One of the greatest gifts of genre fiction – whether horror, s/f or fantasy – is that the very best of it is a commentary upon the world we live in. There’s a deep-beneath-the-muscle realism to unrealism that most stories based upon our humdrum kitchen-sink existence can’t hope to mine, and that’s probably why tales about vampires are especially enduring. The vampire is an immortal archetype for our desires, vulnerabilities, angers and angsts no matter how young or old we are. It is what we fear to become and what we long to be. Maybe, for some of us, it is what we are already. That’s why, despite the thousands of forgettable vampire stories that are seemingly produced every year, Stoker’s Dracula and Le Fanu’s Carmilla, Rice’s Lestat and Lindqvist’s Eli will never evaporate in the sunlight that falls across the bookshelf.
Unfortunately, Lee Markham’s The Truants disintegrates within the first couple of chapters. It’s a difficult read (Markham’s tediously staccato prose doesn’t help) and it’s occasionally nasty in a way that wants you to throw the book out of the window and forget it ever happened, but what really stakes it through the ventricle is that Markham tries so hard to make his story and characters socially relevant that he ends up tiresomely reinventing the wheel. The Truants is yet another grim and grimy nosferatu-noir that doesn’t include the word vampires but is full of tosh about ‘old-ones’ and undead infections and the futility and fragility of life and the quest to destroy a weapon which is spreading a kind of plague throughout the city’s downtrodden population. As a heartbroken immortal being waits on a park bench for the dawn to destroy him he’s stabbed to death by a thug and the weapon does a violent La Ronde around the capital injecting the old-one’s tortured consciousness into the blood-stream of every victim. Yes, we get it. It’s all code for the nightmare of modern Britain and the hopelessness of our expanding social underclass, and instead of the usual vampiric metaphor of sexual disease the metaphor here is the growing cancer of violence broiling beneath the streets of our ever-more dystopian council estates. From that POV, Markham is fulfilling the brief outlined in the very first sentence of this review – commenting upon the world we live in and using the lens of the vampire to warn us about what’s coming. It’s just that he’s got nothing interesting to add and what he does say he says very clumsily. This wants to be golden age Bauhaus but it’s actually Daphne & Celeste in a Littlest Vampire fright wig.
Do yourself a favour. Give The Truants a pass, back-to-back re-read Matheson’s I Am Legend and Lindqvist’s Let the Right One In and wait patiently for the upcoming Blu-ray release of Abel Ferrara’s excellent The Addiction. The Truants never manages to flip the crypt and it definitely ain’t down with the Count… but at least we gave our early morning morning puns a workout.
THE TRUANTS / AUTHOR: LEE MARKHAM / PUBLISHER: GERALD DUCKWORTH & CO LTD / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
