In the previous post I analyzed Mr. Justice so much it almost died on the examination table; at some point I'll combine those notes on plot and character with a discussion of the author's style (looking closely at some quoted passages), which I hope will restore some of the mystery and magic to the novel. In the meantime, I'm going to strap another subject onto the gurney: Blood County, 1981, a fine horror novel about which very little has been written.
As those familiar with DP's bibliography know, she wrote that book under the pseudonym "Curt Selby." This paragraph precedes the frontispiece:
Curt Selby was born and raised in a remote valley of West Virginia, and is thoroughly familiar with the life of the isolated mountain folk with whom he is kith and kin. After serving in the armed forces, Selby found work in the East Coast state where he married and makes his home. He has written and sold many novels under other signatures, but this one is drawn from his own youth and experiences.
This passage contains multiple ironies: (1) The reader thinks this is Selby's most personal book--that he finally came out from under the aliases to tell a story based on his own background. One problem: Selby doesn't exist. (2) Piserchia published eleven books under her own name, but wrote the one "drawn on her youth and experiences" under a pseudonym. (3) In this most personal of her books, the isolated mountain folk who are her kith and kin are depicted as a pack of bloodthirsty vampires.
Nevertheless, the book does contain some beautiful and affectionate writing about the world DP left behind, and in discussing the novel, I plan to succumb to the urge to look for autobiography at every turn. What follows is a chapter by chapter summary, a form of note-taking that will eventually be a review. Chapter 1. Clinton Breen receives a telegram from home announcing that his brother Jared is dead. He's so distracted he steps off a curb and is hit by a car. The gaping, mortal wound on his head barely fazes him; by the time the driver, Portia Clark, tracks him to his apartment a few hours later it's healed. Clinton tells her he's fine and doesn't need her help. Sugarman Phelps, Clinton's alcoholic "surrogate mother and father" arrives at the apartment from Blood County, W. Va. He reiterates that Jared is dead; Clinton says: "I don't see why you have to be so afraid of him." Chapter 2. A train travels east carrying war casualties. Somewhere around Illinois or Pennsylvania, one of the coffins springs open and a fiend with long fangs and glowing red eyes emerges. As he prepares to bite the soldier guarding the coffins, the soldier recites the Lord's Prayer, and the fiend shows dawning awareness, relaxes his grip, and jumps from the train. (In Chapter 9 we learn this scene is a flashback to Clinton's vampire awakening.) Chapter 3. From her hiding place under a mansion in Blood County, Gilda Lamprou watches a child, Charlie, playing. She gives him bubblegum in exchange for a few drops of "what keeps him functioning," a routine that's been going on for some time. She fears her husband, Duquieu, will be "harsh" if she "simply snatches the brat and does what she longs to do all at once." [outline continued in comments--or read the completed version here.]
Ch. 4. Clinton and Sugarman travel from Newark [see p. 72] to Blood, a West Virginia mountain village. The train and bus only take them so far; the rest of the journey is on foot. In flashback, we learn that Clinton and his half-brother Jared are the offspring of mortal women ravished by the vampire Duquieu. Both women died shortly after giving birth; according to Sugie, "all their red blood cells was et up." [Note: this telegraphs information that Portia learns later in the Morgantown hospital.] Clinton is ashamed to be Duquieu's son, but Sugie tells him (still in flashback) that "you're my boy and the boy of everyone in Blood who's trying to be a Christian while livin' in the middle of Beelzebub's circus." The boys often play in Duquieu's mansion, where their father day-sleeps inside an impregnable iron cage.
Ch. 5. Clinton and Sugie return to the mountain shack where Clinton spent his youth. This scene is very sad. Clinton learns that his childhood sweetheart Coley Nagl married Jared. Weird detail about the village: vegetables grow to enormous size there; everyone lives off abundant, self-canned food.
Ch. 6. Flashback: A much younger Clinton and Jared try to ride Duquieu's powerful horse, Baron. Later Jared attempts to break into Duquieu's cage and fails. He declares that one day he'll be master of the Lamprou estate.
Ch. 7. Blood resident Marsh Nagl (Coley's father) makes deliveries to the mansion, informs Duquieu that Clinton has returned to Blood. Clinton has violated "the law": anyone can leave the mountain but no one can return without permission. Obviously Duquieu rules the village like a medieval landowner.
Ch. 8. Duquieu locks Gilda in the mansion's basement and tells her she'll live on rats and cockroaches. She has evidently done something bad to the child, Charlie. She tells Duquieu he'll need her soon, because his sons are going to "bring him down."
