Review: The setting, the characters, the blood!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 03 28, 2012
There are enough details in Axel Taiari's A Light to Starve By to fill up a novel-length work. That Taiari manages to work all these details into a story of less than 30 pages is astonishing. Usually in works of such length there is one big idea or one big reveal wrapped in filler. Not so with A Light to Starve By. There are fresh revelations on nearly every page and even when there aren't, there are amazing prose and descriptions of a near-future Paris that paint scenes in acid-etched detail.The story concerns an unnamed vampire protagonist who, along with other members of his kind, face a sort of supernatural holocaust. Humans have developed a vaccine that makes their blood poisonous to vampires, werewolves and other supernatural beings. It seems the only choices available to blood-drinkers are either to move to less populated areas of the world where the vaccine has not yet reached or to form "clans" and bargain with a new sort of drug dealer for untainted human blood.For some, the story will seem derivative of Charlie Huston's Joe Pitt vampire series. While true that both share similarities (including a high level of violence), A Light to Starve By is far darker. Huston gives Joe Pitt at least of glimmer of hope, but Taiari's vampire knows his world is rapid folding in on him. His only real connection (and it's tenuous at best) is to a human woman he once loved. Night after night he returns to watch the light in her windows. But one night those lights remain dark. The Hunters, a group within the Catholic Church who hunt down and kill vampires and their human sympathizers, don't know what they have gotten themselves into as the vampire plots his revenge.Even days after I read A Light to Starve By there are scenes and settings and characters that still haunt me. That's the mark of an author who has full command of his art. It also left me wanting to know what came before and after the details described in Taiari's story. I hope he revisits these characters sometime soon.