Raymond A. Villareal's Blog, page 2
June 5, 2018
USA Today Review
Brian Truitt, USA TODAYPublished 1:26 p.m. ET June 5, 2018
(Photo: Mulholland Books)
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Having vampires and humans living and working together in society is just asking for a whole lot of bad blood.
Conflict, conspiracy, curiosity and chaos all arise in Raymond A. Villareal’s debut novel A People’s History of the Vampire Uprising (Mulholland, 432 pp., ★★★ out of four).
In a nod to what World War Z did for zombies, Vampire Uprising chronicles roughly 3½ years after the discovery of a virus that gives its hosts extraordinary abilities and a penchant for plasma.
The subject matter is somewhat familiar, albeit clever in exploring vampiric tendencies, and the story derivative at times. But Villareal smartly fleshes out an intriguing what-if scenario with civilization-altering turns and political gamesmanship.
Vampire Rising follows a cast of characters through various accounts, documents and articles that detail the Gloamings (they’d rather not be called “vampires,” please and thank you) and their gradual infection into all walks of life.
It begins with Liza Sole, a presumed-dead woman who walks right out of an Arizona morgue. CDC researcher Lauren Scott crosses the country to investigate, and she’s the first to make headway into figuring out the mysterious NOBI virus that starts spreading across America.
Uprising takes the romantic concept of vampires as tempting, beautiful and arrogant creatures who live for centuries and extrapolates it to modern culture.
Celebrities and power players want to be “re-created” as Gloamings — they even get their name courtesy of a Taylor Swift social-media post — and the vamps start fighting for their civil rights as they play a bigger role in the everyday world. (The fact that a growing percentage of the American workforce can only come out at night is just one of many problems.)
Author Raymond A. Villareal. (Photo: Ryan Humphries)
The storytelling is picked up by a Catholic priest; the head of the FBI’s Gloaming Crimes Unit; a political operative involved with a Gloaming gubernatorial candidate; a nurse who signs up with an anti-vamp terrorist group and others as Uprising shifts from police procedural to social satire to international mystery and back.
Naturally, deadly complications arise when one part of the population needs to feed from the blood of the rest. As key players’ narratives intertwine, the plot becomes much more about real-world stakes than horror-movie staking.
The oral-history structure is both a positive and a negative for Uprising. Some of the drier chapters lean into Congressional testimony and legal mumbo-jumbo — Villareal is a real Texas attorney, so that stuff’s solid if not scintillating. Yet he brings his characters’ personalities alive in satisfying fashion, which buoys the expositional parts and helps drive narrative momentum.
Vampire Uprising is well worth a bite: The creature-feature crew will discover that recognizable tropes can feel fresh, and readers who aren’t horror fiends will find a beguiling entry into the thoughts of Dracula and his ilk living among us.
Washington Post Review
By Elizabeth HandJune 5 at 8:00 AM
Think things are tough now on the national scene? Wait till the vampires arrive, agitating for equal rights, medical treatment, nighttime access to schools and representation in Congress. That’s the scenario spun by Raymond A. Villareal in his relentlessly clever first novel, “A People’s History of the Vampire Uprising.”
(Mulholland)
A fictional oral history — compiled from newspaper and magazine articles, online posts, notes from a Center for Disease Control specialist, transcripts of FBI interviews and more — “A People’s History” traces a viral outbreak from its onset in Nogales, Ariz. Lauren Scott, a young CDC research physician, is dispatched to the border town to examine a three-day-old corpse “exhibiting unusual hemophilia bruising and intradermal contusions over ninety percent of the body.” Problem is, that particular body has disappeared, though another corpse with similar bruising lies in the morgue.
But wait! There are two circular wounds — “maybe a bite” — by the carotid artery. Also, two top molars seem to be loose.
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At this point, readers everywhere will be shouting, “Vampires — run!” But it takes a while longer for Scott and her likable sidekick, Hector Gomez, head of the Nogales health department, to catch on. Given the CDC’s response time to real-life epidemics, from AIDS to the current opioid crisis, maybe this isn’t so unlikely. . . .
Drs. Scott and Gomez search for Patient Zero: a woman named Liza Soles, the corpse who, it turns out, has been reanimated by her exposure to the Nogales Organic Blood Illness (NOBI) virus. They catch up with her in the art mecca of Marfa, Tex., looking like “a young Patti Smith busking in front of the Chelsea Hotel.” (Villareal’s tongue-in-cheek references to the contemporary arts world are a running joke throughout.)