Ch. 9. Clint and Sugie debate the serfdom of Blood's residents. We learn that Duquieu fled the old country in 1693 and has ruled the mountain village since. Sugie thinks the villagers are dependent on the abnormally large yields from the hybrid "freak seeds" that Duquieu brought with him from Europe; he defends Duquieu as a "civilized thing [who] only goes haywire once in a while." After Sugie goes to sleep, Duquieu appears to Clint and gives him 24 hours to leave town; the old vampire offers Clint some of his seeds, and says certain tribes in Mexico might welcome a savior. Clint calls Duquieu a rapist, and Duquieu taunts that it was he, Clint, who consumed his mother's body in the womb. [Second telegraphing of this info.] Clint says that Duquieu is evil, and Duquieu replies: "Imagine long, long life[...] Do you picture yourself as noble and as the perpetrator of good works or does time begin to pall on you? [...] Aye, that it does, and every little bit of diversion can lure you at any time. The flash of a slender ankle or an angle of loveliness in a cheek is enough to transport you into a frenzy of desire." We also learn here about Clint's death in the war and subsequent transformation, and that Clint is a "day man," meaning the rays of the sun don't hurt him (yet). Later, villager July West arrives and announces that Portia Clark, who injured Clint in Chapter 1, has arrived in Blood.
Ch. 10. Flashback: Young Clint, Jared, and Coley are diving off a rope bridge. Coley says she'll have "plenty of babies" when she marries Clint. Clint reflects that he can't stay in Blood and marry Coley (or anyone else) because his offspring will be like Duquieu.
Ch. 11. The toddler Charlie Steiner has become a vampire, thanks to Gilda. His mother Louise, still fond of him against her better judgment, keeps him in a bear cage deep in the woods. Responding to his cries of "Charlie hungwy!" she lets him out of the cage, "feeds" him, and puts him back in. He has taken too much blood; she falls to the forest floor and dies.
Ch. 12. Portia Clark spends her first night in Blood, locked by the locals in her room. She walks up the mountain searching for Clint, and discovers Louise Steiner's body. Clint appears on horseback, guesses that "wolves" were responsible, and goes off to take care of the body. Portia continues climbing and has lunch in the shack with Sugie. Coley arrives looking for Clint, and is distant with Portia. This chapter is all described from Portia's POV; we learn she's a freelance writer thinking about doing a story on Blood. We see the food, customs, and countryside, all lovingly described, through her city-fied (Newark, NJ) perspective: for example, she has a breakfast of eggs and fried fatback (described as "crisp and sweet") and her host Sid has "salt fish"--fish rolled in batter and fried in lard.
Ch. 13. Searching for his wife Louise, Sam Steiner discovers a very hungry Charlie in the bear cage and lets him out. Things don't go well.
Ch. 14. Not suspecting what's going on with Sam and Charlie, Clint takes Louise's body to her home and lays it out on the floor for Sam to take care of. Later, he "sits up" with the deceased Jared's body. Jared's grandfather and surrogate Pap, a mean drunk named Sweck Brewster, shows up and taunts Clint. Sweck swears that Jared won't turn, and if he does Duquieu will kill him. Clint tells Sweck to leave town.
Ch. 15. Marsh Nagl is Blood's "milkman," meaning he has to collect a pint of blood a month from Blood residents and make nightly hauls up to the mansion. His horse-drawn wagon enters the Steiner property but he doesn't realize till too late that the family has turned. Just before they attack, he curses himself as "a fool living in hell and not constantly on the lookout for devils." After the Steiners are done with him, they gorge on his nightly run.
Ch. 16. Coley finds Clint in the church keeping watch over Jared's body. We learn that Sweck Brewster killed Jared, and that Clint became a schoolteacher after leaving Blood. Coley hopes Clint will marry her now that Jared's dead, but Clint says "Your husband isn't dead." He tells Coley to leave the church so the jealous Jared won't see the two of them together when he opens his eyes.
Ch. 17. Duquieu bursts into Sugie's shack and angrily demands that Sugie assume Nagl's duties, since "the delivery was not made tonight." Portia comes out of the shadows and sarcastically asks if Duquieu is a feudal padrone. Duquieu becomes courtly in manner and invites Portia to take a walk with him. He points out his house at the top of the mountain, and says he hopes he'll see more of her. He exits, and Sugie refuses to tell Portia anything since she'll "be leavin' tomorrow." [Among other things, Portia learns from Duquieu that he was born in France, and that his father was Greek. His last name "Lamprou" is obviously a play on lamprey, a bloodsucking eel, and in fact Piserchia never uses the word vampire in the book: the bloodsuckers are all referred to as Lamprous.] As Portia is falling asleep, she thinks she sees a face pressed against the screen door--that of a woman last seen dead in the woods.
