Author: Peter Tonkin
First Published: 1981
Contains spoilers
The Blurb: It all began on New Year's Eve, with a party at the Rectory, and an accident. Drunk and humiliated, schoolmaster Edwin Underhill stumbles through the local cemetery - a short-cut to his home when the ground suddenly caves in beneath him and, falling into a pit, he impales his hand on a stake.
Underhill, described by his peers as a ‘plain little man', now finds that his unprepossessing looks undergo a distinct transformation. He records in his journal the alarming changes that start to take place: his hair, tending to baldness, now becomes thick and healthy; his teeth sharpen; he finds he craves redder and rawer meat and, at the same time, he begins to avoid daylight and becomes a nocturnal wanderer. The woman on whom he has set his heart no longer shuns him but finds his change in appearance, and his mysterious air, strangely attractive. But along with these bodily changes comes a host of fantastical nightmares and new emotions which he cannot fully understand, far less control.
THE JOURNAL OF EDWIN UNDERHILL follows in the grand tradition of vampire stories from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to the more recent Interview with the Vampire, but it differs subtly from its predecessors. In this contemporary tale Tonkin looks inside the individual, to the innermost fears and feelings of a man undergoing a terrifying transformation.
The review: I stumbled over this vampire novel and discovered a great, Gothically beautiful prose that explores the change from human to vampire. Underhill starts a journal following his embarrassment at a Christmas event and subsequent accident. The accident sees him piercing his hand on a piece of wood that was a stake – removing the stake from the vampire (though her body was dissected and dispersed, so it gives her a spiritual escape but not physical form) and infecting him.
The first half of the book then follows his changes, as listed in the blurb, and the second half once he becomes actually undead. It is interesting that he uses the stake to tie a damaged rose plant, which subsequently produces corrupted flowers. The original vampire is Stana Etain, Countess Issky-Koul who brought the “white plague” to the country village Underhill is living in and, when discussing vampires, the historical figures of Báthory and Gilles de Rais are invoked. She has cursed the familial line of the one responsible for her staking. When Underhill fully turns, he is more a monstrous vampire (interesting given his physical alterations when alive) and literally sloughs his old skin. The vampires are tied to both their grave dirt and the night, and he is able to merge into shadows. He refers to a part of himself as the Dead and there is a conflict between his remaining vestiges of humanity and the Dead. Other tropes included are the use of holy objects, and a struggle is described between light and dark, along with apotropaic things such as garlic and wolf’s-bane. One aspect that was fairly cool was him not seeing some garlic flowers and wolf’s-bane as it was put out centuries before and had no tell-tale life left in it but the magic of it still being effective.
Tonkin’s writing has a definitively Gothic lilt and is wonderfully evocative and whilst the story is fairly simple the atmosphere and characters keep the reader engrossed. 8 out of 10.
In Hardback @ Amazon US
In Hardback @ Amazon UK
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