Monday, September 16, 2024

The Suicide Motor Club by Christopher Buehlman


 This is a pretty standard vampires in the real-world novel, set in the wild days of the late 1960s. As you might guess from the title, the vampires are running around in souped up muscle cars killing and feeding and killing and feeding. It takes the courage of a bereaved mom-turned-novice-nun to put something of an end to the rampage. I know there are real upsides to writing in a time like the 1960s, from an author's point of view: The culture is not wildly different from present-day, and the differences are well-publicized; and there's not the sort of technology to track movements around the country in anything like real-time; and--related to the latter--there's not mostly-reliable communications anywhere, any time. Knowing that kinda makes the choice stand out a little, though. It's interesting to read a novel that plays the sorts of games this one does, and realize how little in overt debt it owes to King's *Salem's Lot*.

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