Ch. 18. Duquieu wheels a cart of blood bottles down to the basement of the mansion (called the "pool room" because it contains a large empty swimming pool) in order to feed the starving Gilda. We learn she was once a mortal woman, and that Duquieu's father "warned him not to take a normal woman as a bride." As he is reminiscing about their early days, Gilda bolts out the door and escapes.
Ch. 19. Jared wakes up in a full-blown vampire rage. He breaks the chains with which Clint has bound him and exits the church.
Ch. 20. Duquieu stalks Portia from outside Sugie's cabin. Clint appears and tells him no. Duquieu mockingly claims droit du seigneur and scoffs at Clint's "war training." They fight; Clint surprises the old man with some unexpected moves but soon Duquieu has Clint on his back. As he leaves, Duquieu warns his son to be en garde.
Ch. 21. The next morning, Portia tries to convince Clint and Sugie to let her stay in Blood. Ugly-looking villager July West shows up and is told to escort her out of town. Sugie announces that he's the new milkman and asks Clint for a contribution; obviously he doesn't know yet that Clint has turned. ["Turned" is my post-Near Dark shorthand for vampire transformation, by the way: Piserchia never uses the word that way.] Clint says he's too "feverish" to give blood and Sugie leaves to "shop for Duquieu's dinner." Soon after, Coley arrives with the news that her father, Marsh Nagl, is a Lamprou. They find him sleeping under his house and he shrinks from the light and "mews like a cat." Clint promises he'll prepare the old man for burial after he's made "one more mark" on the body.
Ch. 22. Sugie makes the milk run up to Duquieu's mansion. Duquieu says Blood residents must "go into the havens" until he rounds up all the Lamprous. Countermanding his earlier orders, he requests that Clint, not Sugie, handle all future blood deliveries to the mansion.
Ch. 23. Wandering the hills, Gilda finds Charlie and "adopts" him. The two prowl for necks to suck, but can't find any Blood residents. Gilda realizes that Duquieu has done something he only does "every once in a while," which is put the townspeople in havens: five concrete fortresses, each stocked with provisions to sustain 100 people for a week, which Duquieu uses as lures for stray Lamprous. As Gilda is explaining this, Duquieu rides up dramatically astride the horse, Baron. Sam and Louise Steiner, who have been lurking behind the Pickhandle Hill haven, try to cut and run. Duquieu kills Louise with a flying wooden stake through the heart and strings the screaming Sam up in a net, which swings from a tree branch. Gilda shields Charlie, her "baby," from skewering, and the grumbling Duquieu marches them back to the mansion and locks them up in the poolroom. [This is getting funny--we're almost in Addams Family territory here.]
Ch. 24. Blood residents exit the havens after dawn to take care of business around town. Sam hangs in his net, burned by the daytime sun, waiting for Duquieu to kill him. Clint collects blood from the townspeople, then uses his Army-acquired lockpicking skills to enter Duquieu's sleeping cage. Perversely, he places the blood at the foot of the old Lamprou's bed. He returns home to find his surrogate Pap crying; it's finally dawned on Sugie that Clint's a Lamprou, albeit one who sleeps at night and wears a steel vest to protect his heart. Clint tells Sugie not to worry, because Blood is "home to everybody I love." He promises to "handle the situation," and then makes a mysterious promise that doesn't become clear 'til the last chapter: "You'll have your Lamprou to bless the fields and you'll have your jug and your friends."
Ch. 25. Kicked out of the village, Portia visits the hospital in nearby Morgantown. A doctor there knows something peculiar is going on in Blood, but isn't inclined to investigate: "They mind their business, we mind ours." He finds Clint's and Jared's birth certificates stapled together and Portia learns what the reader already knows about the deaths of the boys' mothers. Portia returns to Blood the next day; when she arrives at Clint's cabin at dusk, she sees Clint on the porch and a woman and child at the edge of the yard, beckoning to her. She runs to Clint, and out of her hearing Clint tells Gilda and Charlie to get lost. (How did they escape?) Portia announces she's staying in Blood "to see if the Union is cohesive as I've always assumed."
