Children of the Night
Mercedes Lackey
ISBN: 0812522729
Publisher: Tor Books
Pub. Date: May 1994

Synopsis:
Diana Tregarde finds unexpected danger in New York--a rock band of psi-vampires that feed on strong negative emotions--and soon this practicing witch allies herself with Andre LeBrel, a true vampire who intends to destroy this musical menace. Diana Tregarde is new to New York, and to her Guardianship--but she's ready to defend her friends, and her adopted city, from any evil--even vampires: the Children of the Night.

Synopsis:
How will the staunchly Christian members of a Victorian family deal with one of Christendom's most abhorrent creatures a bloodthirsty vampire? Hannah Kristan enters the blood drinker's domain, believing her beloved husband dead. But Adrian waits, a changed man, for his grieving bride! Angela Marshall is brought to believe. But will Christian charity save her or make her a profane communion sacrifice in the name of love? Nathaniel Cravers, seeking to unearth his estranged family's shadowed past, becomes inextricably mired in the dark covenant that separated him from his rightful heritage! Jonathan Cravers lives a haunted half-life with the conviction that Satan wields all power. Can love alter his self-condemning curse or will it sentence him to an even more unspeakable damnation? God alone knows, and not even the band of stalwart Heavenly Guardians charged with watching over the humans and thwarting Satan's demonic legions are privy to His omnipotent design! In post-Civil War Massachusetts, celestial angels watch in trepidation as Adrian Kristan returns to his birthplace to free himself and his unborn child from an old unholy pact. They know the dark power he is facing but are unable to intervene, barred by unstable faith and the demonic forces holding dominion over the inhabitants of Tall Pines. At the center of the conflict is Jonathan Cravers, a manipulative vampire bent on self-preservation at any cost and Adrian's child is the key to his survival. However, Jonathan's fate rests in other, invisible, hands, and the more he attempts to bend lives to his will, the more control is wrested from him. Though he fights emotions that bring unbearable pain, he is drawn more deeply into a vortex of sentimentality that could be his undoing! It is only when Angela Marshall arrives that the angels are granted entry past the diabolic sentinels to counsel the mortals Jonathan holds in his grasp. Initially horrified at discovering what he is, Angela is also fascinated, and she makes him begin to question the very basis of his existence. Even the angels are astonished to discover that Jonathan is more pawn than power at the hands of Satan's minions. As the omnipotent forces of Good and Evil do battle, Jonathan comes to see Angela as his means to redemption if such a state is possible for him. But will her lifeblood be the required sacrifice for his salvation? Heavenly love or Hell's fury--which holds the prevailing power?

Synopsis:
Even creatures of the night need legal aid, and lawyers Alanna Wolff and Jeff Byrd are their champions in Lash's graphic novel. Wolff and Byrd, aided by their secretaries, Mavis and Corey, have their hands full, for their clients include a rambunctious vampire boy who is being persecuted by a fellow classmate, a time-traveler with patent woes, a woman whose dead lover's soul is in jeopardy, and a boy with a dual identity. If that weren't enough, all four primary characters also have their tumultuous love lives to contend with. The Vampire Brat takes more than a few pot shots at contemporary television shows, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (appearing here as Myrtle, the Vampire Hater) and Ally McBeal (Ally's desperation for a man is unabating). Kristine Huntley Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Synopsis:
It's almost midnight. Cat's on the bed, facedown and naked. She's Sam's former girlfriend, the only woman he's ever loved. Sam's in the closet, with a hammer in one hand and a wooden stake in the other. Together they wait as the clock ticks down because... the vampire is coming. When Cat first appeared at Sam's door he couldn't believe his eyes. He hadn't seen her in ten years, but he'd never forgotten her. Not for a second. But before this night is through, Sam will enter a nightmare of blood and fear that he'll never be able to forget - no matter how hard he tries.

Synopsis:
Serge Dumont, vampire latent, has never met a woman who wasn't his for the taking—until he meets Derri Morgan. One look at the sexy, beautiful defense attorney and it's bloodlust at first sight for Serge. Undaunted, and confident of his attraction to the opposite sex, Serge sets out to capture his prize...

Synopsis:
Ever since she could remember, vampire latent Katie Dumont has nursed a secret desire for full-blood Aleksei Madison. As she nears her 36th birthday, she's restless and confused. Despite her hunger for Aleksei, a human, Mark Lewis, has managed to endear himself to her. Having watched the turmoil her family experienced after her brothers fell in love and in bloodlust with human women, she is determined not to make the mistake of falling for a human male. But bloodlust, the most powerful force in a vampire's life, cannot be denied...

