culture and presented ways they can be both clever and foolhardy when dealing with the humans around them.

As I write this, I’m settling in to edit my new vampire novel Ordeal of the Scarlet Order. My vampires live in secret, but they still have to live in a world dominated by humans. I’ve been having fun exploring how that works in this novel. I’ve been posting updates about the novel at my Patreon site, including a sneak peak of the cover, which has already been created by the talented Chaz Kemp. Also, my Patreon site helps to support this blog and keep it ad free. If you find value in my reviews and comments here, please consider supporting me there. What’s more, you can now join free for a week and take a peek behind the scenes before committing to being a regular patron. Why not go over and take a look at https://www.patreon.com/davidleesummers? I’ve shared several of my novels as I’ve edited them for new editions and I also plan to share Ordeal of the Scarlet Order as I get it ready for publication. Joining up would be a way to be among the very first readers and I’d love to hear your feedback!

A Quest for Good Coffee

In 1977, I sat spellbound in the theater watching Star Wars. Afterwards, I read and reread the Marvel comics adaptations of the movies until they fell apart. I was spellbound with the adventure, following Luke Skywalker on a quest to the stars to fight the Galactic Empire and rescue Princess Leia. It wouldn’t be long before I would be drawn to similar types of adventures in the pages of fantasy novels. Eventually, friends introduced me to the world of role-playing games and I was delighted that growing into adolescence didn’t mean I had to give up imaginary adventures through deep space or long ago kingdoms.

Later, as an adult, I remember watching one of the later Star Wars films and wondering what it would like to live in this world where you had your choice between living under the thumb of an evil empire or in service to a crime lord. Were the only choices rising up against tyranny or living in poverty? In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien gave us some hint of what it was like during the quiet times and why Frodo went on such a difficult and perilous quest. That said, many fantasy novels drop you into the midst of trouble and then don’t let up until the problem is solved. Like with the Star Wars world, I found myself wondering what it’s like to live day-to-day in such a world. Does anyone ever just go on a quest for good coffee?

That’s where Travis Baldree’s Legends and Lattes comes in. Viv is a powerful but battle-weary orc, a warrior you might find in any role-playing game. She arrives in the town of Thune with a dream She wants to open a coffee shop. She discovered coffee on one of her adventures in a gnomish village after a particularly grueling fight and fell in love with sitting at a table and just enjoying a rich hearty beverage. She wants to give other folks the opportunity to do the same. Fortunately, she has a magical artifact that she believes will bring her good fortune. Sure enough she finds a great location and begins making her dreams a reality. She meets a hob named Cal who is handy with a tool kit and helps her convert an old stable into her shop. She hires a succubus named Tandri who proves to be her ideal partner and when they realize they could use baked goods to lure people into their shop, they meet a rattkin named Thimble who is a literal wizard of cinnamon rolls and chocolate-filled croissants.

Viv’s quest to open a coffee shop is not without challenges, though. She has to contend with a local boss who wants collection money and a former partner who thinks Viv cheated the adventuring party when she left with the artifact. There’s fun in seeing how Viv contends with these challenges and adapts to life as a shopkeeper after spending years on the road as an adventurer. This is less a novel of swordplay and more one exploring the quiet times in a world where high adventure happens. What makes this work is that Baldree gives us characters we care about and taking a light-hearted approach to the challenges they face and overcome in their world.

I also loved reading in the back that this book was a self-publishing success story. Authors and book store owners who loved the book rallied around it and recommended it to people they knew, which drew it to the attention of a bigger publisher and eventually it became a well-deserved Nebula-award nominee. All of this goes to show how important it is, when you find a book you love, to tell people about it.

Like Viv, I love a good cup of coffee. I made sure Ellison Firebrandt had coffee aboard the Legacy. Fatemeh Karimi makes a great coffee in my Clockwork Legion novels. Even the vampire Daniel might be tempted away from some blood for a good cup of coffee. You can learn more about my many coffee-loving characters at http://www.davidleesummers.com. And if you find one you really like, please do tell your friends!

Faith Hunter’s Skinwalker

I recently finished the first draft of my latest vampire novel Ordeal of the Scarlet Order. In my novel, the vampires have scattered around the world to avoid retribution from destroying a secret military project, only to find themselves pulled back into it whether they want to be or not. Portions of the novel are set in France, Colorado, and New Orleans. After wrapping up my novel, I decided I was in the mood for another vampire novel set in New Orleans. I’d heard about Faith Hunter’s novel Skinwalker before, but hadn’t read it. Since my Scarlet Order world also touches on skinwalker legends, and since I have a novella inspired by skinwalker stories, I thought I would take a look.

