This book, by David Lee Stone, was found for me in a cheap bookstore and judging by the cover is a vampiric orientated book. The character pictured is one Jareth Obegarde (a half vampire on his mother’s side) and, whilst he is a main character, the vampiric elements are so low key that I thought I’d give this an honourable mention as opposed to a review.
The Illmoor Chronicles are comedy fantasy, much in the vein of Terry Pratchett, and the story of this entry into the chronicles surrounds a dark sub-sect of the only legal religion the Yowlers. This sub-sect had devised a plan to turn the people of principle city Dullitch to stone. It is up to a bunch of misfits including Obegarde, along with ex-thief and ex-gravedigger Jimmy Quickstint and penniless noble Duke Modeset to stop them.
We get a little bit of vampire lore and that is about it. As Obegarde explains, being half vampire, “I’ve just the one fang, I only drink blood when there’s no wine going and I can’t sleep a wink past midnight.” Later we discover that half vampires, or loftwings, can also lay on hands to heal others and they are extremely difficult to kill. The problem from a genre point of view is that, with the exception of an epilogue coda, the character could have been any creature - the fact he was half vampire was almost an irrelevance.
The book itself is an amusing and easy read, though a tad Pratchett derivative.
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