A People's History of the vampire Uprising by Raymond A. Villareal

 

So the premise is that vampirism is something like a contagious disease--one which somehow turns people into things which manifest all the classical (meaning Eastern Europe via Stoker) signs of being vampires. Problems are Villareal fails to convince on the science--for example: "radiation that prevents all cameras from working" seems as though it might screw up a CCD, but that sort of radiation seems unlikely to have any sort of effect on a camera with film, using a mechanical shutter--and fails to convince on the sociology and psychology--there'd be little incentive for someone whose fame and social cachet were derived from performances that were captured on film/video/compute to choose to become that sort of vampire (one of the sub-conceits) and his POV characters fail to convince as actual people. The fact Villareal has chosen to present the novel as a modern-day epistolary novel--all the narratives are presented as transcripts of various testimonies and interviews, from several different people who seem to have little to no connection with each other--means whatever narrative there might be in the novel comes across as fragmented. Maybe that would be more like "kaleidoscopic" if I could be bothered to finish it, but I tapped out after ~150 of ~400 pages.