Here's another Crystal Lake horror novel and it sits well with the others that I've reviewed of late, even if it's a bit more predictable and a bit more visual, as if it was intended to be a pilot for a TV  show or a Netflix original movie but author Brad Ricks wrote it down in prose first. It works, both as a novel and as the beginning of a series; but it's also the very much that beginning, so devotes a higher page count to set the stage, introduce us to characters and set up the series than it does to detailing the opening episode. I'm thinking of it as a feature-length pilot in prose form.

The setup is pretty simple. A vicious animalistic vampire breaks into Brittany White's apartment and drinks her blood, leaving her almost dead when her husband Michael shows up. He's a big guy and he's ex-military, so trained for tough situations like this, but the vampire shrugs him aside. It's the only reason why we even hesitate to think that Det. John Jennings is an asshole for suggesting that Michael killed his wife himself but no, Jennings is absolutely an asshole.

And so Michael takes on the task of investigating his wife's death himself, which he's very capable of doing, not only because he's a big tough ex-military dude but because he has a condition called HSAM or Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory. It's kind of like eidetic memory, but in full colour 3D video. It's highly convenient, of course, but the catch is that he has to go into mild meditative states to be able to replay the footage in his head, which takes dedicated time.

It's during his first such meditation that he sees the club stamp on the killer's hand, which directs his attentions to the Starlight Club. He's quickly set up there and is about to be ripped apart by a resident set of vampires when he's saved by outsiders. In fact, he's saved by a pair of mysterious people that he noticed were following him earlier. They turn out to be members of the Night Crew of the title, a capable team dedicated to hunting down and killing vampires, and naturally they're rather eager for him to join their ranks.

The depth behind all this is grief. Michael and Brittany met at a grief counselling session, as both of each of their parents had died and they were seeking shared solace. They hit it off, married and now it's just him and a whole new sense of grief. As much as this reads like a TV movie, which can't sound like a compliment but isn't meant as an insult, there are some seriously powerful scenes as Michael deals with his latest loss. He's triggered memorably by a walkthrough at his house and he suffers at the hotel he's staying at while the cops work the crime scene. His responses to Jennings are very well-written indeed.

But hey, I mentioned vampires, so you're going to want to know the rules and the history, both of which are important for the beginning of the series anyway. These vampires mostly feel like we're conditioned to expect from them but without a religious angle. Crosses and holy water do nothing. Also, sunlight and garlic don't kill them but do slow them down and mess with their senses, which are, of course, heightened. In fact, the older the vampire, the more attuned they are to the world around them. A stake to the heart works but so does a bullet and the easiest way to kill them is to cut off their head. Oh, and in the inevitable disclaimer that every serious horror novelist must set in place, they don't sparkle.

As for history, vampires ran amok in the Dark Ages but Charlemagne (yes, that one) stopped their reign of terror, then instituted the Council to keep it that way and orchestrated a set of Accords to govern the sustainable shared existence of humans and vampires.

I'm sure we'll get into all this more in future books, but that's the grounding. Oh, and there are a whole lot of other supernatural creatures but we don't meet any of them this time out, likely on account of there not being any room to do so. Again, I'm sure they'll show up later in the series to flesh out Ricks' world and, no doubt, complicate everything. This time out all that matters is the bad guy of the week, an alpha vampire called Silas, is a renegade who doesn't care about Accords and wants to go back to the good old days of the Dark Ages. It's up to the Night Crew to stop him.

I can't deny that I didn't enjoy this considerably but I mostly enjoyed it as a beginning and I cut it a fair amount of slack because of that. There's not a heck of a lot of actual investigation within this investigation, even accounting for Michael's HSAM, an acutely convenient shortcut. He gets up to speed shockingly quickly after a first test shows that he's rather out of condition since leaving the forces. The big bad gets taken down surprisingly easily given how long the Night Crew have been almost but not quite tracking him down. And the one and only reveal that I didn't see coming felt highly convenient.

Damn, that paragraph reads like I hated this with a passion but I swear that I didn't! I merely can't avoid acknowledging the limitations it had as the pilot episode for a series. It's too busy putting a mythos into motion, introducing us to a set of core characters we'll follow forward and getting us to a particular point where it can become episodic. I'll happily dive into book two whenever it sees print and I'd expect it to spend more of its time on story, while continuing to flesh out the world in the background. Book one is a setup. Book two is the first true story on whose merits we ought to safely judge the series to come.

For now, I like that setup. I like Michael, though I'm sure he'll grow too. His character is driven by grief here, which will change as of the next book. His motivations will be different and he'll find a lot more conflict in who he is going forward. I look forward to seeing how that unfolds. I also look forward to seeing how he connects with Thomas, the sole vampire on the Night Crew, much more than the various human members. More than anything, I look forward to a substantial story that will likely mix investigative skills we see in detective shows with the more military mindset that's inevitable in a takedown squad like the Night Crew.

So, see you next time out. This series has the potential to run long but it's largely going to depend on the success of that first episode proper, now that Ricks has put the groundwork in place. ~~ Hal C F Astell