One Foot in the Grave by Wm. Mark Simmons

One Foot in the Grave by Wm. Mark Simmons

This novel starts out strong with Simmons’ hero, Chris Csejthe, trying to deal with having lost his wife and daughter a year before while also working with his doctor to try and understand why he is increasingly sensitive to sunlight. For the reader who has picked up an urban fantasy, this is an easy question to answer. Chris is becoming a vampire. Part of what makes the first portion of this novel so interesting is the effort to find out why Chris is changing. Thrown into the mix is Chris’ overly slow introduction to the supernatural world. Things don’t really begin to jump until two critical things happen—Chris gets reason to suspect that his wife is not dead after all (or maybe she is undead) and Chris starts having nightmares about what really happened the day he lost his family (which it turns out he doesn’t remember clearly at all).

 

This storyline is very well done and quite exciting. Unfortunately, the book slows down again as it turns into a quest for a rogue vampire killing people near where Chris used to live. This is one of those things that I think the vampire community should have been alert to earlier. Weird deaths and disappearances are often a sign that vampires are active and the region Chris used to live in seemed to have a lot of those.

 

As the novel develops, Egyptian mythology and Count Dracula begin to factor into the story and Chris continues to grow in power without actually finishing his transformation and becoming a vampire. He also continues to be—well, not suicidal, but not interested in continuing his life if he becomes a vampire. This adds a lot of tension as he struggles to bring about a permanent ending to the problem of the rogue.

 

This is a slow moving but very interesting novel.