Necroscope: Defilers
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Jake Cutter is reluctantly learning how to be a Necroscope - how to use the Möbius continuum to travel instantaneously from place to place, how to talk to the dead - but the dead don't like him much. It seems Jake's got a hitchhiker in his mind, a dead vampire named Korath. But since Korath holds the key to the Möbius equations, Jake can't just kick him out...
In Australia, Jake helped E-Branch destroy the aerie of the mind-master, Nephran Malinari, one of the trio of Great Vampires who came to Earth from the vampire world. Malinari escaped and went to ground with the hideously beautiful Lady Vavara. Vavara has taken over a holy monastery on a beautiful Greek island and turned the nuns into most unholy creatures of fearsome appetites for all things carnal.
But Jake wants revenge against the Italian mobsters who killed the woman he loved. As far as he's concerned, E-Branch can search for Malinari, Vavara, and the metamorphic Lord Szwart without him until he's satisfied his own bloodlust. But it seems vampire-hunting is truly Jake's job now - the men he's trying to kill aren't men at all but vampires hidden for two generations in human guise!
To defeat them, Jake will need every weapon in Necroscope's arsenal, including the power to call the unsleeping dead out of their mouldering graves...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The 12th novel in Lumley's Necroscope series shows the hitherto vigorous vampire epic getting long in the tooth. Though it features the usual vast and vivid cast of psychic sleuths and earthly undead monsters, it is noticeably stingy with the plot twists and full-throttle action that have made the saga a formidable fusion of espionage and supernatural horror. The trio of other-dimensional Wamphyri who took refuge on Earth in Necroscope: Invaders are still on the loose at the novel's start, and Ben Trask's indefatigable E- (short for ESP) Branch is determined to prevent them from spreading the infectious vampire fungi. To kill time while they follow clues that lead them to the vampire stronghold in a convent on the Greek island of Krassos, Ben and his operatives converse in tedious exchanges that seem not so much dialogue as lectures and briefings for the reader's benefit. Similarly, the vampire master Nephran Malinari and the Lady Vavara snipe incessantly at one another in melodramatic Dark Shadows swatches. The problem is most acute in nominal hero Jake Cutter, who spends most of the tale sidetracked on a personal vendetta against a mafia kingpin, sparring mentally with the absorbed consciousness of the vampire Korath, who whispers nonstop provocations in his ear as part of their Faustian pact. The three cliffhanger finales in the final pages echo climaxes of previous novels, and seem little more than deliberate overcompensation for the story's surprising stasis.
