Here's a book that I'm long overdue in reviewing, because Ron signed it for me at Phoenix Comicon in 2014, while kindly allowing me to sell copies of my brand new first two books from his table. He's a generous soul and a mainstay on the local scene and I hope that he starts working events again soon, so I can pick up the second in this series [Update: he just moved to Colorado, so that may not help]. While it apparently took me eleven years to start it, I didn't want to stop again when it ran out of pages. Two of the principal plot strands are resolved but others aren't and I want to know more about everything.

The simplest way to describe this book is as "vampire novel", but while that's true, it's misleading because it isn't interested in many of the tropes of the genre, just as it isn't interested in obeying many of its rules. In fact, it shrugs off almost all of them as nonsense. Crosses don't cause any pain or discomfort and vampires don't need to be invited in. They don't even die when they're turned, so there's no undeath. The greatest danger is sunlight, ironically given that it was the one typical rule that wasn't in 'Dracula', but the older a vampire gets, the more they can tolerate it. Some of the oldest can walk around in it without care. Without ever sparkling.

And vampires do live long lives, ones they always remember impeccably well. There are characters here who have already reached zip code ages, which takes them further back than Rome, Greece or ancient Egypt. The Vitzameri, Kristino Pa Anovas, who's over fifty thousand years old, employs a title that goes back to the days of Atlantis. Maurana, merely 16,532 years old, was a princess in a "small late Atlantean kingdom". They heal quickly, use psychic powers and benefit from enhanced strength and speed. And they drink blood. All the positives are traditional. The negatives aren't.

There are a few different strands of plot that Tobin recounts from multiple points of view, each of which unfolds in the first-person present tense, an approach that makes some sections seem like a Rod Serling introduction. Picture a world, he suggests, in which Atlantean vampires live among us, hidden but feeding, their undying eyes always watching for new recruits, apparently too superior to the rest of us to deign to using contractions. I was initially annoyed at how clearly Victor Trent hates the critters, but I got used to it. The vampires have the same approach and he's an old soul, so is fitting in without ever knowing that he's doing it.

Let's just say that he would have had kittens with that previous sentence. He is always careful to speak correctly, even it makes him sound clipped and obnoxious. He is acutely aware that he will use more syllables and words than we would to say the same thing but he is apparently physically incapable of speaking an apostrophe, so that is that.

Then again, Victor is kind of like that. He's a young intellectual with a masters degree in criminal justice and philosophy, he'll eagerly engage in substantial debate with anyone intelligent enough to keep up with him and I appreciated that. Unfortunately, he also has a nasty habit of telling the world at large that it isn't intelligent enough to keep up with him and it doesn't take much of that to understand why he's a twenty-eight-year-old virgin working in a used bookstore in Buena Park, California, and his closest friends are his sister Zoe and his uncle Reggie.

He's the first plot strand, to which the title refers. He's mortal, but vampires see us in one of two categories: dims and brights. Most of us are dims, but brights stand out in a crowd of dims like an explosion of colour in a black and white world and one vampire, only 255 years old, wanders into a nightclub to see that Victor is very much a bright. That means that he has potential to be brought into one of the vampire orders, which function much like secret societies. Aurea Octavia Bodellini, 2,120 year old vampire from Pompeii, is quickly made aware and she promptly treats Victor as her personal project.

She's Plaz Seschni, or Order Ruby, and either she'll bring Victor (and maybe Zoe) into the order or she'll terminate them both as threats. To throw him off balance, she arranges for him to be hired by a congressman and moved to Washington, DC, where she can monitor him. The night club was a first step. She wants to see a couple more and, if they happen as she expects, she'll arrange for an experienced vampire to test him. If he passes that test, she'll invite him to join Order Ruby. If, on the other hand, he fails, she'll terminate him as an imminent threat. And yes, that means exactly what you think it means.

Aurea is a crucial part of the second plot strand too, arguably rendering her the most important character in the book. Two hundred and fifty years ago, the Vitzameri exiled her from Europe to North America because he believed her to be involved in the assassination of his sister Vetrina, a belief now proved false by the confession of Phillipe de Mer, before he committed suicide over an increasing level of guilt. He did the deed, he says, along with two others already dead, and Aurea, who was Vetrina's best friend, wasn't involved at all. The Vitzameri knows now that he committed a grave injustice and so he owes Aurea a blood debt. Beyond the obvious reparations that must be made, it's up to her to decide how she collects.

