cover image The Blood Poetry

The Blood Poetry

Leland Pitts-Gonzalez. Raw Dog Screaming (Ingram, dist.), $29.95 (214p) ISBN 978-1-935738-24-4

Vampirism is one of the less unpleasant elements in this over-the-top short novel. Epstein Dorian is a high school English teacher who yearns for a sane, loving family life. Unfortunately, his mother is an addled bloodsucking fiend who lives upstairs in his house, his wife's corpse is found with wooden splinters in her heart, and his 13-year-old daughter, Sylvia, returns from death as an autistic telepath. Epstein spends his time indoors, watching TV shows about mass murderers and thinking about Sylvia's "adorable breasts." When he does go out, he manages to hook up with a sexy bartender, though only fantasies of torture and murder turn him on, and they attend services at a church run by Pentecostal vampires. Even for Grand Guignol humor, this is pretty strange stuff. Pitts-Gonzalez's shambling, lunging prose does convey Epstein's desperation, but the overall situation is never convincing enough to justify the emotion. By the time Epstein goes "berserk in a cold and calculated kind of way," readers will have entirely tuned out. (Oct.)