Published in , it was one of the books that kicked off the Urban Fantasy genre. It was a debut novel that was so ground-breaking that it won the Bram Stoker award.
I was just looking for a book written or set in the s that I could use for my Stranger Things Halloween Bingo square. I gulped the novel down in two days. It was fresh and clever and filled with casual, graphic violence and transactional sex that felt raw and real rather than contrived and exploitative.
Sonja Blue lives in a world splattered with blood, much of it her own work. Sonja Blue lives in a heartless, vicious, violent world so completely lacking in glamour or romance that it makes other vampire books seem like Disney World. The story starts in classic gothic style with the nightshift warder at the mental asylum who, hardened by decades of experience, is unafraid of the patients on the Danger Ward.
Except for the women kept in an unfurnished padded cell, who wears nothing but a straightjacket and who scares him even in his dreams. The book launches into rapid, violent action that unleashes the strange woman on the world and introduces us to the two identities who share a body, one a teenage American heiress and the other a predator who is always hungry.
Then we meet the baddy. The pace slows a little, the timeframes widen and the geographic settings become more exotic as we get the backstory of both women both of which are filled with abusive men, violence, rage and more than human abilities. From there we build to the inevitable ballet of hate-driven violence as Sonja Blue confronts who she is and seeks retribution. As I read the novel I was struck by how its strengths were those of a graphic novel: vivid original, uncompromising images, strong lead characters each with a distinctive style, strange creatures in exotic settings, a fast-moving plot, an atmosphere of evil and corruption and spectacular bloody carnage at regular intervals.