Synopsis:
Unlucky with love… All the attractive women in vampire Aleksei Madison's life, starting with his mother, have disappointed him. Having suffered countless romantic disappointments in the past, he is in no mood to be taken in by yet another pretty face when he shares a passion-filled weekend fling with full-figured Dani Tyler. Although he finds her physically attractive, he has no intentions of allowing Dani to touch his heart. And yet she does. To complicate matters, a secret he has guarded for nearly sixty years is about to be revealed, threatening all those he holds dear. As he races to save the lives of his siblings from the most powerful foe he's ever faced, he leaves Dani guarding a secret of her own that will forever change both their lives. Love with a younger man? Sometimes having your darkest fantasies fulfilled can have devastating repercussions. Raised in a small town, Dani is dismayed to find herself madly in love with a man who looks young enough to be her son. But the darkness in Aleksei both frightens and attracts her. She must decide if loving Aleksei will bring her nights of endless bliss or result in the lost of her life and soul to the darkness within her nocturnal lover.

Synopsis:
THE KISS OF ADAMUS - A Mahler symphony plays in this house. Eve tempts Adam in stained glass. A dead mouse, a pink bow around its neck, lies on the dresser. A topaz-eyed cat, as big as a Labrador, stalks for food. A madman gallops in the hallway. And Rachaela waits, waits for her lover, her seducer... She worked in a bookstore, a conventional young woman in a conventional life. Then they beckoned Rachaela, using a lawyer as a front, using a variety of ruses, beckoning her to the house on the sea - the house of Scarabae... Now she is here: not a prisoner, but she cannot leave; not a criminal, but stained with sin, seduced... A man's body burns on the beach. Madness cries out in her head. This is her family. This lover bears her family name. He comes to her in black, bearing his passion, his thirst for her blood, his ecstasy - his terrible seed...

Synopsis:
A new tale of horror featuring the mysterious vampiric family of Scarabae follows Anna, a family member, as she and twenty other children are kidnapped and taken to a pyramid under the Southern ice by an immortal named Cain.

Synopsis:
But one of their own is igniting a blaze of chaos through the streets of London. Original. Emerging from the burned remains of their old home, the ancient, elegant Scarabae ready themselves for a new life of seduction and feasting, until little Ruth ignites a blaze of chaos through the streets of London that threatens them all.

Synopsis:
The discovery of an apparent murder victim in a dusty Arizona town convinces Sue Wing's grandmother that Cup-hu-girngsi, Corpse-who-drinks-blood, is on the prowl again.

Synopsis:
The vampire Jean-Luc Courbet rises after sunset and admires his own beautiful physique before going out to the gay bars of New York City. There he trolls for good-looking young men with whom he can have sex. Unfortunately for these fellows, Jean-Luc follows his lovemaking by draining them of every drop of their blood. He hides the bodies as well as he can, but soon enough the police discover them along with additional corpses killed in the same way. It seems that another vampire is at work, and Jean-Luc suspects an old enemy. Through flashbacks, the reader learns how Jean-Luc became one of the undead and who it is that wants to destroy him.

Synopsis:
When Professor Everett Land is found dead, detective Brandy Mather has a puzzle on her hands. The body is definitely his; dental records confirm his identity. But Professor Land is in his forties and the body is that of a very old man. What could have caused him to age so rapidly? Why is the corpse smiling? Brandy enlists the aid of computer scientist Dan Martin, who is smart, handsome, and anxious to help. Dan is almost too good to be true, and Brandy soon falls in love. But something is off about Dan. . . very off. Brandy's investigation soon throws her into the midst of small-town politics, bank robberies, and vampires.

Synopsis:
Buried in the Romanian mountains, trapped in unlife, Thibor Ferenczy teaches his human tool, Boris Dragosani, to rip secrets from the minds and bodies of the dead, to gain world domination, but Harry Koegh, the Necroscope, can save both the worlds of the living and of the dead. With over 250,000 copies sold in paperback, Brian Lumley's Necroscope has become a classic novel of vampire terror. The first in a horror-filled trilogy, it is the cornerstone of Lumley's work.

Synopsis:
Harry Keogh, necroscope, thought that the war with the vampires had ended with the destruction of Boris Dragosani--his nemesis from Necroscope, but Yulian Bodescu is secretly creating an army of vampiric monsters, and Harry must defeat a legion of monsters before they overrun the entire earth. But the man who talks to the dead lives on, more powerful than ever, able to transport himself instantly to any spot on the globe--and to speak mind to mind with both the living and the dead.

