The Premise
A young man in New York, down on his luck and feeling depressed, decides to sample some of the vice on offer in Times Square. The experience changes him, and before he's aware of what's going on, he finds himself, and those close to him, in danger.
In Review
I tried to avoid dropping the term that gives half the plot away, but one look at the cover will have the same effect. Yes, there are vampires in this story, and this could rightfully be considered a member of the much-loved vampire genre. The other day, a friend of mine listened to my brief description of this book, and said that he went for anything involving those wascally bloodsuckers (ok, he didn't say that exactly, I just wanted to type it that way). If you count yourself as one of these types, you probably don't need to read any further. Pick this up, and enjoy.
I wasn't joking when I said that mere mention of the word vampire gives away a good portion of the story. Every vampire book I've read goes through the same routine of introducing every day characters to the existence of vampires, the truth or fiction behind the myth, and what it's like to turn into an undead creature with an appetite for fresh, hot blood. Live Girls is no exception. Even if the cover didn't show a woman with pronounced canines, you'd still catch on to the vampire element early on in the story, when a main character sees a few puncture marks on his penis, and wonders what they might mean.
This is another genre fixture prominent in Live Girls: that vampires are seductive, sexy, and big fans of sexual congress. Every time a male vampire gets ready to feed, he has an erection. This mixture of sexuality and a specific form of cannibalism has always puzzled me. Just what, exactly, is so sexy about sucking blood? I've tasted my own blood, thank you, and not only was it unsavory, it was far from being a turn on. What really makes it a brain twister is the fact that, today, a significant majority of the population is afflicted with a virus that makes their blood deadly. Who wants to suck on that?
These observations aside, I enjoyed reading Live Girls far more than the cover – garish – suggested I would. The prose is neat, lying somewhere between King and Koontz, and a few characters have that every day pluck that manifests into heroism when the going gets tough. Garton paces the story well, and writes at his best when events picks up, and things get gory. This violence increases in step with the climax, until dismemberment and heavy trauma become commonplace.
All of these positives kept me reading, while the ending put a satisfactory cap on the entire effort. There are no big conspiracies, or a super-villain plot to enslave the human race. The conclusion reflects the necessarily limited influence the main characters have on events, and offers a partial resolution that I found refreshing. It could be that Garton had a sequel in mind, but I'd like to think that he was comfortable leaving the ending open enough to suggest continuity, as opposed to the open-shut affairs that are rampant in popular fiction.
I had thought that this book is new, but apparently it was first published in 1987. Moreover, Ray Garton has published many other novels, and was a regular staple in the horror genre during the 1980s. My compliments to the publishers at Dorchester for giving his early work another print run.
8/17/06