The skinwalker of Faith Hunter’s title is a Cherokee woman named Jane Yellowrock who can shapeshift into a mountain lion. What’s more, the mountain lion appears to be its own individual living within Jane’s consciousness. Jane doesn’t know much about her history or where her powers came from, but she has been trained to fight and works as a professional bounty hunter. In New Orleans, a rogue vampire is on the loose killing both humans and other vampires indiscriminately. However, the vampires can’t seem to trap it or catch it. They hire Jane to do the job for them. The novel opens as Jane arrives in New Orleans and meets with her contact, a vampire madame named Katherine Fontaneau. She soon finds her search complicated by the interplay of vampire family politics and police interest in the case. Despite that, Jane begins to gather clues while making allies and enemies among the human and vampire populations of the Crescent City. Fortunately, one of her best friends is a powerful witch who has given her powerful tools to use in the hunt.

Authors who write about vampires have a lot of choices when they establish their rules about these creatures. There are many sources in folklore and fiction writers have just built on that. If there are real vampires, they’ve remained hidden in the shadows and haven’t yet appeared to tell us what we’ve gotten right or wrong in our depictions. Witches can be a little trickier since there are wiccans and a long, dark history of people accused of witchcraft. Faith Hunter clearly builds her own witch lore, where magical power is passed along genetically. In Diné lore, skinwalkers have a strong association with witchcraft. Again, Hunter builds her own skinwalker lore, separate from that of the Diné. Once I understood that Hunter had built her own self-contained lore, I was able to sit back and enjoy the ride.

Skinwalker was a solid thrill ride of a novel with lots of action. She gives lush descriptions of the locations around New Orleans that I’ve visited including the French Quarter, Jean Lafitte National Park, and the Garden District. She also gives us several characters we really care about, and it’s not always clear who the good guys and bad guys are. There were a few things in the novel that didn’t quite work for me such as Jane’s almost magical hair that let her store enough weaponry to push my willing suspension of disbelief. That said, I did like the witch-enchanted magical saddlebags on her motorcycle which allow her to store many items.

• You can learn more about my novella about a skinwalker at: http://davidleesummers.com/Breaking-the-Code.html
• You can learn more about my Scarlet Order vampire novels at: http://davidleesummers.com/books.html#scarlet_order

Black Sails

My fascination with pirate adventures goes back to my first visit to Disneyland around 1971 and riding Pirates of the Caribbean within a few years of its opening. I remember the pirates and the pirate skeletons scaring me on that first visit. I grew up in Southern California and had several opportunities to return to Disneyland. Despite being scared that first time, I always made a point of riding Pirates of the Caribbean and I saw new things every time. I saw the humor, the violence, the hints of history. In short, I became fascinated with the real pirates of the so-called Golden Age of Piracy which ran from approximately 1650 until around 1740. This fascination would ultimately lead me to read Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel Treasure Island.

For the last few months, I’ve been working my way through the Starz television series Black Sails, which was billed as a prequel to Treasure Island. The series is that, but it’s also a lot more. The series imagines Captain Flint, Long John Silver, and Billy Bones from the novel as pirates with ties to Nassau who sailed alongside such real-life pirates as Charles Vane, Jack Rackham, Anne Bonney, Benjamin Hornigold and Edward Teach. As the series opens, Captain Flint, played by Toby Stephens, is on a quest to capture gold from a Spanish treasure galleon called the Urca de Lima. Billy Bones, played by Tom Hopper, is a member of his crew. John Silver, played by Luke Arnold, is an opportunist who happens to discover the Urca de Lima’s route.

This is all a fine setup for a high seas adventure, and there is plenty of high seas adventuring in the series, but the series doesn’t forget that Captain Flint needs a base of operations, so early on, we’re introduced to Nassau and the woman who runs the show there, Eleanor Guthrie, played by Hannah New. It’s through the interactions with Eleanor that we get to know the other famous pirates and soon they all have a hand in the adventures as well. As the series unfolds, we soon find that Nassau is more than a home base and a meeting point for our characters, its integrally tied to Flint’s motives and the reason he became a pirate in the first place.

