Lumley reveals perhaps more than he intended to in the note following this turgid supernatural novella, originally intended to be a chapter in his 1995 two-part novel, The Lost Years
. Having promised his publisher a vampire tale, Lumley remembered a story line he had previously thought superfluous and decided to write it after all. The convoluted plot, in which the Francezci brothers recruit American mobster and vampire Mike Milazzo as a weapon against Harry Keogh, a “necroscope” who can communicate with the dead, will leave many readers wishing the author had left it on the cutting-room floor. The writing is often clumsy (“Harry knew that their moon-child nature caused little more than a trace of the telepathic phenomenon known by E-Branch's mentalists as mindsmog”), and the story will make sense only to Lumley's longtime fans. (May)
