Skarlet – review

Author: Thomas Emson

First Published: 2009

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: You thought you knew…

Fear grips London as dozens of clubbers die after taking a sinister new drug, but that’s only the beginning. Forty-eight hours later, the dead clubbers wake up – and it is open season on the living, who are butchered for their blood.

Soon, London gives a name to its terror: VAMPIRES

Jake Lawton, bitter and betrayed after the Iraq War, finds himself fighting another battle – against the growing army of immortal hunters and their human cohorts. He joins forces with the journalist who brought about his downfall and the dealer tricked into distributing the drug. And together they take on the spineless authorities, the ruthless cohorts, and the hungry dead.

But the vampire plague unleashed in London is nothing to what lurks beneath the streets –

Waiting to be fed…

Waiting to be resurrected…

Waiting to reign again over a city of human slaves…

The review: Sometimes a book cover just captures my eye. The cover of Skarlet did just that, in a high street booksellers (and, from what I have since gathered somewhat earlier than the forward release date). The cover caught my eye and despite the old adage, ‘never judge a book by its cover’ I remembered the wisdom of the Simpsons when they said you can judge a book by its cover, especially with regards the blurb on the cover. The blurb, as you can see, mentioned vampires.

We are in the realm of the good old-fashioned horror novel here. A plague of vampires spreading through the streets of London and they are not the romantic vampires often favoured as this attack on a bus shows, “The vampire attacked one of them, tearing out his throat. Blood fountained from the wound. It attacked another youth, butchering him, blood spouting from the shredded throat.”

The idea of tying drug culture and vampiric behaviour is nothing new at all, however this isn’t just some random drug – this has been designed for a purpose and Emson starts revealing a grand conspiracy as well as a satisfying back history that stretched back to Babylon and the exploits of Alexander the Great. Not as explored, certainly, but nice in its brevity is the reference to Vlad Tepes who Emson informs us was not the vampire that, through Bram Stoker and Dracula, people have assumed but rather the clue is in his act of impalement – those impaled were vampires and he was a hunter thereof.

There is some strong characterisation though I didn’t buy into all the backgrounds. Jake Lawton, disgraced soldier, I didn’t buy for instance – despite being the main character. Simply put a journalist publicised a video of him executing what looked like an unarmed civilian, but his story is that the man was a suicide bomber and he became a political scapegoat. I am sorry, I didn’t buy that. The military would have protected him and made it clear to the world that the man was a suicide bomber. That is only a little irk and we are in a fictional world however.

If this is ever filmed the money shot is at Big Ben, looking at the clock we see a “figure stood in one of the faces, more than three hundred feet above Parliament Square. It hung on to one of the clock’s hands, watching the chaos below.”

All in all this is solid horror, well worth a read with some nice background material within. 7 out of 10.