The President’s Vampire

Cade and Barrow are back, once again fighting creatures that one never encounters in even the most comprehensive zoo.  Barrow refers to these monsters as Snakeheads, although they are really some kind of combination of human, reptile, and amphibian.  They seem to be a man-made mutation of something that has existed in legend and folklore for centuries.

Cade has encountered the Snakeheads before, and it’s not a fond memory for him.  He knows that what he is dealing with now is harder to kill.  It also has a new way of propagating – the bite of a Snakehead transmits enough of the virus to make a new Snakehead.  A new Snakehead is a ravenous Snakehead.

This mission is a joint one, against the better judgment of both Cade and Barrow.  They don’t have a choice on this one.  The CIA is just as unhappy about sharing the mission.  Everyone from the CIA seems hardwired to distrust everything and everyone, including their own team.  Cade has been around too long to believe anything that comes out of the mouth of a spook.  Barrow is learning, but hasn’t gotten over that male propensity to think with the wrong head sometimes.

The imminent threat is the Snakeheads.  The long-term and far more dangerous problem is the person creating the Snakeheads.  This is where the conspiracy theorists will have themselves a wonderful time.  So plausible in some ways, so incredibly unlikely at the core – all grist for that mill.

Farnsworth has written a very good second novel, building on all that was good in Blood Oath.  His characters, for the most part, grow and mature (although that is difficult in a vampire).  His monsters are truly horrific.  The man behind it all gives “sick and twisted” a whole new meaning.  I can hardly wait to see what’s next.

Reviewed by P.J. Coldren, March 2011.

The Sound of Building Coffins

I first read the first 5000 words of “The Sound of Building Coffins” as part of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards in 2008.  If I had the rest of the book, I would have finished reading right then.  As it was, those first chapters haunted me. I bought the book as soon as I heard it was available and it did not go onto my massive TBR pile.

The tale begins in 1891 New Orleans as the Creole Age was dying and the Jazz Age was being forged in the fires of poverty and calamity. Nine-year-old Typhus Morningstar is riding his bike to the river with a sack of aborted fetuses courtesy of Dr. Jack. Those babies are going to the river, to be ‘rebirthed’ into catfish. Further down the Mississippi, Marcus Nobody Special is fishing. So far, he’s kept nothing of what he’s caught since he casts his line for a particular catfish.

That same half-moon night, lynchings of Sicilian prisoners take place in the New Orleans jail. Reverend Noonday Morningstar (Typhus’s father) and several of his cohorts are summoned to the wife of one of those men because her infant son is possessed by a demon. They perform a voodoo exorcism using a hand of glory claimed from the child’s hanged father and rebirth the baby afterwards.  Not all of the party survive that night and none remain unscathed. That demon pursues the rest of the party, alive and dead, through the next several years.

New Orleans itself is as strong a character as any. Through the pages, you can feel the damp, hear the hot sweet strains of a cornet changing music history, taste the spice of cajun food, and see the bodies rising out of the ground with the weather. The Crescent City’s call is so strong there are times you have to stop and recollect the storyline, but the effort is very worthwhile.

WARNING:  After reading this book, you’re going to have some cravings for some low country boil and beignets, maybe some crawfish etouffe and Preservation Hall jazz.

Reviewed by Rebecca Kyle.