"A memorable tale of redemption and the resiliency of the human spirit"
Byron Solsbury is one of the chosen, a being of the new
order. Brash and willful, he is also the ex-head of the
Ravens, Stargazers' elite security force. In a society that
doesn't easily tolerate disobedience from its citizenry,
Byron's checkered past and a penchant for insubordination
lead to his expulsion from the Ravens and puts him in the
doghouse with Stargazer powers-that-be. He has been spared
the death penalty for terminating another warrior but now
the Elders are calling in the favor. The Elders approach
him with an offer he can't refuse: infiltrate a Warm One
farm in Xanadu where a Stargazer has been found dead,
suspected murdered. He must squash the insurrection and
secure one of the Stargazers' major food supplies. What we learn in this tale of hubris and survival is
that "Stargazers" who are the master race and ruling class,
are what pre-apocalyptic society once referred to
as "vampires". The Warm Ones are the surviving humans who
have not evolved and upon whom the Stargazers feed and
subsist. Neither the Elders nor the ancient and timeless
mother of all Stargazers, the MoonQueen herself, can
foresee the error of their conceit until it is too late and
they have already set Byron loose in Xanadu. When the farm's doomed shaman, Medea--a young and
passionate Warm One female--leads Byron to, not only the
truth behind the death of a fellow Stargazer, but also his
own origins, Byron reverts to type. Since he can never
reclaim his stolen past, he goes for payback against the
MoonQueen in the only way possible for him, basically
signing his own death warrant, yet again, when he allies
himself with the Warm Ones in their uprising against the
Stargazers. Though this was a great cautionary story with a fully
realized and sensitive anti-hero half of an unusual and
quixotic pairing, it was not a romance by usual definition,
and not for the squeamish. However, if you can stick with
it and get past the necessarily graphic and gory scenes of
mutilation artfully dispersed throughout, it will assuredly
net you the ultimate literary payoff: a memorable tale of
redemption and the resiliency of the human spirit. Mr. Connor, a talented and first-time novelist, has
breathed fresh new life into the vampire genre with this
creative and thought-provoking debut.
Reviewed by Gracie McKeever
Posted March 16, 2003
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After living in the shadows for centuries vampires have
finally gained dominance over the Earth by instigating a
nuclear holocaust that has blotted out the sun. Humans are
now treated as animals, kept in concentration camp-like
farms. Byron, the Moon Queen's favorite "creation", is
assigned the task of stopping an insurrection at one of the
human farms. But while investigating a religious cult among
the humans, he begins to question his own reality. As he
digs deeper for the truth, he becomes a renegade outcast
among his own--and humanity's last chance for salvation.
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