Synopsis:
Now available for the first time in hardcover, the third book in the Necroscope series traces the battle between Harry Keogh and the horrifying Vamphyri on their home ground, an alien landscape of looming towers, impossible cliffs, and ravenous vampire-beasts. Russia's Ural Mountains hide a deadly secret: a supernatural portal to the country of the vampires. Soviet scientists and ESP-powered spies, in a secret military base, study the portal--and the powerfully evil creatures that emerge from it, intent on ravaging mankind. When Jazz Simmons, a British agent sent to infiltrate the base, is captured by the KGB espionage squad and forced through the portal, his last message tells Harry Keogh, the Necroscope, that the vampires are preparing for a mass invasion. Harry has only one option--to strike first. He must carry the human-vampire war to the vampires' own lands. But his strongest psychic power will be useless there. What good is the power to summon the dead in a country where nothing ever dies, where every man, woman, and child become half-dead servants of the Vamphyri?

Synopsis:
new vampire stalks the earth, and only Harry Keogh can defeat him! The silence of the grave is not silent at all. In their millions, the dead are screaming...but no one can hear them! Atop a perilous cliff, deep in the Balkan mountains, rises the castle of the Ferenczy. Once it was a stronghold of the Vamphyri...and now it will be so again, for Janos Ferenczy, vampire and black magician, has risen from his ages-long sleep. Powerful and evil, Janos conjures dead men and women into a semblance of life and subjects them to fiendish tortures. But the shrieks of the dead do not satisfy Janos's lust for blood-- for that he needs living humans. His terrifying armies of the risen dead will soon overwhelm a helpless, defenseless mankind.... Helpless and defenseless because a terrible battle against the vampires has destroyed Harry Keogh's deadspeak, leaving the Necroscope deaf to the teeming dead...and to their warnings of Janos's reign of terror. To save the world, Harry must join forces and link minds with the most powerful, and deadliest, vampire of all!

Synopsis:
After the preceding books, Harry's life couldn't get any worse, right? It did. The return of Shaitan and Shaitas was a great way to give Harry and his group a hard time and new problems. This final book in the Necroscope series before the Lost Years sets up the hero of this five book rampage to a thrilling ending.

Synopsis:
The sixth volume of Lumley's vampire series, Necroscope, harks back to an earlier period in the life of Harry Keogh, who is the Necroscope. In it, Keogh is inexperienced, still on Earth, seeking his lost family, and caught in the murderous rivalry between two potent vampires. This set of ingredients produces a story that certainly succeeds at keeping the reader turning pages. Lumley hasn't quite dispensed with his tendency toward purple prose, however, and also, the book has the usual problem of the prequel--suspense that is undermined by the knowledge that the protagonist will survive, for his further adventures already exist. Yet wherever the other Necroscope yarns have been popular, this one will be, too. Roland Green As a young man, Harry Keogh discovered that he was a Necroscope--that he could talk to the dead and transport himself instantly to any place in the world. Harry also discovered that vampires stalked the earth, and that they were a thousand times more terrible than anyone ever imagined. Now, Harry finds himself searching for his wife and son, who disappeared in the midst of Harry's war against the undead monsters that plague mankind. A new novel in the best-selling vampire series fills in the life of the great vampire hunter, Harry Keogh, recounting Keogh's most perilous encounter with the undead while desperately searching for his missing wife and son.

Synopsis:
Ninth doorstopper volume in the Necroscope series, a towering vampire cycle and rousing sequel to 1995's Necroscope: The Lost Years (not reviewed). Volume two fills in the lost years of Earth's greatest vampire hunter, Harry Keogh, the Necroscope who can talk with the dead and teleport in space and time. When Keogh died and was reanimated in the body of brain-dead Alec Kyle, Harry's wife Brenda, unable to live with a total stranger, disappeared with their immensely powerful infant child. Three families of vampires banished to Earth from Starside, an alternate world, have been warring for millennia. Harry goes on leave from ESPionage, Britain's parapsychological intelligence group, to find his wife, but ESP hypnotically blocks his mind so that alien powers can't tap his hidden talents. It doesn't work: B.J. Mirlu, 200-year-old vampiress with whom Harry's in love, seizes control of his will, and, between B.J. and ESP, Harry loses large portions of his memory. During this lost period, a werewolf kills a rapist who's attacked a girl who works for B.J. at a bar B.J. owns in Edinburgh--an incident serving to reveal the plans of the two other vampire factions intent on destroying B.J. and those around her. The renewed vampire war couldn't come at a worse time: She and her moon-children guard the aerie where her master, the dog-Lord Radu, has been immersed in a vat of resin since the Black Plague, from which it's taken him 600 years to recover. Now his resurgence is at hand, and, if still infected, he'll move into Harry's body and rebuild it in his own image. B.J. is torn between her love for Harry and the possibility of her becoming a full-blown Wamphyri! But can Harry survive Radu's resurgence? Can the star-crossed B.J.? No diminution either of energy or of billowing High Purple prose. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP.