Black Sails doesn’t try to portray pirates as fun or loveable characters out on a jolly lark. It shows us the types of crimes and atrocities they committed. It also shows us how far the colonial powers in the new world went to to end piracy. Of course, those colonial powers were authoritarian and didn’t abide people who attempted to lift themselves out of poor circumstances to a better station and didn’t abide people who refused to fit into socially defined molds. Of course, this was a society where people literally owned other people and kept them as slaves.

Of course, another truth about the so-called Golden Age of piracy is how little we actually know about these “famous” pirates. One theme of the series is that we never really learn Long John Silver’s history and he constantly reinvents his own narrative. The people around him also feed into his mythology. Captain Flint is also a persona built by a former British Navy captain who felt pushed into a course of action by circumstances. In a sense, the series is examination of the importance of story and its role in motivating others.

By nature, I’m a person who asks questions. It’s what led me to a career in the sciences. It’s also what led me to be a writer. I like to explore ideas and I don’t always accept that something is true just because someone in authority told me it was true. I expect an authority to be able to show me why something is true and to be accountable for their actions. I’m not someone who fits comfortably in a lot of the pre-defined social roles. It’s perhaps because of that I find pirate stories fascinating. Black Sails and other similar tales tell stories of those who question authority and live life by their own rules. While there’s a danger in glamorizing pirates, I’ve often found it important to ask what drove people to choose that life.

My Space Pirates’ Legacy series came out of that fascination for real life pirates and one of my goals is to present Ellison Firebrandt as a man who is driven to become a pirate by his life circumstances and the world he lives in and then look at how he finds his way onto a new life path. You can discover his story by reading the books at: http://davidleesummers.com/books.html#pirate_legacy

Die Hard with Vampires

While in the final days of drafting my novel Ordeal of the Scarlet Order, I had the opportunity to read Kim Newman’s novel Anno Dracula 1999: Daikaiju. To date, this is his sixth and final Anno Dracula novel. Set in Japan on December 31, 1999, we learn that the vampire Christina Light, also known as the Princess Casamassima, is throwing a party for New Year’s Eve in her Tokyo office building, built in the shape of a dragon. Of course, in Japan big monsters are kaiju and really big monsters are daikaiju, hence the book’s title. At the stroke of midnight, the princess plans to “ascend” and she’s invited everyone who is anyone to be there for the event. One of Christina’s vampire powers is to literally become light and her ascension will take the form of becoming a permanent part of the electromagnetic spectrum, which would allow her to become part of the whole information superstructure of the world.

Among the attendees are Richard Jeperson of British Intelligence and his bodyguard, Nezumi, who had been made a vampire around a thousand years earlier when only 13-years old. The party looks as though it’s going to be a splendid success until a group of terrorists, Yakuza assassins and Transylvanian mercenaries crash the party all led by a member of Dracula’s family who has visions of “ascending” in Christina Light’s place. The terrorists aren’t the only unwelcome guests. On the 44th floor of the Daikaiju building. Hal Takayama wakes up, not remembering his history or why he’s there. What’s more, his left hand has been replaced by a computerized glass hand called “Lefty” that seems to have an agenda of its own. Lefty effectively convinces Hal that he was Jun Zero, the most notorious cyber-terrorist of the age. Meanwhile, looming in the background of the novel is the infamous Y2K bug, which many people feared would be disastrous as the calendar rolled over from 1999 to 2000.

So far, the Anno Dracula books have tended to tell stories set over weeks and even decades, but this one is a taut action-thriller jumping character to character as Jeperson, Nezumi, and Takayama work together to stop the terrorists and understand the implications of Christina Light’s ascension. Christina Light’s story arc began in the graphic novel Seven Days in Mayhem, then continued in the novel One Thousand Monsters. Daikaiju proves to be a thrilling conclusion to the arc. Even though Daikaiju is the final novel so far, I still have one more Anno Dracula volume to go. Kim Newman has a short story collection called Anno Dracula 1899 and Other Stories which I will likely dive into while hoping he has other stories in the works for the series.

As I say, I recently finished the first pass of a new Scarlet Order vampire novel. I’m at the point where I’m setting it aside and then I’ll take a fresh look at it in a couple of weeks. I’m sure I’ll be tearing it apart and putting it back together again before handing it off to beta readers and an editor. Meanwhile, you can learn about the first two novels in the series and read the opening chapters at: http://davidleesummers.com/books.html#scarlet_order.

