When reviewing a vampire novel, it would be all too easy—and rather tempting—to begin with a lengthy diatribe railing against the current state of vampire fiction, how that damned Stephenie Meyer and her sparkling blood suckers have dragged the genre down from the rather elevated status it once enjoyed. Fun, yes, but not entirely true. The genre had, in fact, found itself riddled with cliches long before The Twilight Saga came along. Pouting pretty boys had been all the rage for several decades due, no doubt, to the success of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles of which, I have to admit, I was a fan—the first three or four books, at least—and still am in spite of the wave of copycats that came in its wake. Among those copycats, I am sure there are a few worthy of comparison to the originals that inspired them, a smaller number that may have even surpassed them. Be that as it may, there reaches a point when enough is definitely more than enough. When discerning readers demand a bit more originality. Fortunately, there are always writers willing to push the limits of established boundaries. To create something outside the status quo. Something original. When I first sat down to read Robert S. Wilson’s Shining in Crimson, I couldn’t help but wonder at the narrative in which I would soon immerse myself. Copycat or something altogether different? Something original? There was only one way to find out . . . .

In the book’s first chapter we meet Hank Evans, a man who is having a particularly bad day and a night that’s about to get even worse. He and a group of fellow Penitents, criminals who have violated one or more of the American Empire’s morality laws, are being trucked out to the city of Necropolis, a place where no Penitent has ever survived the night. Because, you see, Necropolis is where the vampires live. Once there, Hank sets out on foot, alone, ready to face whatever horrors are about to come his way. He does what anyone in this situation would do, I suppose, and sets off in search of supplies, looks for some way of defending himself. Along the way he runs afoul of a type of vampire we later learn is called an Ancestor, a somewhat mindless creature capable of flight and, of course, is filled with a terrible hunger for human blood. In a confrontation with the creature, Hank manages to not only survive but to achieve victory. After incapacitating the Ancestor he partakes of its immortal blood, discovers great—although temporary—physical power and his best defense against the many dangers of the night shrouded city.

It isn’t long before Hank finds himself in another potentially lethal confrontation, this time with another type of vampire, one of the more human variety. Driven by a greater intelligence and an altogether different motivation behind its attack, Hank finds himself in a much more desperate situation this time around. Thanks to the Ancestor blood, though, he manages to survive once again. It isn’t until he befriends a vampire named Ishan, head of the Council that rules Necropolis, that it seems likely that he may, in fact, survive the night, although simple survival is far from Hank’s solitary goal here. He needs to get out of the city and return to the human world where his young son has been imprisoned and is being punished for his father’s crime, a course of action with its own list of perils.

Overall, I rather enjoyed Shining in Crimson. The future society that punishes its criminals by exiling them to a city overrun by vampires is an interesting concept, as are the different kinds of vampires inhabiting the place. Hank makes for a likeable enough protagonist, and one cannot help but feel for the tribulations his son must endure. The Ancestors are sufficiently creepy in their mindless bloodlust while the human vampires and the scheming among their ranks are enough to keep the reader’s attention and help push the plot forward. Shining in Crimson does (inevitably?) draw from the wealth of vampire novels that have come before. But there is enough untrodden ground here to draw in fans of the genre. Robert S. Wilson shows a lot of promise here with this debut novel. Now it’s time to see where that promise will take him.