Liza escapes, but not before Scott gets a blood sample, which allows her to determine that the virus causes an allergic reaction to sunlight and can be spread only by direct contact. Those who survive develop “solipsism syndrome,” a severe form of narcissistic personality disorder. Because of their aversion to daylight, survivors call themselves Gloamings — and most of them don’t report their infection to doctors.
It soon becomes clear that NOBI carriers are choosing whom they bite based on the trifecta of beauty, wealth and talent. Taylor Swift is the first celebrity to sign on, followed by various politicians, crime lords, the pope and video artist Matthew Barney.
Author Raymond A. Villareal (Ryan Humphries)
There are some unanticipated side effects, of course. Those infected develop a weird sort of radioactivity that renders it impossible to record them on film . This makes it difficult for the NFL to televise games featuring Gloaming players, and it also presents challenges for Gloamings running for political office.
Still, within a short time, this select group has become the new 1 percent: They form the Equal People movement and petition Congress to be protected under the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) . Less than 18 months after Liza’s disappearance, the president signs the Gloaming Rights Act.
If you think this is a good idea, you may be a Gloaming yourself.
Villareal’s cheeky blend of political satire and gothic thriller is enhanced by his background as an attorney and his deft use of convincing details: the science behind the NOBI virus; the Gloamings’ legal defense in their efforts to be recognized under the ADA; minutes from congressional hearings; copious footnotes; and three brief appendixes.
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Aside from its ironic allusion to Howard Zinn’s classic, “A People’s History of the United States,” Villareal’s novel is somewhat reminiscent of Christopher Farnsworth’s Nathaniel Cade series, though Farnsworth is a better prose stylist. A numbing Vatican subplot, featuring Jesuit derring-do and a Marian prophecy, threatens to put a stake into the narrative. (That particular vein of mysterioso Catholicism was tapped out long ago by Dan Brown and Anne Rice.) But Villareal wisely shifts focus back to Scott and Gomez, along with an engaging FBI agent who cracks dorky vampire jokes.
Unsurprisingly, Villareal’s debut has already been sold to 20th Century Fox for an eventual movie adaptation. With its doggedly unglamorous investigators pitted against a cabal of narcissistic, wealth-obsessed bloodsuckers, this wild ride of a novel proves that each era gets the vampires it deserves.
Elizabeth Hand’s most recent book is “Fire,” a collection of essays and short fiction.
A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE VAMPIRE UPRISING
By Raymond A. Villareal
Mulholland. 432 pp.
May 26, 2018
New York Post: The 20 best reads for your summer break
https://nypost.com/2018/05/26/the-20-...
A People’s History of the Vampire Uprising
Raymond A. Villareal (fiction, Mulholland Books, out June 5)
An epidemic of vampirism has swept across the United States, and now these changed people, fresh from their blood diet, are called “Gloamings” and have become a part of this changed society. As the Gloamings start taking over prominent positions, they lobby to change laws and fight discrimination against vampires.
May 23, 2018
USA Today "10 hot books for summer reading, from Bill Clinton/James Patterson to Ruth Ware"
3. A People’s History of the Vampire Uprising by Raymond A. Villareal (Little, Brown, fiction, on sale June 5)
What it’s about: When a virus turns all sorts of people into vampires (including a populist political candidate), the “Gloamings” start demanding their civil rights in this satirical horror novel.
Why it’s hot: What’s being pitched as “World War Z for Vampires” has been snapped up for the movies by 20th Century Fox and Shawn Levy’s 21 Laps (Arrival).
May 11, 2018
April 16, 2018
Review in Publishers Weekly
Raymond Villareal. Mulholland, $27 (432p) ISBN 978-0-316-56168-6
At the start of Villareal’s enjoyable if derivative first novel, CDC virologist Lauren Scott travels to Nogales, Ariz., where she visits the city morgue to examine a body “exhibiting unusual hemophilia bruising and intradermal contusions.” To her annoyance, the body has apparently been stolen, but another has since arrived at the morgue bearing the identical pattern of bruising. Lauren notices two puncture marks on this new body near the carotid artery. Sure enough, the evidence suggests that vampires—who prefer to be known as gloamings—have invaded the U.S. Lauren eventually joins Hugo Zumthor, the FBI agent in charge of the Gloaming Crimes Unit, and John Reilly, a Catholic priest, in contending with the gloamings, who are struggling for their political rights. Genre fans may have fun recognizing the influence of such notable predecessors as Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire series, Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s The Strain, and Max Brooks’s World War Z. That 20th Century Fox and Shawn Levy’s 21 Laps have secured film rights bodes well for this solid supernatural thriller. Agent: Daniel Lazar, Writers House. (June)
March 25, 2018
Kirkus Review
The oral history of the bloody beginnings of a worldwide vampire revolt.