Renfield

As I write this, I’m working on the final chapters of my third Scarlet Order Vampire novel, Ordeal of the Scarlet Order. I’m still in the rough draft stage, so in some ways, once I complete this phase, the real work will begin. I’ve been having fun with the book, but I know it needs work to make it better. While working on the novel, it was fun to learn about the movie Renfield starring Nicholas Hoult as Dracula’s famous familiar and Nicolas Cage as Dracula himself. My wife and I decided to make an excursion to see the film.

Renfield is told as a sequel to Universal’s 1931 film, Dracula. As the film opens, we find Renfield in New Orleans in a support group for people in abusive and co-dependent relationships. As he narrates how he came to be there, he tells us the story of his past century or so of existence, starting with a recreation of scenes from the 1931 film. The recreated scenes demonstrate how well Cage and Hoult channel Bela Lugosi and Dwight Frye in their performances. In fact, in some ways, Cage feels like he finds a middle-ground between Bela Lugosi and Carlos Villarías, who played Dracula in the Spanish-language version of the film, shot at the same time and on the same sets as the English-language version. We learn that Renfield effectively gets super strength from eating bugs, an offshoot of how vampires gain strength and power from drinking blood.

The reason Renfield is in the support group is that he’s dealing with his guilt over taking innocent people to Dracula over the years. Instead, he’s decided to take abusive partners and spouses to Dracula. The only problem with this plan is that Dracula has no taste for evil-doers and Renfield finds himself stepping on the toes of a drug cartel operating in the Crescent City called the Lobos. Meanwhile, a New Orleans cop named Rebecca Quincy, played by Awkwafina, will do anything to stop the Lobos, who murdered her father.

After Renfield kills one of the Lobos top hit men, Teddy Lobo, son of the cartel’s boss, is sent to dispatch him. Meanwhile Officer Quincy is on the trail of Teddy Lobo played by Ben Schwartz. They all collide at a New Orleans restaurant and Renfield saves Officer Quincy’s life. As the two get to know each other, Renfield decides to take steps to further separate himself from Dracula.

Overall, Renfield was an enjoyable horror/comedy take on the Dracula. I liked how Cage gave us a Dracula who really wasn’t at all sympathetic and I also really appreciated that the film understood co-dependent relationships. After all, the idea is that Renfield defends and supports a being who is addicted to blood. As a fan of New Orleans, I loved seeing the Crescent City in the film and recognized many of the filming locations. Tonally, the movie was a little jarring. It seemed to have trouble deciding whether it was a light horror comedy in the vein of What We Do In the Shadows or a more over-the-top bloody action romp in the style of Robert Rodriguez’s Machete. Also, I felt the inevitable, final confrontation between Teddy Lobo and Renfield could have been a stronger scene.

Although this was a vampire film, I felt the clash of magic, horror, and crime reminded me most of my novel The Astronomer’s Crypt. You can learn more about my novel, and even see a short film based on a scene in the novel by visiting http://davidleesummers.com/Astronomers-Crypt.html

Against the Day – Part 3

As Part 3 of Against the Day opens, we find the Chums of Chance aboard subdesertine frigate Saksaul under the command of Captain Toadflax. They’re searching for the lost city of Shambhala. The Chums learn that Iceland spar allows them to use the Sfiuncino Itinerary as a map. They can go inside the map where the distances are marked in the dimension of time. Along the way, they stop at the city of Nuevo Rialto, where they encounter sand fleas the size of camels. The chums also learn that the lost city of Shambhala may not be the main objective of the Saksaul. It’s possible, they’re after oil instead of adventure.

We then return to Colorado briefly where Merle Rideout misses his daughter Dally. He begins a journey to places east and develops a fascination for movies. In particular, he’s caught up in how they manipulate time through the use of light. Meanwhile Frank Traverse has returned to the United States and is looking for his girlfriend Estrella in Nochechita. When he gets there, he has the feeling she’s in town, but somehow can’t see her. The reason Frank had left the United States is that he killed Sloat Fresno to avenge his father. Sloat’s partner, Deuce, who has married Frank’s sister Lake, is afraid of meeting the ghost of Webb Traverse. This fear forces him to admit his part in Webb’s murder to his wife.

