5 stars

Kyle Marffin

Gothique

Design Image

2000

ISBN 1-891946-06-4

What Stephen King did for rural Maine in 'Salem's Lot, Kyle Marffin has done for urban goth/White Wolfite subculture in Gothique. Vampires don't just want to move into town: they want to take the place over. And the many, many, many black-clad kids who recite the silent mantra "Oh, please, please become real" have created the perfect cover. Honestly, isn't it a little disappointing to know that a badass vampire old enough to be their great-grandfather is just as short on taste and discretion as they are? But I'm getting ahead of myself. Megan Russell puts the truth on disk -- the sales and resales of the old Palace theater, the financial shenanigans inside Whitestar Media Group, the multinational named Marek and the waifish-looking Arianne. Marek's flunky sent to kill her and recover the dirt achieves only half of his goal -- the floppies are gone, and we readers are halfway through the book before they resurface, battered and corrupted, the legacy of a woman who died falling naked off a skyscraper....

"Gothique, so much more than a nightclub...." And its gradual encroachment on whatever it wants constitutes much of the book's development. Charade magazine increasingly becomes its tool, to the annoyance of art department veteran Jeff Stancheck, who is old enough to have fond memories of rubber cement and type galleys. The neighborhood of the old Palace theater -- in the process of becoming the nightclub Gothique -- is being taken over by pasty-faced punks and girls who don't mind the blood running from their necks, to the terror of Frank Hoelevich, who soon gives equal attention to crucifixes and his M-1. And the youth of the city -- well, they're being taken over too, and moving into the basement of Gothique, some sleeping in coffins, others handcuffed to iron bedframes to provide wake-up snacks. "Gothique. You'll just die."

Gothique is a beautiful formulaic horror novel. I mean that as a compliment. Formulas are like clichés: they get created and used because they perform a needed function. Formula is not bad -- it is as good or as bad as its execution makes it, and Gothique is a bang-up execution. There are lots of characters, but Marffin portrays them solidly, getting readers just sufficiently up to speed at the right time. The long disappearances of some characters, the rare but poignant glimpses of others; the seemingly evil vampire with more than just a shred of decency under her snarling exterior, the good guys who become vampires and keep being good guys, the priest whose faith doesn't go far enough -- they're all there. And so is the suspense as the vampires get closer and closer to the good guys. Oh, and I nearly forgot the obligatory twist just before the fireworks start -- yow! I didn't see that one coming! And at the very end is the obligatory reappearance of an important vampire principal in circumstances tying her to the protagonists she has left behind. Vampires are forever; we never fully get rid of them, and they are never too far from us, no matter how we reassure ourselves to the contrary.

But there are a couple of non-formulaic aspects worth mentioning. Nonformulaic bit #1: Nobody is rescuing a romantic interest from the bad guys. There is romance, yes, but Jeff Stancheck is saving his daughter and Frank his dog when they finally storm Gothique; renegades Colleen and Cass are just good roommates, not lovers, and in any case not there to save anyone in particular. Nonformulaic bit #2: Marffin uses such an utter lack of affectedness in pointing out the vampires' evils. The speechifying by disillusioned vampires of various degrees of good comes across as their own speech, not a "message" foisted on us to advance some creed or anti-creed. Whether the vampires are truly damned is never known, but they're truly themselves, no matter which side they are on. Maybe there's a little preachiness in the "Be careful what you wish for; you might get it" subtext. Maybe. But that's so often a subtext of horror novels, the evil looking beautiful until, well, until -- ! But mostly Gothique is a novel rich with its characters, their hopes and dreams and fears, and the events that gradually build toward the showdown that we know is coming. And we do know. We know the formula so well that we play our part and surf the suspense that comes from doing it right and relish all the pieces falling into their prepared places at just the right time. Gothique. It's just yummy.

Catherine B. Krusberg