Synopsis:
Sixth symphony in the Necroscope series, an epic vampire cycle begun in paperback (Deadspawn, 1991, etc.) and now shifting to hardcover, with 480 pages of dense lyricism and small print in need of a guide like Frank Herbert's Dune Encyclopedia. In his Necroscope cycle, Lumley falls victim to a historical giganticism endemic among fantasy writers like Mervyn Peake, Gene Wolfe, and others who write long and lust after the vanished three- decker. Vampire hunter Harry Keogh, the Necroscope, called The Hell-lander and sometimes Dwellersire, can talk with the dead and move effortlessly through time and space. Earlier, Harry battled the near-immortal masters of the Starside, the Wamphyri, and drove what remained of them to the Icelands. The Sun now circles from Sunside to Starside, but Harry is ailing, for he himself has been corrupted by Wamphyri evil and been robbed of his ability to enter the forbidden Mobius Continuum (``Trapped in its flux, he drifted useless as a ship with neither sail nor rudder, a waterlogged hulk rocked and slowly twirled by mathematical tides and algebraic whirlpools, through straits of Pure Number where he was now innumerate''). Are the Wamphyri truly gone? No, they still live in hidden vampire caverns and, strangely refined by unclean vampire science, have come forth to prey on innocent humankind. Harry's twin sons inherit some of his powers and may save mankind; but during a vampire raid, one has been snatched by a flying monster, and the other must find him so that together they may fight the revived evils of the Wamphyri. Frenzied deliria! Hair-tearing madness! Death in high purple! But just the draught that Lumley's faithful have ordered. Next: The Bloodwars! -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP.

Synopsis:
Second novel in Lumley's Vampire World series (Blood Brothers, 1992), or subseries, but apparently seventh in the overall Necroscope series, each volume a doorstopper. Lumley hacks out his vampire universe with a plot of inhuman complexity that few could possibly keep straight - perhaps not even the author himself. Written in surreal impasto, his introductory synopsis is a crowded symbolist canvas whose weirdly lighted details escape a larger general meaning for new readers. At this point in the cycle, Nathan and Nestor, twin sons of Harry Keogh the Necroscope, a vampire hunter from a parallel vampire world who talks with the dead and zips swiftly through time and space, are now enemies in the Sunside/Starside world. Harry was an alien who sired his twins on Nana Kiklu of the Szgany Lidesci, but the twins have matured into opposites, with Nathan fey and gifted with weird power, and Nestor strong and lusty and now set on being lord of the Wamphyri (vampires)! We last saw Nestor snatched up by a flying monster, dropped into a land of lepers, then escaping, though into hideous dreams of the future, while his lieutenant Zahar had captured Nathan and tossed him into the Starside Gate, portal to hell-lands from which no man or monster had ever returned. Now Nathan is trapped on earth and being pursued by a maniacal psychic bent on murdering him, while a band of British psychics, who first became aware of the Keoghs back in 1990 (it's now 2006), protect him. Nestor, meanwhile, though a victim of nightmares, grows ever more vile in expanding his power, now torturing the dead (with whom he can talk in deadspeak), now raping girls while sucking them dry from within. Lumley's High Purple storytelling delirium remains undimmed. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP.

Synopsis:
The highly-anticipated conclusion to the blood-chilling Vampire World trilogy, begun in Blood Brothers and continued in The Last Aerie. At the height of their powers, twin brothers Nathan and Nestor Keogh are locked in mortal combat, determined to destroy each other. The outcome of their battle will determine the fates of two worlds and countless humans.

Synopsis:
This is my life, my reality. I'm not a vampire, simply the lucky lottery winner of an all-star line up of disease. From Anemia to Xeroderma Pigmentosum and all points between. Real diseases which have built the vampire myth. I drink blood, my skin burns in sunlight but I don't turn into animals and I don't live forever. Not by a longshot. I'll be lucky to see thirty. So will my friends. We share a bond of disease, and the struggle to live normal lives.