We jump from Colorado to London and return to the adventures of the True Worshipers of the Ineffable Tetractys – the TWIT – along with Yashmeen Halfcourt and Lew Basignight. Yashmeen has been obsessed with Riemann’s Zeta Function decides to go to Göttingen. Her professor Renfrew wants her to be on the lookout for a professor called Werfner.

From here we join the steamship Stupendica where Dally Rideout is crossing the Atlantic with her mother Erlys Zombini. Kit Traverse is also there. When he and Dally meet, they remember their time in Colorado and they begin flirting with each other. Their romance is doomed as a result of the bilocation of this section’s title. The Stupendica is also the Battleship Emperor Maximillian with its own destiny. Kit finds himself working below decks on the Emperor Maximillian. After several adventures, he finds his way to Belgium. As Kit tries to figure out how he’s going to get to Göttingen, he is pegged as a nihilist outlaw. He begins to see that Belgium is a pawn of international affairs just as his home state of Colorado is.

The Chums of Chance are now in Brussels where handyman Miles Blundell encounters one of the Trespassers, who are voyagers through time. It’s pointed out that any study of time is ultimately a study of mortality. The Trespassers don’t voyage through time because of any technical knowhow. Rather they became time travelers when time was ripped open. The Chums hope the Trespassers might be able to help them find eternal youth, but Miles points out that the Trespassers don’t have that power.

Meanwhile, Kit Traverse falls in with a group of arms dealers while also falling in love with a woman named Umeki Tsurigane from Japan. The arms dealers realize the Chums’ airship, the Inconvenience is rarely seen. Only the Chums are seen and it seems to be a property of light. Umeki is working on using light as a weapon, splitting it into rays that are ordinary and extraordinary. Kit dreams about the weapon’s power, then tells Umeki about it. Ultimately, she leaves him to go to Japan.

Dally, aboard the Stupendica, arrived in Europe as expected and she travels with the Zombini family of performers across Europe. Eventually, she decides she must make her own way and asks to stay in Venice. Dally becomes associated with Hunter Penfallow, who we last saw associated with the Vormance Expedition in the last part. He tells her a story from the Gospel of Thomas that leads her to realize that one might find order when one expected chaos.

Back in London, private investigator Lew Basnight is put on the trail of an antique dealer named Lamont Replevin who supposedly has a map of the lost city of Shambhala. Lew is able to photograph it. Now, Kit Traverse and Yashmeen Halfcourt have converged in Göttingen. Kit’s funds from the millionaire Scarsdale Vibe are cut off, but Kit also realizes that Yashmeen has an incredible power. She can step outside of time itself. Yashmeen offers to help Kit find employment with TWIT. She also reveals that her father might be another person seeking the lost city of Shambhala. Kit meets with Yashmeen’s father and learns: “As for what lies beneath those sands, you’ve got your choice – either Shambhala, as close to the Heavenly City as Earth has known, or Baku and Johannesburg all over again, unexplored reserves of gold, oil, Plutonian wealth, and the prospect of creating yet another subhuman class of workers to extract it.”

In the United States, we follow Frank Traverse as he’s hired to run arms into Mexico. Frank begins to have dreams about his father Webb. At the same time, Frank’s brother Reef has been working as a dynamiter in Europe. He now knows that the millionaire Scarsdale Vibe is connected to his father’s murder and Reef feels compelled to hunt down Vibe. Reef ends up connecting with his brother Kit along with Yashmeen. Kit wants to go to Venice on Scarsdale Vibe’s trail. Kit and Reef attend a séance where the “speak” with their father, Webb, who tries to dissuade them from chasing down Scarsdale Vibe.

This part of the novel wraps up with Lew Basnight in London. He thinks he runs into Professor Renfrew, but it turns out it’s Professor Werfner. After consulting with his friends Nigel and Neville, Lew realizes Renfrew and Werfner are the same person, somehow separated through bilocation.

Keeping track of all these plot threads is definitely a challenge, but it helps to focus on the thematic threads. The Traverse brothers are seeking justice for their father, but justice may find itself tied to international politics. There’s the quest for Shambhala, which might be a quest through time as much as through space. There’s also the very notion of “bilocation.” People and places that may be two things at once, each with different fates. As Dally discovered in Venice, the world appears to be in chaos, but we may find order yet. In part 4, we’ll literally turn “Against the Day.”

