3 stars

Thomas Staab

Vampire's Waltz

Crazy Wolf Publishing

1999

ISBN 0-9674172-0-1

Brooklyn, a parallel apocalyptic present. One nosferatu has cleaned out a city of eight million to make it her spawning ground. A handful of the living, however, still walk the empty streets. A far-seeing black man. An angry teen. A mortal woman whose unborn child will be the vessel of an unholy union of blood. And two members of immortal races: werewolf John Pastore, whose ancient-beyond-ancient people have a longstanding grudge against the vampire-kind, and Immortal Armondo Moreno, whose long, lonely fight against the "Blood Slaves" has made him question even the instinct that drives him. A long history has led up the events of Vampire's Waltz. Glynis is the last member of the last of the thirteen vampire houses. Hidden for a century, she has augmented her powers: she can bind the very forces of life in the universe and can transform humans to nosferatu with unprecedented speed. However, she has learned from her house's mistakes. Use of force brought about their downfall: her own powers notwithstanding, her chief weapons are now her enemy's hopes and fears. Armondo has spent an immortal Ironblood's long life wielding a sword of petrified wood against the undead, and Glynis offers an end to his solitude: vampire blood cannot transform Ironblood, but if the two mix in an innocent vessel, it will be the beginning of a new race, one more powerful than vampires or Ironbloods, and Armondo will have a place at its head -- and at Glynis's side. All he needs to do is fetch the innocent vessel, the soon-to-be-born child of the "Fair Christian" -- a young woman named Christine that Pastore has taken under his wing.

Nor does Glynis exercise her charms on Armondo alone. Christine is young, poor, unmarried, and capable of bearing numerous subsequent children if she wants them: whether in person or through telepathy, Glynis hammers home Christine's unfitness to care for a child, and especially this particular child, who has the unique potential to be the mother of a new race. With both Armondo and Christine suffering crises of conscience, can John and his often bickering young charges keep the world safe from the creation of a super-race?

Vampire's Waltz tries to be everything -- a modern morality tale, an earth-saving epic, an action-adventure story. The amazing part is that by and large it succeeds. I usually complain about authors' larger-than-life characters not working: well, Staab's do, from his members of immortal races with their long lives and longer memories to the elemental beings that represent the forces of Nature itself and rise against the race of the undead. No less effective and believable are the everyday people: Shawn Murrell, a well-read young man who can draw on deep anger for his strength; twelve-year-old Jesse Morsello, whose chief virtue seems to be that he's not one of them -- yet; and Christine Ferranti, who gives birth to the focus of Glynis's hopes and must struggle in worlds both tangible and psychic to prove herself more than a merely biological mother.

Vampire's Waltz is popular literature, not Great Literature. Its PC sweetness and light gets wearisome at times, and its attempts to pack in a little of everything can yield disappointingly shallow bits: Glynis's self-doubts and her romantic history, for example, are touched on too fleetingly to give her the depth that they might. And although I made a point of not paying much attention to typos and misspellings as I read this book, I'll warn readers that the first printing is full of them. (Publisher/author Staab tells me many were corrected for the second printing, but he did not mention addressing the major oops of referring to bats as rodents, which they are not.) Still, overall I was pleasantly surprised by Vampire's Waltz. I really and truly anticipated that it would suck, and it really and truly doesn't. Unswervingly gritty in its depictions of physical violence and the darkness in the human (and vampire) soul, it is ultimately an affirmation of justice in nature -- human nature included.

Catherine B. Krusberg