Blood Feud

by Sam Siciliano

A master of manipulation with the power to take life and grant unlife prowls the streets using men as pawns and turning women into victims--all the time thirsting for the death of the woman he once loved. Original.

Genres: Vampires, Horror, Fiction

315 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1993

About the author

Early on, Sam Siciliano developed a taste for fantastical worlds better than the one he was stuck with. He grew up reading the golden-age juvenile science fiction of Heinlein and Andre Norton, the Mars and Tarzan novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Baum's Oz books, Brooks' tales set on a New England farm where Freddy the Pig had his adventures, and of course, there was the London of Sherlock Holmes. Siciliano has a doctorate in English Literature and taught briefly at the college level, but because of the terrible academic job market, he ended up with a career in information technology, mostly as a database administrator. His reading and authorial tastes remain diverse, with a special fondness for genre fiction. Besides ten Sherlock Holmes' pastiches, he has had three vampire novels published. At the University of Iowa, Siciliano met and married fellow graduate student Mary Slowik, and the two have raised three children and several cats together in the Northwest.

Here is the order and inspiration for the Holmes series:

THE ANGEL OF THE OPERA
(Inspired by Gaston Leroux's Phantom of the Opera)
THE WEB WEAVER
THE GRIMSWELL CURSE
(Inspired by Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles)
THE WHITE WORM
(Inspired by Bram Stoker's The Lair of the White Worm)
THE MOONSTONE'S CURSE
(Inspired by Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone)
THE DEVIL AND THE FOUR
(Inspired by Conan Doyle's The Sign of the Four)
THE VENERABLE TIGER
(Inspired by Conan Doyle's "The Speckled Band")
DEATHLY RELICS
THE GENTLEMAN BURGLAR
(Inspired by Maurice Leblanc's The Hollow Needle)
SHE REINCARNATE
(Inspired by Rider Haggard's She)

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

So, the description of this book's plot on the back cover (and on this Goodreads page) is pretty misleading. It makes it seem like these two vampires with their mutual loathing of one another are the main characters, when in fact they aren't introduced in earnest until two thirds of the way through the book, and their motivations and backstory are clearly supposed to be a twist of some kind.

The main characters are actually just humans - There is Mary, a good Christian girl that's pretty in a plain way who says "God is a woman" unironically, and is recovering from a difficult breakup. Then there is Steve, a depressed, square yuppie whose knee hurts, and is recovering from a difficult breakup. They are joined by Fred, a chill priest who can hang; and Smith, an asshole.

Together, they make multiple incompetent attempts at slaying the aforementioned vampires, and then the book just sort of ends.

The author is pretty good at creating a gloomy Gothic atmosphere of decay and chilly darkness, and the Pacific Northwest setting is nicely evocative, but there's otherwise not much to recommend here.