As I’ve noted before, I see echoes of Pynchon’s steampunk experiment in my own writing. I see the exploration of the Wild West. I see the worldwide saga and I appreciate Pynchon’s fascination with math and science. To learn more about my steampunk saga, visit: http://davidleesummers.com/books.html#clockwork_legion

Dracula 1972 AD and Beyond

Recently reading Fred Saberhagen’s 1975 novel The Dracula Tape, brought to mind a pair of movies set just a little earlier in the decade. These were Dracula AD 1972 and The Satanic Rites of Dracula both produced by Hammer films in 1972 and 1973 respectively. These were the last two films where Christopher Lee played Dracula for Hammer. Just as Batman has the Joker, and Sherlock Holmes has Moriarty, Dracula has Van Helsing, and it’s fitting that Hammer studio’s long-time Van Helsing, Peter Cushing, was along for the ride. These movies were interesting to watch, since I’ve long cited Christopher Lee’s portrayal of Dracula as an inspiration for the Desmond Drake character in my Scarlet Order Vampire novels.

Dracula AD 1972 opens with Dr. Lawrence Van Helsing’s final confrontation with the count. As one might gather from Van Helsing’s name, we’ve already deviated from Bram Stoker’s novel. The two are fighting on a coach when it hits a rock and both are thrown clear. Van Helsing soon discovers that Dracula has been impaled on the broken spoke of a wagon wheel! The good doctor finishes the count off. Dracula falls to dust just before Van Helsing succumbs to his injuries. Unfortunately, one of Dracula’s minions shows up and collects the wheel spoke which impaled Dracula along with a healthy sample of vampire dust. Soon, we skip ahead to 1972, where a group of young people are partying in a London estate. When they’re kicked out, the leader of the group, who looks suspiciously like the minion who collected Dracula’s remains, invites the group to an abandoned church. He wants to conduct a black mass “for kicks.” The ritual is performed. The leader, who goes by the name Johnny Alucard—another tie to a novel I read recently—succeeds in bringing Dracula back. It looks like the world may be lost, but fortunately, one of the people in the group is young Jessica Van Helsing played by Stephanie Beacham. She’s the great granddaughter of Lawrence and the granddaughter of Lorrimer who, like Lawrence, is played by Peter Cushing. In this film, Dracula seems tied to the abandoned church and relies on his minions to do all the work for him. This makes it comparatively easy for Lorrimer to track him down for the final confrontation. The movie’s pacing and style felt like a tribute to the earlier movies in the Hammer Dracula franchise, but it added little new to the lore.

Hammer followed this film with a sequel called The Satanic Rites of Dracula. The movie was retitled Dracula and his Vampire Brides for release in the United States. As one might gather from the British title, more dark rites are in process. Only this time, the people engaged in the rites are from Britain’s business, political and scientific elite. Top investigators attempt to infiltrate the proceedings to find out what’s going on. They get some info and turn to Scotland Yard’s Inspector Murray who helped to crack the last weird case involving dark rituals. Inspector Murray turns to his friends Lorrimer and Jessica Van Helsing for help. This time Jessica is played by Joanna Lumley, but otherwise, our repeat characters are portrayed by the same actors as before. We soon learn that Dracula is no longer tied to the church where he had been trapped in the last movie. He’s now a top London businessman called D.D. Denham. Dracula has grown so old that all he really wants is an end to his immortal existence. However, being Dracula, he isn’t content to just find a way to die. He has to take out humanity as well and he’s found people willing to help. Fortunately, Murray and the Van Helsings are there to save the world. While the first film felt like a tribute to early Hammer Dracula films, this one played more like later films with more explicit violence and nudity. I liked the idea of Dracula as a businessman in the 20th century and Christopher Lee’s D.D. Denham certainly feels not a little like Desmond Drake from the Scarlet Order novels.

Even though the second film felt campier than the first and had several problems, I tended to like it better. The first film relied on many tried and true Dracula tropes, but the second film embarked on new territory, doing more to make Dracula himself the kind of character he would be in the present day. I only wish that Christopher Lee’s Dracula had been given more to do along with a stronger ending than the one he received in the final film. Still, if you’re a fan of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, it’s worth seeking these films out.

I’ve been hard at work on my third Scarlet Order vampire novel featuring Desmond Drake, who takes inspiration from Christopher Lee’s Dracula. As of this writing, I’ve completed just over 80,000 words of the novel. If you want to be ready when the novel comes out, check out the first two books of the Scarlet Order vampire series at: http://www.davidleesummers.com/books.html#scarlet_order