Ch. 26. Clint delivers blood to the mansion; his metal vest saves him from Duquieu's booby traps: wooden spears hurled by wall-mounted catapults. After the attack he and Duquieu debate Blood's feudal servitude. Clint says his education showed him what a leech Duquieu is: he survives on the townspeople's superstitions. Duquieu says the people would never have progressed anyway, and Clint says "Because you haven't let them!" Duquieu sidesteps the issue by railing about local families that produce "gargoyles" through incest, and brags that he built two schools that the locals burned down: "They wanted only their fields, their jugs and their isolation." Clint suggests that Duquieu and Gilda, as the last surviving Lamprous, could have saved the townspeople by killing themselves. Duquieu replies that suicide's not so simple. Before Clint leaves, he tells the old Lamprou that Jared has released Gilda, Charlie, and Sam.
Ch. 27. Outside Sugie's house the next morning, Clint discovers Portia shooting arrows at targets. Unknown to her, Sugie has his rifle trained on Sam Steiner, who is stalking her, wearing a large floppy hat and oversized clothes to protect himself from the sun. To Sugie's horror, the sharp-eyed Clint points out that Gilda and Charlie (who we learn in Chapter 33 are impervious to sunlight) are on the other side of the yard, also watching the archer. Sugie explains that Portia was on a "limpig team" and made the bow and arrows herself. [Somewhat conveniently because Portia still doesn't know about Lamprous, the arrows are pure pine.] Again out of Portia's hearing, Clint tells Sam to lay off the woman and to tell Lady Lamprou and Charlie to do the same. At first Sam is snarling, but when he realizes Clint has no blood he says "Awww. You're a Lamprou."
Ch. 28. Clint and Coley stand on the old rope bridge they played on as children and talk about the stray Lamprous haunting Blood, and their feelings. Coley asks about Portia, mentioning that the newcomer gave her some rouge to replace the "cheek color" she normally gets by soaking pieces of red wallpaper. [Another interesting detail of life--and poverty--in the hills.] Suddenly, Jared appears on the shore and cuts the rope bridge. Clint and Coley dive fifty or sixty feet into Slate Lake. Clint guesses that Jared wasn't trying to kill them but wanted to sever the childhood ties the three of them had. Coley points out (not for the first time or the last) that Clint has "never been right" about Jared.
Ch. 29. At noon two days later, Clint finds a hollow place in a treetop where he used to hide as a boy and climbs in it to sleep; his body clock is changing and he's becoming more nocturnal. We learn that Portia has hiked to Grafton to swim in the town's new pool and Sugie and Coley are safe in the havens. This chapter gives a science fiction-ish account of Lamprou physiology, reminiscent of Richard Matheson's great I Am Legend: cells that divide more slowly during periods of food-deprivation, an unusual part of the brain that awakens after death and repairs injuries, and a new mechanism in the heart that secretes "Lamprou substances" used by the brain.
Ch. 30. Duquieu awakens before dusk to discover Gilda hanging by the neck in the hallway of the mansion with a stake rammed through her heart. He falls into a chair in shock: "A sob racked Lamprou's body, brought him stiffly upright in the chair. His last link with hope and sanity lay in the form of this addle-brained woman who loved him far more than he deserved. Now she dangled like a puffy-faced, bulgy-eyed fish, strung up like a trophy by one of the hayseeds living in these wretched hills, her life's fluid leaking onto the floor at his feet." While he ponders who the culprit might be, Clint and Sugie show up with the nightly blood run. He hides, and listens as they find the body and immediately peg Jared as the killer.
Ch. 31. Duquieu throws a rock into haven number one with a message demanding that the townspeople produce Jared by nightfall of the next day. To work off his rage, he rides Baron around the hills: we learn that the horse is infected by the Lamprou substance, but, according to a later chapter, not a blood drinker. Coincidentally Duquieu's ride takes him to Grafton, where Portia is swimming after practicing her archery all day. He sees her diving in the pool by herself, wearing a white bikini.
Ch. 32. Duquieu attacks Portia and r4pes her. He leaves her lying on the grass, but she recovers quickly, grabs her bow and arrow, and heads him off on the footpath leading out of the park. She shoots him through the heart, but then can't find his body: only a bloody pile of clothing. [This chapter is one of the novel's biggest surprises; we've been expecting the big, manly, Fisher King confrontation between father and son, and suddenly, two-thirds of the way through the book, the love interest takes out Dad just like that.]
