Suckers
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Anne Billson's debut novel is part horror story, part satire and has been praised by (among others) Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Carroll and Christopher Fowler, who in Time Out called it "dark, sharp, chic and very funny". It's set at the end of the "greed is good" decade, and features a gothic love triangle between a man, a woman and the 300-year-old vampire they chopped into easily disposable pieces a decade earlier. But now she's back. and this time she's building an empire...
Kevin Jackson, author of Bite, a Vampire Handbook, wrote: "This debut novel by Anne Billson, a noted film critic and frequent contributor to the Guardian, was highly praised by Salman Rushdie and others as a sharp and witty satire on the greedy 1980s. And so it was, but that was only part of the story: it is also a gripping adventure yarn, a tale of the nemesis that may lie in store for us if we have ever committed a guilty act, and a delicious character study of an unconventional young woman whose weaknesses (envy, malice, jealousy) only make her all the more charming to the reader. It contains one of the most chilling moments in all vampire literature..."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Yet another would-be satire of London's media swarm, this debut novel--which inexplicably caused Billson to be named among Britain's best young novelists earlier this year--is a tediously arch farrago whose less-than-inspired central conceit quickly wears thin. Magazine consultant Dora Vale and her erstwhile lover Duncan Fender have a creepy feeling that the vampire, Violet Westron, whom they had chopped into small pieces 13 years before, has returned as head of a multinational media conglomerate with designs on world domination. Of course it's true, and soon Dora finds herself alone against evil forces. Related in glib journalese, Billson's trite observations on contemporary pop culture are never toothsome or original enough to animate her moribund plot. Since Dracula and his ilk have always served as quite self-conscious symbols of cultural anxiety, the end-of-the-millennium-psychosis-blues that Suckers aspires to remain obdurately flat. Nasty and tasteless without being particularly shocking, silly without being very funny, the novel is--sharpened stakes and fangs notwithstanding--pointless and suprisingly lacking in bite; Suckers stands in sore need of a transfusion.
