Review by Oliver Longden
Blood Fugue is one of those strange novels that falls somewhere between a set of existing horror tropes without ever quite managing to capture the essence of any of them. Jimmy Kerrigan is a reclusive writer with a profound fear of the dark living in an isolated mountain community in America. The town has a secret: it has for many years been prey to a blood-born infection that turns those infected into vampiric creatures with the periodic need to drain other humans for sustenance. Over the course of the novel the infection, the fugue of the title, explodes out of its precarious balance and begins to threaten the world beyond the borders of the town. As the infection spreads and more and more people fall victim to the disease, Kerrigan is forced to confront his own background and discovers that he has a sacred birthright that enables him to fight the monsters created by the fugue. What follows is a desperate race against time as Kerrigan battles to understand his own superhuman powers and save those close to him before the town is completely destroyed by the disease.
Joseph D’Lacey is not a bad writer. He’s just not a good writer either. Blood Fugue is a book that is constantly on the verge of being really enjoyable but fails because it never really decides what kind of book it wants to be. On the one hand there’s a classic isolationist story told from multiple perspectives about terrible things happening in a remote location with plenty of claret to be spilled along the way. This fails because, when you have a protagonist with super powers, other elements of the story are just window dressing, and there’s no surprises when characters without the necessary superpowers die. Obviously they’re going to die, they don’t have super powers. On the other hand there’s a story about a guy with super powers fighting evil, which is more an action adventure plot than a horror plot. We don’t tend to be afraid of things much when there’s a guy with super powers in the mix because we know he can stop the bad guys. Predator is a great film but it isn’t a horror movie; we all know the Predator has no chance against Arnie, there’s no question whether Arnie is going to win.
The action adventure side of Blood Fugue fails because there simply isn’t enough action. Kerrigan spends too much time wandering about being confused when he should be kicking the hell out of vampires. He’s unhelpfully conflicted about the idea of killing vampires too which would be fine if this was a deep character study but, thanks to the author including large sections from the perspective of disposable supporting characters, we don’t spend enough time with Kerrigan to really understand his doubts and conflicts. It really feels like Kerrigan ought to be an action hero; he’s got a whole bunch of magic stuff to help him beat the shit out of vampires, but he steadfastly refuses to go apeshit and start killing things. Instead he comes across as some kind of heavily armed hippy. I wanted to punch him in the throat.
None of the issues with Blood Fugue would have been insurmountable had the novel been written with gusto, but sadly D’Lacey’s style tends towards the restrained rather than the Grand Guignol. There are metamorphosis sequences that are begging to be slathered in adverbs and adjectives but end up being described like flat pack furniture being put together. It’s not exactly bad writing, technically D’Lacey is much sounder than a lot of the trash that gets published, but too often it doesn’t evoke anything except Ikea assembly instructions. When he does reach for the purple prose he ends up describing a man’s penis as “his beating totem,” an image so monstrously bad I could probably write a 500 word review of just those three words. Blood Fugue isn’t a bad novel by any means, and if you like early James Herbet, Shaun Hutson, Richard Laymon or Guy N. Smith you may find D’Lacey has something to offer, but people who like their horror extreme and overwritten are advised to look elsewhere for their fix.
Blood Fugue is available now from Proxima Books.