I Travel by Night
There’s a good reason Civil War veteran Trevor Lawson travels by night: he’s a vampire. Wounded at the Battle of Shiloh, he was bitten by the vampire LaRouge, and now, a quarter century later, he lives a tortured life, the humanity slowly draining out of him. His only hope: find LaRouge and kill her before he has completely turned from man to vampire. When a man begs Lawson to ransom his daughter from the clutches of a madman (a madman who, by the way, specifically required that Lawson deliver the ransom), Trevor hopes this is his chance to save himself. McCammon demonstrates once again—not that any proof was needed at this point—that he is one of the masters of the horror genre. The novel is brief but not thin. Lawson is a tragic hero, and his story is hauntingly sad. Subtext counts for a lot here: McCammon knows his readers will be familiar with vampire lore, and he knows that our imaginations will provide the dark atmosphere and the creeping terror, with only a few, well-chosen words to get us in the right frame of mind. A must for horror fans. --David Pitt