For the longest time, we alternate between those two plot strands but eventually a third arrives to join them, in the form of a vampire hunter named Van Arpen. While these vampires boast lots of advanced technology—in addition to ancient Atlantean tech, they've been involved in offworld manufacturing at least as far back as the seventeenth century—they can't trace him. However, he can trace them and he's killed a bunch already. It's interesting that, with the vampires considered good guys—for the most part, at least—he comes across like a serial killer, using manipulation to get to his victims and taking their rings as souvenirs, whether ruby, emerald or sapphire.

If there's a fourth plot strand, it's Atlantis, but that floats through the book without a focus, not a crucial thing here but surely one that will become one later, especially if Aurea is right and maybe they're about to find a way to obtain the codes needed to open the ancient vaults. Potentially, we could see forteana generally as the fourth plot strand, because Tobin doesn't just trawl in Atlantis but reincarnation, telepathy, ghosts and more. The concept of twin flames is mentioned often too and somehow never gets icky, even though it's usually regarding Victor and Zoe, who are typically lovers in past incarnations but brother and sister here. There's no incest, don't worry.

I found this whole setup fascinating. Tobin has a unique vision for vampire society, structured and nuanced. It's deep worldbuilding, indeed. Also, while he dips cynically into politics by throwing the one character who believes the entire American political system is rigged and doomed to collapse into the quagmire that is Washington, DC, he's careful to avoid mention of party. He merely talks about two sides, "our side", from the perspective of Rep. Moore and his staff, and the "other side" who are taking over power with a supermajority as he arrives in "the imperial city". Similarly, the three vampire orders seem to think of themselves as superior to the others, but we don't learn a lot about their differences yet to be able to judge for ourselves.

This is mostly a shockingly successful approach. Victor's admirable cynicism for both sides renders him some sort of purist libertarian but he rarely dips deep enough into policy to upset readers. He does dip a little too far into conspiracy theory territory here and there. For instance, his stance on climate change, while not entirely unfair, hasn't dated at all well, even considering that this book is only thirteen years old. Otherwise, Tobin achieves the elusive feat of writing a novel that's immersed in politics but doesn't immediately piss off half of America today. That holds whichever side you believe I'm referencing there, which is even more impressive.

There are a lot of characters and they're a fascinating bunch. Victor is initially frustrating but he grew on me. After all, it takes balls to show up for an interview with a United States congressman for a job that promises to wipe out his crippling student debt, and tell the man that he has more respect for organised crime than he does for the state. Aurea is oceans deep and we meet a whole community of vampires, all of which are simple to distinguish and few of which seem likely to fade into the background. I particularly liked Midnight Silk, a vampire blues band comprised of former slaves, but there are plenty of favourites to choose from.

I have precious few complaints. One is the way that Tobin throws out technical terms without any explanation. There's even one on the back cover, "porfo", which is "porfa" when feminine, and I'm still not entirely sure what that means. The thrust of it is obvious; they're novices, welcomed into the vampire world but not yet made vampire. However, I get the distinct feeling that there's a lot more nuance to it than that; if you're a porfo, then you're someone's porfo, presumably their only porfo and there are surely responsibilities either way because of that. However, I couldn't tell you what they are. Maybe that's in the next book.

After a couple of hundred pages, Tobin does explain "foara" and "natro" but he never covers what "submitting to the Plinth" means. Again, the drift is clear but the nuance really isn't and I want to look it up in the dictionary, knowing that it won't be there because he invented it. Maybe he could have included a glossary, but there aren't that many invented words. My only other complaint is a plot detail during the finalé of the Van Arpen plot strand. The bulk of that works fine, but there's a detail that rings wrong to me and seems like it was shoehorned in to set up another blood debt for the second book, not uncoincidentally called 'Blood Debts' to expand.

Mostly, though, this was an engrossing dive into a fascinating culture. In my time, I've read a lot of vampire novels and I've seen a lot of vampire movies. Few are as culturally deep as this one. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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