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In the previous post I analyzed Mr. Justice so much it almost died on the examination table; at some point I'll combine those notes on plot and character with a discussion of the author's style (looking closely at some quoted passages), which I hope will restore some of the mystery and magic to the novel. In the meantime, I'm going to strap another subject onto the gurney: Blood County, 1981, a fine horror novel about which very little has been written.
As those familiar with DP's bibliography know, she wrote that book under the pseudonym "Curt Selby." This paragraph precedes the frontispiece:
This passage contains multiple ironies: (1) The reader thinks this is Selby's most personal book--that he finally came out from under the aliases to tell a story based on his own background. One problem: Selby doesn't exist. (2) Piserchia published eleven books under her own name, but wrote the one "drawn on her youth and experiences" under a pseudonym. (3) In this most personal of her books, the isolated mountain folk who are her kith and kin are depicted as a pack of bloodthirsty vampires.
Nevertheless, the book does contain some beautiful and affectionate writing about the world DP left behind, and in discussing the novel, I plan to succumb to the urge to look for autobiography at every turn. What follows is a chapter by chapter summary, a form of note-taking that will eventually be a review.
Chapter 1. Clinton Breen receives a telegram from home announcing that his brother Jared is dead. He's so distracted he steps off a curb and is hit by a car. The gaping, mortal wound on his head barely fazes him; by the time the driver, Portia Clark, tracks him to his apartment a few hours later it's healed. Clinton tells her he's fine and doesn't need her help. Sugarman Phelps, Clinton's alcoholic "surrogate mother and father" arrives at the apartment from Blood County, W. Va. He reiterates that Jared is dead; Clinton says: "I don't see why you have to be so afraid of him."
Chapter 2. A train travels east carrying war casualties. Somewhere around Illinois or Pennsylvania, one of the coffins springs open and a fiend with long fangs and glowing red eyes emerges. As he prepares to bite the soldier guarding the coffins, the soldier recites the Lord's Prayer, and the fiend shows dawning awareness, relaxes his grip, and jumps from the train. (In Chapter 9 we learn this scene is a flashback to Clinton's vampire awakening.)
Chapter 3. From her hiding place under a mansion in Blood County, Gilda Lamprou watches a child, Charlie, playing. She gives him bubblegum in exchange for a few drops of "what keeps him functioning," a routine that's been going on for some time. She fears her husband, Duquieu, will be "harsh" if she "simply snatches the brat and does what she longs to do all at once."
[outline continued in comments--or read the completed version here.]
- tom moody 4-15-2002 2:24 am
Ch. 4. Clinton and Sugarman travel from Newark [see p. 72] to Blood, a West Virginia mountain village. The train and bus only take them so far; the rest of the journey is on foot. In flashback, we learn that Clinton and his half-brother Jared are the offspring of mortal women ravished by the vampire Duquieu. Both women died shortly after giving birth; according to Sugie, "all their red blood cells was et up." [Note: this telegraphs information that Portia learns later in the Morgantown hospital.] Clinton is ashamed to be Duquieu's son, but Sugie tells him (still in flashback) that "you're my boy and the boy of everyone in Blood who's trying to be a Christian while livin' in the middle of Beelzebub's circus." The boys often play in Duquieu's mansion, where their father day-sleeps inside an impregnable iron cage.
Ch. 5. Clinton and Sugie return to the mountain shack where Clinton spent his youth. This scene is very sad. Clinton learns that his childhood sweetheart Coley Nagl married Jared. Weird detail about the village: vegetables grow to enormous size there; everyone lives off abundant, self-canned food.
Ch. 6. Flashback: A much younger Clinton and Jared try to ride Duquieu's powerful horse, Baron. Later Jared attempts to break into Duquieu's cage and fails. He declares that one day he'll be master of the Lamprou estate.
Ch. 7. Blood resident Marsh Nagl (Coley's father) makes deliveries to the mansion, informs Duquieu that Clinton has returned to Blood. Clinton has violated "the law": anyone can leave the mountain but no one can return without permission. Obviously Duquieu rules the village like a medieval landowner.
Ch. 8. Duquieu locks Gilda in the mansion's basement and tells her she'll live on rats and cockroaches. She has evidently done something bad to the child, Charlie. She tells Duquieu he'll need her soon, because his sons are going to "bring him down."
