Three novellas that take place in different periods of Benny’s life and all feature her encounters with vampires.
Three novellas that take place in different periods of Benny’s life and all feature her encounters with vampires.
Bernice Summerfield
The Vampire Curse
Split into three separate novellas.
The Badblood Diaries
This story is told from the perspective of Bernice Summerfield, reporting directly to an audience of (presumably) millions, from an expedition to the isolated planet Badblood, cut off both from the rest of the universe after the empire pulled out several generations ago. Split into small segments or ‘reports’ Bernice talks us through the arrival on Badblood and describes her coworkers in just enough personal detail to keep us interested.
Badblood is a strange place, with a freak (dust???) storm around the planets atmosphere preventing all but the strongest transmissions through the surface. Mags L. Halliday presents an interesting society, using Bernice’s own reporting instincts to present the survivors of the planet’s vampire plague. With just enough detail to keep things interesting she proposes a simple solution to a planet where the night time brings terrible danger, and then proceeds to show simply what can go wrong.
Unfortunately the vampires, when they finally do appear, only seem half as interesting as the measures society has taken to avoid them. The story told to them of the whistling night seems interesting at first, but once the creatures attack they do very little interesting besides drink blood. This is a story about people’s reaction to horrors, not the horrors themselves.
Also problematic is the fact the story is entirely written after the fact, so even when Bernice is placed in peril it is never possible to consider that she herself is in any danger. There is a significant death toll, and emotional consequences, but no sense of danger.
The Badblood diaries is constantly interesting, well written science fiction that successfully gets inside Bernice’s head. It doesn’t do anything interesting with vampires per say, but it does explore the casts preconceptions and reactions to them effectively.
7 / 10
Possum Kingdom
I have to admit that I got lost very quickly in this one. Kelly Hale wrote a very exciting story, that unlike it’s predecessors actually does something potentially very interesting with vampires, but it took me a long time to realise exactly what it was. By that point I had already decided not to bother re reading the middle half of the story which passed me by in a confused daze.
It’s not badly written, the narrative just jumps through both place and time to give us a larger picture of events. Though it starts and ends with Bernice uncovering, and then solving, the dilemma the middle of the story shows so many consequences and causes of the main plot that I very quickly got lost. It feels like a hark back to the New Adventures, stories larger than the small screen could possibly do justice to.
I really enjoyed Possum Kingdom, but without a re read I think the finer elements of the story will escape me. The concept of a time travel tourist trip to visit famous vampires of history is a good idea but it isn’t explained very clearly at the start. Perhaps only limited information was revealed to keep the air of mystery around the monsters, but it also kept one around Bernice herself which stopped me from understanding her motives clearly until the very end.
Interesting, exciting, and ambitious.
6 / 10
Predating the Predators
Philip Purser-Hallard’s conclusion story is told like a research project, pulling together several historical sources and arranging them chronologically to tell a story. This means like the Badblood Diaries it is told entirely from the first person, through various diary entries, written letters and academic transcripts. However unlike the Badblood Diaries it has several P.O.V. characters and the death count more than underlines a sense of danger throughout.
It is set at an academic conference set up to discuss the concept of vampires, with dignitaries from a range of backgrounds come to present opinions. A P.H.D physicist is due to stand on the same podium alongside dignitaries from the church, several emanant historians, psychologists and a distinguished man who claims to be an ‘actual’ vampire come out of the closet (coffin) at last. Also arriving is an elderly Bernice Summerfield, fresh from a horrific dig on the planet Alukah, accompanied by her granddaughter Ellie.
Accompanying the characters accounts of events are several excerpts of speeches made by those attending the conference. The end result is a story that contains both the human attention to detail of the Badblood Diaries, a living, breathing society for the story to take place in and a plot that is just as ambitious (if simpler) than Possum Kingdom.
I guessed who the villain was exactly one chapter before the revelation, and it is a good twist. All of the P.O.V. characters are well explained, and Bernice’s horrific recount of her dig on Alukah (specifically, her second recount) is exactly the kind of horror writing that a subject of vampirism calls for.
8/ 10
Whole book:
Predating the Predators is my favourite, definitely, but it is not perfect. As with the Badblood diaries, once the vampire threat is out in the open they prove far less interesting than they did before. The only story which does something genuinely new with vampires is Possum Kingdom, which still leaves many things unexplained at the end.
As a whole though this trilogy of novellas proves an exciting read with many things to recommend. There are three very different takes on how to tell a vampire story, some more traditional than others. However this is exactly what the Bernice Summerfield range is good for, exciting self contained science fiction stories with just the occasional guilty reference back to its parent series.
Whole book Score:
7 / 10