Occultober Day 7 Vampire on the Orient Express by Shane Carrow
Occultober Day 7 Vampire on the Orient Express by Shane Carrow
To close out our first week of Occultober, we turn to the vampire…
A lot of people have set mysteries on the Orient Express in homage to Agatha Christie’s famous novel, but I’ve never before seen one quite like this. Carrow’s undead are quite frightening and the threat feels very real…but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Carrow opens by introducing his two main characters—an American deserter from the French Foreign Legion and an English spy. Both are on the famous train and the early chapters show them meeting members of the supporting cast and settling down for their long trip. Then screams break the peace of the night and they encounter something that their minds don’t want to grapple with—but which they know in their hearts is not human. I want to stress here how well done this first encounter is. They don’t just discover a victim with fang marks on her neck—they metaphorically grapple with something clearly supernatural and being young men of the early twentieth century, that’s not something they easily accept.
From that point forward, things get much worse very quickly. They meet an Eastern European count and countess whose eyes are so sensitive to light that they wear shaded glasses. The reader is quick to think Dracula, but honestly, things are far worse than I thought they would be. Carrow is drawing more on the early Eastern European myths rather than on the modern urban fantasy genre for his source material, and frankly, this makes his undead much spookier.
The pacing also surprised me. Midway through the book, Carrow gives us what I had expected to be the climatic concluding action but it’s really the tip of the iceberg. If you like vampire stories, this is a good one.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07...
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