The Very Bloody Marys Horror Book Review

  He’s the only vampire cop around—and a gang of Vespa-riding vampires  threaten   to drain San Francisco dry! 

Big trouble at night in the city. A gang of Vespa-riding vampires are   killing   San Franciscans so indiscriminately they threaten to not only drain the   city   dry—but risk the discovery of vampires everywhere. Gay vampire cop   Valentino   is called upon to stop the group calling themselves The Very Bloody Marys   before   the situation gets worse. Unfortunately, it already has. You see,  Valentino   is still only a trainee who is in way over his head now that Pogue, his   mentor,    is missing. And this brutal gang is tough, smart, and very, very   bloodthirsty.    To do his job, Valentino must move quickly—and carefully—otherwise   he may just get himself killed. What can a creature of the night do? The   only   thing he can, track the gang through the haunts of some very odd   characters,    unravel the mystery, and try to stay out of the sun.

The Very Bloody Marys is a comic horror novel about vampires, ghouls,  faeries,    and the undead that move around after dark. Part chase, part gallows   humor,    part shivery excitement, this new story from the wildly imaginative M.  Christian   is funny, frightening, and very entertaining.

An excerpt from The Very Bloody Marys:

Rising (whee!) and falling (ouch!) with the crest and descent of the   city’s   well-known manic-depressive geography, the faded and split upholstery   squeaking,    squeaking, squeaking with failing springs each time, Mariah piloting, me   hanging   on for dear life, we headed away from downtown and out towards the fog   belt.    For the daylight people, the regular folks, the Sunset and Richmond were   two   sides of the same coin, separated by the green of Golden Gate Park. For   the   nighttime people, the irregular folks-the shadows, the shades, the   spooks-the   Sunset and the Richmond were the hesitant lands, the transforming acres,  tentative   real estate. Places where this could be that, and that might even be   this.

The fog that slipped between the row houses, that blurred the edges of   Doegler’s   repetitive architecture, spinning and twisting among the alphabetically   named   avenues, made more than concrete and brick driveways and bay windows   vague and   uncertain. The white rolling, the ghostly churning similarly pushed the   already   permeable barrier to its limit. Was that a Plywood Specialty Woodnymph   (paneled   skin and knotty eyes) coming out of that Chinese market? Could that have   been   the Sacred Locomotive of Kioram taking the place of the N Judah light   rail vehicle   (gleaming gold, flashing diamond, and deeply lustrous plutonium)?Might   that   have been a Lantern of Aristophanes regally perambulating across an   intersection   (shimmering silks and opulent velvets trailing behind like ornate smoke)?  Could   be, might be, perhaps, maybe, possibly . . .

I hated it. Bad enough to prowl the halls and corridors of downtown,  where   the shadows nipped at your ankles and-according to Pogue-Things That   Shouldn’t   Be Named looked at you with sly schemings and horrible ponderings. They   think   with minds of maggots and icky corruption: would his soul be good   straight or   on a nice point of perfectly browned toast? But back there, at least the   map   didn’t change from block to block. As bad as they were, things stayed   where   they were. Out in the Avenues though, the definitions were way too slick,  too   hesitant, too damned foggy.

The Very Bloody Marys takes you on a surreal and very weird ride through   San   Francisco’s dark side—the side of the undead.