3 out of 5

A fun and appreciably well-written genre book, T. Chris Martindale’s vampire actioner Nightblood never quite gels with its pulpy pitch – you get the sense Martindale kept falling in and out of love with the idea, editor-urged back on path – but that same in-built distraction is what gives it a pretty unique pulse.

Nightblood, by description, feels like a hodgepodge of things from the eras – the 80s – that birthed it, taking in B-movie camp, muscley action flicks, and pulpy newstand books and comic and stewing this altogether for lead Chris Stiles: ‘Nam vet and monster hunter, guided to his prey by the ghost of his dead brother. Nightblood is not the setup of this; rather, we’re told most of this in a shoulder-shrugged just-another-ghost-seein’-war-vet fashion, and while the initial reveal of the creatures Chris will be stalking in the book are truly masterfully terrifying, the fact that we’re dealing with otherworldly stuff is, similarly, not much of a surprise.

Now I will say: some of that might be due to Grady Hendrix’s intro, which hypes up the book’s goofy qualities (similar to my hodgepodge outline above) and gives some background on the needs of the medium at the time – boy’s action genre books selling well – that kind of led Chris down the road, after some other failed starts, to Nightblood. Hendrix is certainly responsible for having me read this in the first place, given its reprint under the Paperbacks from Hell branding, and I’m guilty of reading the foreword, I suppose, but I always question these kinds of spoilers-first forewords for reprints. Like, I understand that the foreword-er has read the book, and wants to share their excitement, but I also don’t think it’s unnatural to read these section before the book – nor that many readers are like me and won’t have read the book before – so it’s hard to say how differently this could’ve read without some of the spoilers Grady drops. Now I’ve partially done the same, of course, but there’s more detail in Grady’s bit that, I think, shades the read; I wonder if doing some hype-man work up front and then adding the background as an afterword may’ve helped.

Chris follows his brother’s guidance to a small town, which features the local old man oddball, the skeptical cop, the sexy single mom, and various other tropey denizens that blend Twin Peaks weirdness with horror movie fodder. Martindale takes steps towards fleshing some of these characters out really well, such as Chris’ love interest’s kids, or cop “Bean,” but the others don’t fare so well. The women are particularly underbaked, and some sections / characters feel like remnants of other drafts when they had more focus; they’re only pulled out here when plot relevant. …Which is a similar rollercoaster of incredibly fascinating elements and bits that come and go with oddly little fanfare; again, as though the author struggled with the focus, and every now and then an editor would say – remember, we need some action; or we need some blood.

This does lend itself to, overall, above-average writing quality: Martindale puts a lot of time into environment, and doesn’t come to his sentences cheaply – that is, they aren’t just words strung together to get us from point A to B, even if sometimes the actual journey from A to B ends up not mattering much. And he’s not precious about his cast, with some truly surprising deaths in store that appropriately up the stakes and make it clear that Chris (the character) is not a superman.

But still: despite the highly quirky setup, Nightblood never quite fully sinks into the pulp, or the horror, or the drama. This makes it unpredictable in a positive way, but also somewhat underwhelming over all.