This debut novel by attorney Villareal has already been the subject of a six-figure bidding war for film rights—not a surprise, considering that this horror epic takes roughly the same approach to bloodsuckers Max Brooks applied to zombies in World War Z (2006). It starts when CDC virologist Lauren Scott is summoned to Nogales, Arizona, to examine the dead body of a girl named Liza Sole. The soon-undead victim quickly decides to split, but not before Scott gets a sense of her: “Temptation in human form.” Scott quickly finds that her discovery, Nogales organic blood illness, or NOBI, does indeed grant its victims fangs, an aversion to the sun, and a life span up to 300 years. As the NOBI infection spreads, these vampires, now identifying as “Gloamings,” start to aggressively demand equal rights, despite the growing tide of bloodless bodies in the street. The risky process of making a vampire by passing on the virus is dubbed “re-creation” and attracts enthusiasts from Taylor Swift to the pope. Villareal handles his sexy vampires well, giving them interesting abilities and aspects without granting immortality. Elsewhere, the book follows Hugo Zumthor, the FBI agent in charge of the Gloaming Crimes Unit; a radicalized anti-Gloaming Catholic sect; and Joseph Barrera, a slick political operative whose life is upended when he joins the campaign of the first Gloaming candidate for governor. Some of the story’s elements (read: religious conspiracy) may seem derivative, but overall it offers a wide-ranging, readable thrill ride for fans of the genre. While the book fails to match the sociopolitical insights of World War Z, it delivers a spectacularly creepy ecosphere, not to mention some genuinely horrifying frights. Interstitial elements like magazine articles and social media posts help augment Villareal’s ambitious worldbuilding.
The start of a vampire epic and a strong contender in the genus of apocalypse fantasy.
March 8, 2018
Trip to NYC
Trip to New York City for the Media Luncheon.
December 12, 2017
JD Payne & Patrick McKay Bite Into Fox & 21 Laps’ ‘A People’s History Of The Vampire Uprising’
"EXCLUSIVE: JD Payne & Patrick McKay have been set by Fox and 21 Laps to scriptA People’s History Of The Vampire Uprising, based on the Raymond Villareal novel. The book, to be published next summer by Little Brown’s Mulholland Books, conveys a growing worldwide epidemic. It subverts the vampire mythology by telling the story through various points of view in a grounded political ensemble in the vein of Traffic. Shawn Levy and Dan Cohen are producing for 21 Laps. Mike Ireland is overseeing for the studio.
Payne & McKay are writing the next Star Trek film for Paramount and producer JJ Abrams, and also Disney’s Jungle Cruise, which gets underway next spring with Jaume Collet-Serra directing Dwayne Johnson. With Vampire Uprising, they reunite with 21 Laps, which gave the writers their first job writing Deadliest Warrior for Paramount. 21 Laps is in post on the second season of Netflix’s Stranger Things, as well as the Lionsgate sci-fi thriller Kin, Fox’s The Darkest Minds and the indie Kodachrome, latter of which debuts next month at Toronto. They just set a remake of A Bittersweet Life with Darkest Minds helmer Jennifer Yuh Nelson directing and Michael B. Jordan starring.
The scribes are repped by Verve, Kaplan/Perrone and Hanson Jacobson."
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"Arrival" and "Stranger Things" Producers Will Take on The Vampire Uprising
"The producers of Arrival and Stranger Things are on a hell of a roll. First a hit Netflix series, then an Oscar-nominated film, and now they're launching an adaptation of Larry Niven's classic sci-fi story "Inconstant Moon."
Well, this week they added another major genre project.
According to Deadline, producers Shawn Levy and Dan Cohen -- both of whom worked on Arrival and Stranger Things -- are set to produce an adaptation of A People's History of the Vampire Uprising, an upcoming novel by Raymond Villareal. Fox will distribute the flick after picking up the rights during a studio bidding war.
Billed as "World War Z with vampires," the novel documents a vampire epidemic through multiple viewpoints, including government investigators, a librarian at the Vatican, a gossip site and even a Supreme Court justice regarding vampire (they call themselves "The Gloaming") civil rights.
Levy, Cohen and their 21 Laps production company are making the most of their high-profile hits from last year, and I suspect this won't be the last major deal they make in the coming months. As for the project itself, you could argue that vampires and zombies are more or less equally overplayed at this point, and we're already getting another vampire takeover of sorts with the upcoming adaptation of The Passage.
That said, these guys have an eye for good material, so we'll see what happens.
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