Here's something very interesting from Nightfire that at once seems contemporary and topical but also a little traditional, like I've just discovered the source book to an indie horror feature from the early 2000s that did well at film festivals. There was a time when a lot of those centered on vampires but in a non-traditional way, ditching rural villages, virgins and garlic for a firmly urban setting with blood banks and disease. Many of these films also served as metaphors for societal ills, providing a tasty way to explore something utterly now through reinvention of an old familiar monster.

This is very much something like that, with the word "vampire" avoided so conscientiously that it's possible it never comes up. However, Saratov's Syndrome, which slowly spread out of the then USSR in the early nineties, is clearly something very close. Infection is through a bite, leaving the victims thirsting for blood and unable to tolerate sunlight. Izzy is one of them, infected in Utah in 2010, very possibly because Saras, as they're known, are wildly allergic to coffee, which is a new touch. We stay with Izzy on her quest to survive, but we see it through the eyes of her daughter, Mia, who's a mere ten-years-old when her mother is turned.

And this is where the metaphors begin, because domestic abuse and child neglect aren't always as easy to define as how they tend to be depicted in the movies. Mia's dad is long gone when this goes down, so Izzy has been raising her as a single mum, which inherently deserves some credit, but she isn't doing the greatest job of it even before her needs manifest after Devon bites her. It's likely he did so deliberately, given the context, and it's not hard to see a parallel to those who infected their partners with HIV or even COVID, for whatever reason. And it's not hard to see a parallel between a thirst for blood and a thirst for drink or drugs. The end result is the same.

And so Mia spends her teenage years avoiding company and avoiding school so that she can secure her mother, who sleeps all day and prowls at night, from a society that wants to take her away as a way to stop her being the clear threat to the public that she is. It doesn't take long for Mia to rip a chunk out of her arm so her mum can feed without going out and murdering people, reopening the wound every night. Eventually, they order phlebotomy kits, so they can draw the blood in a far safer fashion from syringe to blood bag to cup. And they settle into their dangerous routine, Izzy literally living off her daughter.

The chapters alternate between two timelines, each of them moving forward chronologically. One is Salt Lake City in 2010 when Devon infects Izzy and signs her up to an online Sara support group, a time when the disease is new and society is changing to address its impact, passing laws, setting up Sara centers and implementing mandatory testing stations in public places. The other is Tucson, in the present day, presumably 2023. Izzy and Mia are ostensibly safe at this point, with Izzy running a bar called the Fair Shake, bypassing the testing machine on account of being the owner who opens up, and Mia working at the Book Bunker during the day.

However, their dangerous routine is threatened by a pair of external factors. For one, Mia, who is a long way from ten now, meets someone and begins to dare to think of a life that isn't entirely built around drawing her own blood to feed to her mother. There are so many parallels here, not just the reluctance to open up or bring someone home when your mother is an addict but also the way that free Saras are literally illegal, making this choice of location so close to the Mexican border surely a deliberate one. For another, Devon seems to be back and, like so many abusers, he has his victim's ear so emphatically that he can talk Izzy into pretty much anything.

That the someone that Mia meets and falls hard for is female merely adds another modern touch, a fresh riff on what's normal and what's other. She's a wild free spirit named Jade, who works at a Starbucks during the day and sings in an indie rock band at night. She wants Mia to travel with her when they leave for an upcoming tour and, with Devon increasing in presence and threat, that just means a whole bunch of simultaneous deadlines by which point Mia has to make her life-alterating choice.

While I can't say I was particularly surprised by where it ends up, Liz Kerin kept me on the hook all the way through this book. Every page I read captivated me, especially through Mia being so vivid a character. We feel for her because of the situation she's in but we also feel for her because we're as unsure as she is about when she could have done things differently. We're pretty sure she ought to have done something differently but, like any child of an abusive parent, it's hard to draw a line between safety and freedom on the one side and duty and debt on the other, especially when she's only ten years old at the outset. Simply leaving just isn't an option at that point. We can talk about when it might have become one.

What I found fascinating was that I was hooked on the story while I was reading it, so that it was all about Izzy and Mia, with Devon and Jade growing in importance as the page count rises However, I read this over a few nights and, every time I put it down to sleep, my brain went to work looking at all the parallels that Kerin was drawing with her modern day vampire story. I think fundamentally it speaks to being trapped by the actions of others, especially as a child, and the eventual need to get free of that cage. That cage might be domestic abuse, child neglect, addiction, lack of legal status or something as impersonal as a debilitating disease, but it's cast from iron.

And, of course, freedom isn't necessarily found in the places we might think, dream or expect. This feels like a standalone novel that's started and finished and told its story, but it seems to be half of a duology, with 'First Light' expected next April to wrap it up. I'm eager to see where that takes her and Mia both. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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