Bloody Habit

A Bloody Habit by Eleanor Bourg Nicholson, 435 pages

It is the dawn of the twentieth century, and it sometimes seems that not only does the sun never set on the British Empire, but that the Empire is itself a kind of terrestrial sun, enlightening the whole globe, banishing the shadows of injustice and war, ignorance and superstition that still haunt the backwards corners of the world.  Yet the queen who symbolizes this golden age of progress is ailing, and the reading public thrills to Bram Stoker's suggestion that some of those old superstitions might turn out to be terrifyingly real.  John Kemp, a young barrister with a growing practice, certainly finds the novel Dracula unsettling, but far less unsettling than finding himself face to face with an actual vampire, or discovering a genuine van Helsing in the unexpected form of a Papist friar.

It would be easy to mistake A Bloody Habit unread as either a belated attempt to cash in on the waning vampire fad or an attempt to cash in on the continuing fashion for reworking popular stories to fit modern sensibilities.  It is neither.  Nicholson's charming and horrifying novel is certainly inspired by (and often refers to) Stoker's classic, but it is also very original - just as importantly, the characters resemble actual Victorians and show no resentment of their era.  Nicholson's vampires are malevolent monsters, and that malevolence is horrifying, as is appropriate for a tale in which an ordinary London lawyer suddenly finds that his life, like every life, is on the front lines of the struggle between good and evil.