There are some that say horror shouldn’t deal with anything political. My initial response to such a statement is to ask the person making said statement how much actual horror they’ve seen in the last 50 or so years. Horror, indeed a great deal of speculative fiction, hits not only the universal truths of human existence but provides a mirror, no matter how cracked, into our currently broken times. Some may pejoratively call such horror “woke,” but such stories also bring a bright light to some very dark and harmful social issues. Rodney Barnes’s book Killadelphia is an excellent example of this, using the idea of vampires as the Founding Fathers as an example of our current broken system. I had already reviewed the first deluxe edition of this series, but Killadelphia Deluxe Edition Book 2, like any good sequel, raises the stakes for all the characters involved.
The book opens with Philadephia as a fallen city. Abigail Adams, wife of former president John Adams, and her vampires are not roaming the streets at night to slaughter any innocent humans in their way while humans fighting for survival are turning on each other in the bright light of day. Undead detective James Sangster, Sr., along with his son, find help in the form of the enigmatic vampire Seesaw, a pack of werewolves who know a thing or two about war, and a trickster god, but the vampire army have boosted their numbers with the addition of founding fathers Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.
With the stellar depictions of vampiric carnage rendered by artist Jason Shawn Alexander, the meat of the story is filled in by writer Barnes. Barnes does quite a bit of narrative lifting in this volume, having to handle so many new characters, from werewolves to new vampires. In the hands of an inexperienced writer, all the new characters could have flitted past the readers without leaving any impression, but Barnes balances them all, letting them all develop organically and contribute to the overall story in their own ways. Along with character development, Barnes uses the vampire metaphor to shine a light on the dark underbelly of America and the promises it has left unfulfilled with monologues by a man who helped build it.
No comments:
Post a Comment