Ch. 9. Clint and Sugie debate the serfdom of Blood's residents. We learn that Duquieu fled the old country in 1693 and has ruled the mountain village since. Sugie thinks the villagers are dependent on the abnormally large yields from the hybrid "freak seeds" that Duquieu brought with him from Europe; he defends Duquieu as a "civilized thing [who] only goes haywire once in a while." After Sugie goes to sleep, Duquieu appears to Clint and gives him 24 hours to leave town; the old vampire offers Clint some of his seeds, and says certain tribes in Mexico might welcome a savior. Clint calls Duquieu a rapist, and Duquieu taunts that it was he, Clint, who consumed his mother's body in the womb. [Second telegraphing of this info.] Clint says that Duquieu is evil, and Duquieu replies: "Imagine long, long life[...] Do you picture yourself as noble and as the perpetrator of good works or does time begin to pall on you? [...] Aye, that it does, and every little bit of diversion can lure you at any time. The flash of a slender ankle or an angle of loveliness in a cheek is enough to transport you into a frenzy of desire." We also learn here about Clint's death in the war and subsequent transformation, and that Clint is a "day man," meaning the rays of the sun don't hurt him (yet). Later, villager July West arrives and announces that Portia Clark, who injured Clint in Chapter 1, has arrived in Blood.
- tom moody 4-25-2002 6:08 pm [add a comment]
Ch. 10. Flashback: Young Clint, Jared, and Coley are diving off a rope bridge. Coley says she'll have "plenty of babies" when she marries Clint. Clint reflects that he can't stay in Blood and marry Coley (or anyone else) because his offspring will be like Duquieu.
Ch. 11. The toddler Charlie Steiner has become a vampire, thanks to Gilda. His mother Louise, still fond of him against her better judgment, keeps him in a bear cage deep in the woods. Responding to his cries of "Charlie hungwy!" she lets him out of the cage, "feeds" him, and puts him back in. He has taken too much blood; she falls to the forest floor and dies.
Ch. 12. Portia Clark spends her first night in Blood, locked by the locals in her room. She walks up the mountain searching for Clint, and discovers Louise Steiner's body. Clint appears on horseback, guesses that "wolves" were responsible, and goes off to take care of the body. Portia continues climbing and has lunch in the shack with Sugie. Coley arrives looking for Clint, and is distant with Portia. This chapter is all described from Portia's POV; we learn she's a freelance writer thinking about doing a story on Blood. We see the food, customs, and countryside, all lovingly described, through her city-fied (Newark, NJ) perspective: for example, she has a breakfast of eggs and fried fatback (described as "crisp and sweet") and her host Sid has "salt fish"--fish rolled in batter and fried in lard.
Ch. 13. Searching for his wife Louise, Sam Steiner discovers a very hungry Charlie in the bear cage and lets him out. Things don't go well.
Ch. 14. Not suspecting what's going on with Sam and Charlie, Clint takes Louise's body to her home and lays it out on the floor for Sam to take care of. Later, he "sits up" with the deceased Jared's body. Jared's grandfather and surrogate Pap, a mean drunk named Sweck Brewster, shows up and taunts Clint. Sweck swears that Jared won't turn, and if he does Duquieu will kill him. Clint tells Sweck to leave town.
- tom moody 4-26-2002 7:07 pm [add a comment]
Ch. 15. Marsh Nagl is Blood's "milkman," meaning he has to collect a pint of blood a month from Blood residents and make nightly hauls up to the mansion. His horse-drawn wagon enters the Steiner property but he doesn't realize till too late that the family has turned. Just before they attack, he curses himself as "a fool living in hell and not constantly on the lookout for devils." After the Steiners are done with him, they gorge on his nightly run.
Ch. 16. Coley finds Clint in the church keeping watch over Jared's body. We learn that Sweck Brewster killed Jared, and that Clint became a schoolteacher after leaving Blood. Coley hopes Clint will marry her now that Jared's dead, but Clint says "Your husband isn't dead." He tells Coley to leave the church so the jealous Jared won't see the two of them together when he opens his eyes.
Ch. 17. Duquieu bursts into Sugie's shack and angrily demands that Sugie assume Nagl's duties, since "the delivery was not made tonight." Portia comes out of the shadows and sarcastically asks if Duquieu is a feudal padrone. Duquieu becomes courtly in manner and invites Portia to take a walk with him. He points out his house at the top of the mountain, and says he hopes he'll see more of her. He exits, and Sugie refuses to tell Portia anything since she'll "be leavin' tomorrow." [Among other things, Portia learns from Duquieu that he was born in France, and that his father was Greek. His last name "Lamprou" is obviously a play on lamprey, a bloodsucking eel, and in fact Piserchia never uses the word vampire in the book: the bloodsuckers are all referred to as Lamprous.] As Portia is falling asleep, she thinks she sees a face pressed against the screen door--that of a woman last seen dead in the woods.
