SOLVED. Post-Apocalyptic Vampire Novel Set in a Large City (Afterage by Yvonne Navarro) [s]

[Nate]

So I remember reading this vampire novel when I was probably 14 or 15, I bought it at a used bookstore while on a road trip. However, I lost my copy several years ago and periodically remember to try and and find it.

The book was probably released some time between 1985 and 1998. I remember it being somewhere around 600 pages.

The book features a post-apocalyptic future probably five years out; vampires have taken over the night and most humans are either dead or resort to scavenging to survive. There are multiple plot lines but here are the main ones I remember:

1. A vampiress has enlisted the help of an obese and abusive human man to maintain a stock of humans for breeding, using a former jail cell block as a place to store the humans. Because most humans have been driven underground, many vampires are reduced to feeding off rats and other animals or keeping a stock of humans for fresh blood.
2. One group of humans have captured a young vampire child and are holding him captive to test a vaccine/cure of sorts. In the end, the vampire is killed. They held him in a former bank vault or something that was specially modified to hold the kid.
3. There is a young woman who is somehow supernaturally gifted; she lives in a church and has destroyed several vampires, is apparently incapable of being bitten.

I remember several key points in the book:

- In the very beginning, there is a human survivor who watches the early morning light rise; he sees a young woman start to head down into a subway tunnel and sees a vampire start to stalk after her. He grabs a machete and races down to save her but by the time he gets to the tunnel the girl is gone and the vampire is dead and melting.
- There is another point where the human jailer beats/rapes a young captive woman, or she at least shows signs of abuse, and the head vampiress discusses her distaste for the man because of the way he treats the prisoners.
- At one point, the aforementioned mystic/angel woman returns to her sanctuary in a church, where she lights several candles and meditates, or something like that. The writing comments that vampires are incapable of crossing a church's threshold.

I've been looking for this book for a long time, does anyone have any ideas?

[Mir]

This didn't also have space ships in it, did it? I once read a post-apocalyptic vampire novel where the vampires had been genetically engineered by humans but then took over, does that sound familiar?

[Rev'd Hayley]

Justin Cronin: The Passage. Absolutely BRILLIANT!