Demon Vampire by Virgil Allen Moore.

Vampire fiction is a very difficult genre, perhaps one of the most difficult literary genres, to execute well. Quite aside from the obvious genre clichés which everyone is now doubtless familiar with – the vampire as tortured anti-hero, and so on – there is a breadth of expectations in dedicated readers of the genre. Some fans enjoy seeing the conventions of the genre subverted; some enjoy seeing them upheld wholesale; some readers enjoy romances as a part of the plot, others believe that this is hackneyed and overused. (Notably, the Twilight Saga has recently taken the Vampire romance to a kind of summit of objectionableness) Vampire fiction is, in short, a real minefield of competing readership expectations, and pitfalls of plot and style.
So it was with a great deal of trepidation that I fired up a PDF copy of Virgil Allen Moore’s Demon Vampire. What’s in a name? Well, perhaps quite a bit if it’s the title of your novel; this is one which summons up the more theatrical, camp aspects of the vampire genre. In this respect, I have to say, I wasn’t too disappointed. VAM clearly enjoys the romantic qualities of the vampire aesthetic, though I’m uncertain on whether he has simply too much invested in the genre; the plot often all too easily gives way to a simple exploration of VAM’s own conception of vampire mythology, and indeed it’s noticeable how on these occasions VAM’s style is noticeably more fluent than at other times. VAM states that he first came to writing through poetry, and this is noticeable. One of Orwell’s rules of writing well was never to use a more complex word when a simpler one would suffice, and VAM practically goes out of his way to defy this, delighting in – I’m tempted to use ‘verbiage’ here, but that would be a touch hypocritical – complexity of language for its own sake. In a choice between ‘truth’ and ‘verisimilitude’, Demon Vampire is the sort of piece of writing that would choose the latter. When writing poetry this may be all well and good, but prose requires a more incisive, direct style which Demon Vampire fails to really apply. Allied to this are the frequent use of short descriptive sentences, which almost give the impression VAM is simply padding things out to save space.
The characterisation is also weak. I never felt that I had anything much invested in them; the constant feeling is that VAM is simply using them as ciphers to advance the plot, rather than developing them as independent parts of the narrative. The characters lack a tightness of definition and emphasis; again, I couldn’t help feeling at times than VAM was more interested in an exploration of a vampire mythology than he was in creating a story, and as most people will already have at least have a passing familiarity with the genre conceits involved, there’s nothing remarkable in this. Perhaps the most grating aspect of the whole thing though, at least for me, was the lack of even basic research with respect to the period detail. Lovers of the genre are not fools in this respect; often one of the main draws for them are the historical settings. The period scenes lack even fairly basic historical definition, and, indeed, what little there is happens to be frequently wrong. Eyebrows were raised for me on receipt of the information that the Ottoman Empire “crumbled in 1937”. (Even a cursory glance at Wikipedia could have told you otherwise, and it’s not even close to the real date that the Ottomans went the way of the dodo) It’s novel to be in a position where you know more about a historical period than a character who supposedly lived through it, but Demon Vampire provided me with the opportunity. When a writer can’t even summon up the enthusiasm to do research that basic, you begin to wonder what your reason for reading is.
I’m afraid that Demon Vampire simply served to reinforce my wariness of this genre. All the things that I’d long suspected vampire fiction being full of were here: self-indulgence, excessive theatricality and weakness of structure. I can’t even say that hardcore vampire aficionados may have an interest, because I’m not even sure about that. While VAM clearly has a great deal of enthusiasm for the genre, that isn’t enough by itself to sustain a novel, so I’m afraid that Demon Vampire is not something which I can recommend.

Demon Vampire is available now for Kindle.

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