- tom moody 4-29-2002 9:26 am [add a comment]
Ch. 18. Duquieu wheels a cart of blood bottles down to the basement of the mansion (called the "pool room" because it contains a large empty swimming pool) in order to feed the starving Gilda. We learn she was once a mortal woman, and that Duquieu's father "warned him not to take a normal woman as a bride." As he is reminiscing about their early days, Gilda bolts out the door and escapes.
Ch. 19. Jared wakes up in a full-blown vampire rage. He breaks the chains with which Clint has bound him and exits the church.
Ch. 20. Duquieu stalks Portia from outside Sugie's cabin. Clint appears and tells him no. Duquieu mockingly claims droit du seigneur and scoffs at Clint's "war training." They fight; Clint surprises the old man with some unexpected moves but soon Duquieu has Clint on his back. As he leaves, Duquieu warns his son to be en garde.
Ch. 21. The next morning, Portia tries to convince Clint and Sugie to let her stay in Blood. Ugly-looking villager July West shows up and is told to escort her out of town. Sugie announces that he's the new milkman and asks Clint for a contribution; obviously he doesn't know yet that Clint has turned. ["Turned" is my post-Near Dark shorthand for vampire transformation, by the way: Piserchia never uses the word that way.] Clint says he's too "feverish" to give blood and Sugie leaves to "shop for Duquieu's dinner." Soon after, Coley arrives with the news that her father, Marsh Nagl, is a Lamprou. They find him sleeping under his house and he shrinks from the light and "mews like a cat." Clint promises he'll prepare the old man for burial after he's made "one more mark" on the body.
- tom moody 5-06-2002 9:10 am [add a comment]
Ch. 22. Sugie makes the milk run up to Duquieu's mansion. Duquieu says Blood residents must "go into the havens" until he rounds up all the Lamprous. Countermanding his earlier orders, he requests that Clint, not Sugie, handle all future blood deliveries to the mansion.
Ch. 23. Wandering the hills, Gilda finds Charlie and "adopts" him. The two prowl for necks to suck, but can't find any Blood residents. Gilda realizes that Duquieu has done something he only does "every once in a while," which is put the townspeople in havens: five concrete fortresses, each stocked with provisions to sustain 100 people for a week, which Duquieu uses as lures for stray Lamprous. As Gilda is explaining this, Duquieu rides up dramatically astride the horse, Baron. Sam and Louise Steiner, who have been lurking behind the Pickhandle Hill haven, try to cut and run. Duquieu kills Louise with a flying wooden stake through the heart and strings the screaming Sam up in a net, which swings from a tree branch. Gilda shields Charlie, her "baby," from skewering, and the grumbling Duquieu marches them back to the mansion and locks them up in the poolroom. [This is getting funny--we're almost in Addams Family territory here.]
Ch. 24. Blood residents exit the havens after dawn to take care of business around town. Sam hangs in his net, burned by the daytime sun, waiting for Duquieu to kill him. Clint collects blood from the townspeople, then uses his Army-acquired lockpicking skills to enter Duquieu's sleeping cage. Perversely, he places the blood at the foot of the old Lamprou's bed. He returns home to find his surrogate Pap crying; it's finally dawned on Sugie that Clint's a Lamprou, albeit one who sleeps at night and wears a steel vest to protect his heart. Clint tells Sugie not to worry, because Blood is "home to everybody I love." He promises to "handle the situation," and then makes a mysterious promise that doesn't become clear 'til the last chapter: "You'll have your Lamprou to bless the fields and you'll have your jug and your friends."
- tom moody 5-13-2002 9:14 pm [add a comment]
Ch. 25. Kicked out of the village, Portia visits the hospital in nearby Morgantown. A doctor there knows something peculiar is going on in Blood, but isn't inclined to investigate: "They mind their business, we mind ours." He finds Clint's and Jared's birth certificates stapled together and Portia learns what the reader already knows about the deaths of the boys' mothers. Portia returns to Blood the next day; when she arrives at Clint's cabin at dusk, she sees Clint on the porch and a woman and child at the edge of the yard, beckoning to her. She runs to Clint, and out of her hearing Clint tells Gilda and Charlie to get lost. (How did they escape?) Portia announces she's staying in Blood "to see if the Union is cohesive as I've always assumed."
