Special Deputy Arkeley thought he'd pretty much ended the vampire problem back in 1983, when he exterminated a nest of the critters and put the sole survivor, one Justinia Malvern, a vampire predating the American Revolution, into prison. With Malvern in jail, an object of scientific study protected by law from further punishment, incidents of vampirism vanish ...

Until, 20 years later, a routine traffic stop by Pennsylvania State Trooper Laura Caxton reveals the existence of a new generation of bloodsuckers. Arkeley, pulled out of mothballs and put on the case, takes Caxton as a somewhat unwilling partner and begins vampire-hunting, all the while looking for proof that Malvern is behind the outbreak—proof that would remove her protections and allow him to execute her, as he has dreamed of doing for 20 years.

But Caxton and Arkeley are also being hunted, and not only by vampires. Wellington's vamps use half-deads to do their grunt work: think zombified Renfields. The half-deads associated with the new crop of vamps seem attracted to Caxton for some reason ... and Arkeley is not above using her as bait, despite the risks this poses to Caxton and her lover, Deanna, who live—where else?—in an isolated farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania.

Definitely not Anne Rice's vampires

Wellington's vamps are no dainty blood-sippers obsessed with philosophy, sex and fashion. Their dentition is more sharklike than what we're used to seeing in vampires, as are their dining habits. When these vamps get a hankering for blood, they just rip off heads, arms, legs, whatever, and suck the life juice down. And when all juiced up, they are well-nigh invulnerable. The most debilitating wounds heal in seconds; their sole weak point—provided you can get to it, and you probably can't—is the heart.

As in the Monster novels, Wellington proves adept with gore. Here there are a number of gross-out tours de force, with the stand-out being an early scene in which Arkeley is a witness to, and very nearly a participant in, a literal bloodbath. And again, the action is nonstop, the pace relentless and absorbing. This is a testament to the novel's serial origins online, where Wellington offered it, like its predecessors, for free (this despite the recent Luddite rant against this practice by SFWA vice president Howard V. Hendrix, which doesn't seem to have harmed Wellington's, or anyone else's, publication chances or sales). But the sly humor and wacky inventiveness that enlivened Wellington's earlier books is largely absent from 13 Bullets.

No doubt this partially due to the chilly presence of Arkeley, a character who makes Robert E. Howard's gloomy, angst-ridden monster slayer Solomon Kane look like a happy-go-lucky day tripper. Arkeley has sacrificed his entire life on the altar of vengeance against Malvern, yet the law he rigidly adheres to forbids him from claiming that vengeance. This has left him one seriously warped individual.

Caxton is a more interesting character. A female cop in a bastion of male chauvinism who happens to be a lesbian into the bargain, Caxton serves as a kind of counterweight to Arkeley's relentless gloom and doom even as she is slowly infected by it ... and by other, more nefarious, things.

Wellington's vamps create half-deads by sucking their blood and bringing them back to life, but it doesn't seem that vampires themselves are propagated this way. The novel is teasingly ambiguous on this point, but it seems that vampirism is a psychic virus, transmitted through a mixture of hypnotism and telepathy, and operates by inducing its victims to commit suicide. Once infected in this way by a vamp, the victim retains some trace of that vamp in the back of his brain, whispering corruption.

It will give away nothing of importance to reveal that Caxton must fight against these twin infections, from without and within, and it's her struggle to remain human, to remain alive in more than just the literal sense of the word as her world dissolves into a horrific nightmare, that pulled me into 13 Bullets.