Viscerally macabre imagery permeates Wilson’s chilling debut, the first in her Deathless Creatures Saga, giving attentive readers haunting scenes to savor while echoing Sarah’s desperation for someone to understand, and clarify, what’s happening to her. She runs from Alex—and avoids learning more from Lucy—in an attempt to save her comfortable life, but ultimately her path can’t be denied. Wilson colors Sarah’s fascination with Alex as a conduit for acceptance—that she cannot be less than who she is and cannot avoid her fate as someone more than human, needed by the entire planet—though her relationship with Alex is muddled by vampire hierarchy and Lucy’s enigmatic Society of Keepers.
Though Sarah’s refusal of her call is lengthy and drawn out, Wilson’s writing easily draws readers in, eventually offering a high-stakes feast of electrifying passion, death, and a ticking bomb of destruction that only Sarah can stop. Through sheer willpower, and with Alex’s devoted help, Sarah eventually comes into her own, transforming into a confident, transfixing lead who is assured in her role of protecting the human world. Wilson’s characters—and their mesmeric universe—are ripe for sequel treatment, whispering of more romance and exponentially higher stakes in the future.
Takeaway: Two immortals struggle to accept their fate—and each other.
Comparable Titles: B.B. Griffith’s The Vanished series, Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse Saga.
Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A-
Marketing copy: A
[Recommended Review]
In Wilson’s supernatural thriller, a young woman discovers she has a rare, supernatural gift after surviving a tragic accident.
All things considered, Sarah Woodward ought not to be alive. When the bus she was on swerved off the road and plunged into Elliott Bay, Sarah was the sole survivor among the 15 victims. Not only did she survive, she had the presence of mind and absence of injury to swim to shore, where she found herself physically (if not emotionally) unscathed. Soon after, though, strange things begin happening to Sarah; she feels, somehow, both alive and dead, as though trapped in a sort of purgatory. Small injuries to her skin heal almost instantaneously, and she keeps having the same dream of a mysterious cave that feels inherently familiar to her but that she cannot place in memory or the real world. While at an art gallery, seeking out some normalcy in the aftermath of these upheavals to her reality, she meets a young-looking man with a keen, almost stalker-like interest in her, and, despite her best instincts, she goes to a second location with him. She discovers, quickly, that this man, Alex Smith, is not young at all; in fact, he’s a vampire, and more than three centuries old. He has been looking for Sarah ever since the bus crash she survived—he witnessed the whole thing, his vampiric senses able to trace her far-off heartbeat as he heard all the others go silent. Around the time she meets Alex, Sarah is also questioned in the bookstore where she works by a mysterious stranger, Lucy Goodspeed, who claims to work for a shadowy organization known as the “Society of Keepers.” Before Sarah has a chance to talk with Lucy, she and Alex discover something troubling: Sarah’s blood has the capacity to make Alex “alive” again, at least somewhat—after tasting a mere dribble, he’s breathing again, temporarily, for the first time in centuries. When this experiment nearly kills him, Sarah decides it’s time to talk to the Society of Keepers, hoping to get some answers—but the mystery only deepens when, unprompted, Lucy shows Sarah a photograph of that very cave she’s been dreaming of for weeks…
In her first novel, Wilson has managed to find an interesting wrinkle in the classic vampire narrative in the character of Sarah, a sort of supernatural foil who is not the typical werewolf or vaguely Christian ideological crusader, which helps to make this vampire yarn feel at least a bit fresh. That being said, readers’ appetites for sentences like “I can’t tell her I’ve started falling insanely too fast for someone who happens to be a vampire” have been eroded by decades of teen-lit plumbing the exact same dynamics. The plotting sometimes feels too convenient—one wonders about that chance meeting at the art museum—but there is real pathos to Sarah’s character, who feels like a friend from college you’ve mostly forgotten about but who now finds herself in extraordinary circumstances. Fans of vampire fiction won’t find much new here, but those open to an undead thread running through an engaging narrator’s strange experience will enjoy the ride.
Fun—if overly familiar—vampire fiction made palatable by memorable characters.