Ch. 26. Clint delivers blood to the mansion; his metal vest saves him from Duquieu's booby traps: wooden spears hurled by wall-mounted catapults. After the attack he and Duquieu debate Blood's feudal servitude. Clint says his education showed him what a leech Duquieu is: he survives on the townspeople's superstitions. Duquieu says the people would never have progressed anyway, and Clint says "Because you haven't let them!" Duquieu sidesteps the issue by railing about local families that produce "gargoyles" through incest, and brags that he built two schools that the locals burned down: "They wanted only their fields, their jugs and their isolation." Clint suggests that Duquieu and Gilda, as the last surviving Lamprous, could have saved the townspeople by killing themselves. Duquieu replies that suicide's not so simple. Before Clint leaves, he tells the old Lamprou that Jared has released Gilda, Charlie, and Sam.
Ch. 27. Outside Sugie's house the next morning, Clint discovers Portia shooting arrows at targets. Unknown to her, Sugie has his rifle trained on Sam Steiner, who is stalking her, wearing a large floppy hat and oversized clothes to protect himself from the sun. To Sugie's horror, the sharp-eyed Clint points out that Gilda and Charlie (who we learn in Chapter 33 are impervious to sunlight) are on the other side of the yard, also watching the archer. Sugie explains that Portia was on a "limpig team" and made the bow and arrows herself. [Somewhat conveniently because Portia still doesn't know about Lamprous, the arrows are pure pine.] Again out of Portia's hearing, Clint tells Sam to lay off the woman and to tell Lady Lamprou and Charlie to do the same. At first Sam is snarling, but when he realizes Clint has no blood he says "Awww. You're a Lamprou."
Ch. 28. Clint and Coley stand on the old rope bridge they played on as children and talk about the stray Lamprous haunting Blood, and their feelings. Coley asks about Portia, mentioning that the newcomer gave her some rouge to replace the "cheek color" she normally gets by soaking pieces of red wallpaper. [Another interesting detail of life--and poverty--in the hills.] Suddenly, Jared appears on the shore and cuts the rope bridge. Clint and Coley dive fifty or sixty feet into Slate Lake. Clint guesses that Jared wasn't trying to kill them but wanted to sever the childhood ties the three of them had. Coley points out (not for the first time or the last) that Clint has "never been right" about Jared.
- tom moody 5-16-2002 6:31 am [add a comment]
Ch. 29. At noon two days later, Clint finds a hollow place in a treetop where he used to hide as a boy and climbs in it to sleep; his body clock is changing and he's becoming more nocturnal. We learn that Portia has hiked to Grafton to swim in the town's new pool and Sugie and Coley are safe in the havens. This chapter gives a science fiction-ish account of Lamprou physiology, reminiscent of Richard Matheson's great I Am Legend: cells that divide more slowly during periods of food-deprivation, an unusual part of the brain that awakens after death and repairs injuries, and a new mechanism in the heart that secretes "Lamprou substances" used by the brain.
Ch. 30. Duquieu awakens before dusk to discover Gilda hanging by the neck in the hallway of the mansion with a stake rammed through her heart. He falls into a chair in shock: "A sob racked Lamprou's body, brought him stiffly upright in the chair. His last link with hope and sanity lay in the form of this addle-brained woman who loved him far more than he deserved. Now she dangled like a puffy-faced, bulgy-eyed fish, strung up like a trophy by one of the hayseeds living in these wretched hills, her life's fluid leaking onto the floor at his feet." While he ponders who the culprit might be, Clint and Sugie show up with the nightly blood run. He hides, and listens as they find the body and immediately peg Jared as the killer.
Ch. 31. Duquieu throws a rock into haven number one with a message demanding that the townspeople produce Jared by nightfall of the next day. To work off his rage, he rides Baron around the hills: we learn that the horse is infected by the Lamprou substance, but, according to a later chapter, not a blood drinker. Coincidentally Duquieu's ride takes him to Grafton, where Portia is swimming after practicing her archery all day. He sees her diving in the pool by herself, wearing a white bikini.
Ch. 32. Duquieu attacks Portia and r4pes her. He leaves her lying on the grass, but she recovers quickly, grabs her bow and arrow, and heads him off on the footpath leading out of the park. She shoots him through the heart, but then can't find his body: only a bloody pile of clothing. [This chapter is one of the novel's biggest surprises; we've been expecting the big, manly, Fisher King confrontation between father and son, and suddenly, two-thirds of the way through the book, the love interest takes out Dad just like that.]
- tom moody 5-19-2002 8:34 am [add a comment]