After Age
by Yvonne Navarro (Bantam Books )
by Margaret Smith
Vampires and the end of the world – not two of the most original topics for horror novels these days, but if there is any writer who can be counted on to make them work at all, much less together in one story, it’s Yvonne Navarro. Although hardly in the same league as Anne Rice or Peter Straub in terms of familiarity, Navarro has long been a respected mainstay in the circles of those who read and write horror literature.
Her first novel, After Age, is one that deserves the attention of a much broader audience as it injects a badly needed freshness into the genre of vampire fiction. The book is set in the ruins of what used to be her native Chicago, where a plague of vampirism has drastically reduced the human population. The shortage of mortals, however, has resulted in problems for the vampires, who resort to abducting humans for breeding stock. This they accomplish with the help of one sleazy mortal, who, in his pre-apocalypse days, was a loser with bad hygiene in a dead end job. He’s still a loser with bad hygiene, but is now entrusted by vampire head honchos with the power to brutalize and impregnate the captives.
In the meantime, the seemingly dead city is alive with straggling clusters of struggling humans, some in groups, some as loners. There’s a feisty young girl and her companion, an aging dog, a small band of survivors, one a doctor who abducts a child vampire in the hopes of experimenting on it to determine just what will kill off the buggers, and there’s a mysterious woman who appears at first to be no more than a frenzied religious fanatic, but who seems to have, in fact, found a way to render the predatory blood suckers powerless.
If you’ve grown accustomed to taking your vampires on the pretty side, this isn’t the story for you. After Age offers no majestic immortals striking poses. They are efficient killers who do what they have to do, without much philosophical reflection on the whys of what they’re doing. Despite this, they are not one dimensional villains. Even the ruthless vampire overlords are often sympathetic characters, caught in the same desperate struggle for life as the vulnerable humans scurrying through the streets.
The stories of both are conveyed in Navarro’s neat. unadorned prose which keeps the story at a brisk clip. It slows down and savors the most chilling passages just enough to leave the reader with a healthy dose of the creeps.
The novel’s one glaring flaw has nothing to do with the text itself – it’s the book’s blood red cover, which depicts the silhouetted Chicago skyline superimposed on the image of a woman vampire bearing lurid fangs. Enough already. If one were to place end to end all the vampire novels whose covers show a presumably sexy woman vampire sporting her eye teeth, these books would encircle the Earth four times. I showed After Age to several people, many whom said if they passed the book on a shelf in the store, the cover would have driven them off. If this has happened to you, now you know better. Go back to the store and buy it.
