Memoirs of a Vampire Hunter, by Peter Allchin
Book Review by David L. Felts
Have you read this book?
Dark, gritty, sexual, and over-flowing with violence and gore.
Peter Allchin's debut novel is a first person POV story, narrated by Reiner...an innocent victim of an age-old vampire's deadly invitation.
Taking some aspects of the classic vampire tale from Bram Stoker and mixing it with a steady script straight out of a pulp horror novel Peter Allchin manages to inject some new life into an old story.
From an unpleasant meeting with Vlad Dracula and a narrow escape from the Count's evil clutches we follow Reiner (now minus his beautiful wife, Beth) back to London...where another equally famous character enters the fray...Jack the Ripper is in town...and he's a little more than most of us suspected.
With the most famous vampire in history on one side, and Jack the Ripper on the other, Reiner is going to have his work cut out for him.
Lots of blood and gore (perhaps a bit over the top sometimes. As I prefer suggestion rather than description) plenty of fast moving action and the odd bit of vampirish sex to keep the reader titillated.
As pulp horror goes it's right up there with the kind of blood filled stuff NEL produced back in the 70's. No one reads these kinds of books for the intellectual content; one simply devours them for what they are. Just a bloody good pulp vampire story.
The precise conversations between the characters got a bit long winded at times, but one can't have an entire novel filled with nothing but blood after all.
It was no surprise to me that, upon visiting Peter Allchin's homepage, I discovered his love for both Bram Stoker's Dracula and his equal love of the old Hammer House of Horror movies. I could easily envision Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee as characters in this book.
If you're a fan of pulp, horror, and vamp pulp in particular, then you will no doubt enjoy Peter Allchin's tale.
Make no mistake, the vampires in Peter's novel are the evil, nasty, blood sucking scum they've always been. None of this modern teen angst, goody two-shoes vampire nonsense. This is the undead as they are meant to be.
I noticed a couple of typos here and there, though not enough to bother me. I blame the editor/publisher rather than the writer in this instance, as the novel is not self-published.
On the subject of editing, I do believe Peter's novel would have benefited from more judicious editing. There are passages that could have been rendered much shorter and more succinct.
Memoirs of a Vampire isn't going to set the literary world on fire. Most pulp novels never will. But as I mentioned before, Peter's book takes me right back to the blood splattered, gore filled excesses of the 70's, when books were cheap, there were dozens of new titles on the shelves every other month and you bought a pulp horror novel, took it home, curled up in your favourite chair for a couple of hours and got lost in the eerie and gruesome mists of Castle Dracula and the foggy backstreets of Victorian London.
You can discover more about the author and details of how to order his novel http://www.vampirehunter.co.uk/Author.php
Peter Allchin's debut novel is a first person POV story, narrated by Reiner...an innocent victim of an age-old vampire's deadly invitation.
Taking some aspects of the classic vampire tale from Bram Stoker and mixing it with a steady script straight out of a pulp horror novel Peter Allchin manages to inject some new life into an old story.
From an unpleasant meeting with Vlad Dracula and a narrow escape from the Count's evil clutches we follow Reiner (now minus his beautiful wife, Beth) back to London...where another equally famous character enters the fray...Jack the Ripper is in town...and he's a little more than most of us suspected.
With the most famous vampire in history on one side, and Jack the Ripper on the other, Reiner is going to have his work cut out for him.
Lots of blood and gore (perhaps a bit over the top sometimes. As I prefer suggestion rather than description) plenty of fast moving action and the odd bit of vampirish sex to keep the reader titillated.
As pulp horror goes it's right up there with the kind of blood filled stuff NEL produced back in the 70's. No one reads these kinds of books for the intellectual content; one simply devours them for what they are. Just a bloody good pulp vampire story.
The precise conversations between the characters got a bit long winded at times, but one can't have an entire novel filled with nothing but blood after all.
It was no surprise to me that, upon visiting Peter Allchin's homepage, I discovered his love for both Bram Stoker's Dracula and his equal love of the old Hammer House of Horror movies. I could easily envision Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee as characters in this book.
If you're a fan of pulp, horror, and vamp pulp in particular, then you will no doubt enjoy Peter Allchin's tale.
Make no mistake, the vampires in Peter's novel are the evil, nasty, blood sucking scum they've always been. None of this modern teen angst, goody two-shoes vampire nonsense. This is the undead as they are meant to be.
I noticed a couple of typos here and there, though not enough to bother me. I blame the editor/publisher rather than the writer in this instance, as the novel is not self-published.
On the subject of editing, I do believe Peter's novel would have benefited from more judicious editing. There are passages that could have been rendered much shorter and more succinct.
Memoirs of a Vampire isn't going to set the literary world on fire. Most pulp novels never will. But as I mentioned before, Peter's book takes me right back to the blood splattered, gore filled excesses of the 70's, when books were cheap, there were dozens of new titles on the shelves every other month and you bought a pulp horror novel, took it home, curled up in your favourite chair for a couple of hours and got lost in the eerie and gruesome mists of Castle Dracula and the foggy backstreets of Victorian London.
You can discover more about the author and details of how to order his novel http://www.vampirehunter.co.uk/Author.php
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