Empire of Fear
by Brian Stableford
Arcade Publishing, a division of Skyhorse Publishing
May 2011
$14.95
400 Pages
Review copy received from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Summary: In an epic novel the Washington Post called “riveting,” Brian Stableford brilliantly imagines a world ruled by a powerful aristocracy of vampires: long-lived, extraordinarily handsome humans who are immune to pain but must drink the blood of their common subjects. The story begins in seventeenth-century London and spans three hundred years—moving from England to the heart of Africa, to Malta, and finally to the New World. Edmund Cordery, Mechanician to the court of Richard Coeur-de-Lion, believes that vampire beings must have a natural explanation. But when his discoveries make him dangerous in the eyes of his masters, Edmund entrusts his learned secrets to his son, Noell, who in turn becomes a fugitive. When he returns to Europe he faces the awesome might of Coeur-de-Lion and the infamous Vlad the Impaler. This classic has been translated into five languages and “turn[ed] the typical vampire story on its ear” when it was published, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Darkeva’s Review:
What if the greatest kings and conquerors of history–Atilla the Hun, Richard Lion-Heart, Charlemagne, and Vlad the Impaler–were vampires who brutally conquered and ruled over the human race? That premise certainly drew me to the novel, Empire of Fear by English sci-fi author Brian Stableford. Despite it first being published in 1988, I’d never heard of the book prior to its re-release this year in May.

Set in seventeenth-century Europe, the tale revolves around a scientist, Edmund Cordery, who is doing secret research on behalf of an anti-vampire group hellbent on taking the vamps out of power, even if they do rule the world and hold all the highest positions, especially Prince Richard, who is the main head honcho that Edmund been serving for years. But being human (and not immune to the charms of a woman), Edmund introduces his former fanged flame, Carmilla, to his son, Noell, an impressionable youth who is immediately repulsed by her.

Edmund is working on finding out what makes vampires–literally. How they create more vampires, how they reproduce, if the males produce sperm and if there’s some kind of substance in that which alters their DNA. All the nitty gritty is being looked into, because the anti-vamp group he’s a part of doesn’t believe that vampires have Sabbats and take it up the rear from Satan, nor do they think that vampires are demons or that they’re corpses possessed by demon souls. Nope, it’s all in the science, they postulate. Trouble is, Edmund has to find a way to prove it.

Edmund gets pretty darn close to finding out how to make men into vampires, but there are vamps who, for obvious reasons, don’t want that info leaking out. At first, it’s postulated that the vamp-making substance is some kind of elixir, but Noell, being the good boy that he is, continues dad’s research and finds out even more startling things about how vamps are made, and yes, it does involve swapping bodily fluids but not in the traditional sense.

Noell becomes something of an ascetic and monk when he grows up, burying himself in research and books in an abbey with a supporting Abbott, Quintus, but I wanted to know how Edmund and the Cordery family came to serve vamps in the first place–was it a family tradition, something passed down, or did it start with Edmund out of his once strong allegiance to Carmilla?

Eventually forces conspire to get Noell out of the abbey and on a ship with a pirate named Langoisse, who has brought a female vamp with him to be a prisoner in the abbey. She does her best to charm her way into Noell’s pants and nearly succeeds only to suffer a pretty nasty fate once Langoisse and the monk leave on a voyage to Africa. Turns out that vampires originated there (a concept that I thought was wicked cool and had a lot of potential, especially as it hearkened back to Anne Rice and her vampire originators, Akasha and Enkil), but once the book switches focus to Noell and his journey to the heart of Africa to find the cause of vampirism and to find out their secrets, although I liked him as a character, I felt that the middle slowed the pace down and I lost interest at a few points.

Book history lovers will enjoy some of the texts mentioned, including invented ones, like by Niccolo Machiavelli, which posits Cesare Borgia as a vampire (a great concept that at least a few authors I know of have adopted). Sadly, Cesare doesn’t make a cameo appearance. Vlad Tepes, also known as Vlad The Impaler (the basis for Dracula, many argue) makes an appearance later in the novel, which will be a treat for fans of the Wallachian ruler.

As well, each section includes a letter from one character to another, which functions well as a recap, but there are also some snippets from fake texts and letters, such as the one from Francis Bacon to Edmund Cordery, which I thought was a nice touch.

Blood, he discovers, gives vamps power, but it’s not nourishment. In other words, they don’t need to eat it for food. Also, only male vampires carry the ability to make more of their kind. Female vamps, even if they drink from guys (usually male lovers) don’t have the ability to turn them.

Noell’s journey to discover the root of vampirism leads him to Benin where he finds the Uruba people, which I assumed to be a variant spelling of Yoruba. They need to find a city called Adamawara where the African vamps, the elemi, originated. But they’re not exactly willing to give up their trade secrets, and give Noell a hell of a time trying to escape their clutches once he lands in them. Still, they’re nothing compared to Dragulya (Vlad the Impaler), who, suffice it to say, knows his way around torturing his victims, particularly those he wants information from.

For those familiar with Yoruba myths, beliefs, and concepts, they will recognize terms like Olorun and Shango (two great orishas, or major spirits, in Yoruba culture), but for those who don’t have a background or who aren’t up to speed on their Santeria, they might have a hard time following all the new terms.

By the time we get to the end, so much has changed for Noell. No longer is he the nervous monk that he was when the novel began. He’s also gotten over his aversion to vampires in more ways than one, and the journey leads him deeper into a sticky darkness that he can’t get off him no matter how hard he tries.

Although interest and with a lot of cool research, some of which the author has changed to suit the story’s purposes, I felt that most of the book is told through large info-dumpy sections of dialogue, which again, although they’re interesting and do show important story points conveyed much better than info-dumpy narrative, I felt it was a technique relied upon a bit too often.

Despite some of these factors, the book is highly enjoyable and will appeal to fans of historical fiction, vampires in the backdrop of historical fiction, vampire research, and stories that involve pirates, swashbuckling, Yoruba and African mythology. Definitely worth checking out, especially right before Halloween!