Vampires, Werewolves, and Hackers....oh my!

I finished a pretty entertaining novel last night, by first-novelist Ryk E. Spoor, called Digital Knight. Spoor is a person I've had (very) intermittent contact with over the last few years, via the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written, where he goes by the handle "Sea Wasp". Now, if you told me that a new novel by a guy named "Ryk Spoor" was coming out, I'd suspect it was a story involving vampires and werewolves in all manner of Lovecraftian highjinks. That's a good thing, because that's precisely what Sea Wasp has written here.

The book's main character is an "information specialist" named Jason Wood, who spends his days doing contract work for law enforcement types who have special "information" needs -- image enhancement, collecting data and searching it for patterns, and the like. His best friend is a Wiccan-type named Sylvia, and there's a mildly-inverted version of the "Mulder and Scully" dynamic between the two (i.e., he's a "skeptic", she's a "believer") that Spoor is wise enough not to underline too heavily, given what happens almost immediately: Jason Wood finds a dead body outside his back door, a body which is sporting two puncture wounds in the neck and from which every red blood corpuscle has been extracted.

From here, Wood is plunged into a world where vampires are drug dealers. And from there he plunges into a world where vampires are hunted by werewolves. And from there he plunges into a world where vampires and werewolves have been at war for over half-a-million years. And from there he plunges into a world where vampires and werewolves have not only been at war for over half-a-million years, but where they are entities whose power derives from the very spirit of the world.

I know, this description of the book sounds ungainly, but somehow it all works. For one thing, Spoor's tone is pretty "matter of fact" about it all, and he plays his material straight and narrow. He doesn't much mine the vampire legends for their eroticism, which I found welcome (I've become tired of the sexual aspects of vampirism in recent years), and he leavens his supernatural explorations, which seem inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, with other plotlines redolent of techno-spy fiction, not unlike Tom Clancy or Robert Ludlum. It's a pretty heady mix, and Spoor walks the tightrope he sets for himself pretty well by confronting the problems head-on. At one point he gives Jason (his first-person narrator) this line:

But this was like opening the door to my house and finding Gandalf and Conan the Barbarian in a fight to the finish with Cthulhu and Morgan le Fay.

Spoor also appears to have given real thought to the kind of lifestyle an exceptionally long-lived vampire would lead, and also what the implications would be for the real world once word of the existence of werewolves got out. I confess that I have a slight problem with a vampire's resistance to sunlight also applying to the lights of a tanning bed, but I was able to get past that, especially since it provided a good set-up for something later.

Spoor structures the novel in a different way: there isn't a single plotline that winds through the whole thing. Rather, the book exists as a set of linked novellas, each one with its own climax and set of problems. I found this slightly off-putting, until I got to the third story-arc and recognized what was happening. The book is a page-turner, but it still felt slightly strange to read what was clearly a type of "climactic" battle on page 170 of a 380 page book. Also, the book itself leaves a lot open at the end, so I suspect a sequel is in the offing.

I didn't find Digital Knight to be as much a horror book as a dark fantasy -- it didn't frighten me or make me want to leave the light on. This isn't a Stephen King "scare" book, so if you want a story featuring supernatural beasties locked in a war through the ages, with generous helpings of hackerdom thrown in, Digital Knight is the book for you. Check it out. (And, if you're interested, buy it. That will help a new author's career along.)