The Spy Who Drank Blood by Gordon Linzer

The Spy Who Drank Blood is an interesting fantasy/horror/mystery type book from the mid-80s. As you can probably guess from the title, it's about a secret agent who is also a vampire. Since the book is from the 80s, it isn't one of those lame sparkly vampires, or a tragic, brooding antihero, or the love interest of some woman who secretly battles the forces of darkness. Being the protagonist means he isn't a crazed monster either, but he is more interesting than these pathetic vampires that infest the genre today.

Blood, as the hero is called, is a vampire mostly in the traditional mold; he drinks blood, casts no reflection, can turn into mist or a bat or a wolf, can control certain animals, has hypnotic eyes, and can't cross running water.  He works for a secret government agency called the Office.

His boss's daughter is a reporter for a supermarket tabloid and is in Florida investigating skunk ape sightings. She gets kidnapped by some domestic terrorists, and then kidnapped from them by the skunk ape. Blood gets sent in to sort the whole thing out.

This book combines action, humor, horror, and a little science fiction very well.  If you can dis up a copy of this out-of-print book, you should do so.

Fell Beasts ed. by Ty Schwamberger

Fell Beasts is an anthology of horror stories with monsters in them. It's a pretty good collection with a wide variety of monsters: a Bigfoot, a werewolf,a devil, a crazy killer, a flock of crows, a lake monster, a demonic hotel, manticores, a woodwose, evil banished Christmas dwarf things, and some kind of frog monster. The stories themselves range from good to great. My favorite had to be the decidedly Bizarre "There Goes the Neighborhood: (Holiday Version/Extended Cutting)," by Brady Allen,which was the one with the Christmas dwarfs. My least favorite was the final story, "Yellow," by John Everson, which wasn't bad, but I just didn't find particularly exciting.

The only real problem I had with the book was its poor copy editing. I'm not usually one to even notice that sort of thing, but this book had so many mistakes, I couldn't help but notice. I hope that will be fixed in future reprintings, because if it wasn't for that, I would have rated it higher.

The Naturre of Balance by Tim Lebbon

I picked up the (now unavailable) Leisure edition of The Nature of Balance in a discount bin a few years ago. For some reason, I read the first couple of chapters,  got distracted by some other book, and never finished it, until now. Mostly I decided to finish it because I'm going to Horrorfind Weekend tomorrow, and Tim Lebbon is a guest there.

It's easy for me to see why I let myself get distracted from finishing this book; while it's not a bad book, it's also not exactly what I'd call gripping. Sure  it does have an interesting premise, but  the characters tended to be kind of stupid.

The story is that one day almost everyone dies in their sleep. I'm not talking about passing peacefully either; it's more of a Freddy Krueger kind of thing. there's an evil being called Fay and group of six survivors, half of who are very odd people. One is a man with no memory who seems to have a history with Fay. Another is a young woman who Fay wants to kill for reasons that are unexplained until nearly the end. Then there's the psycho who is really working for Fay.

 Really it's not a bad book. I just prefer my horror with  more monsters.