he historical timeline of Wilson's new book deviates from ours around the point when the Berlin Wall fell. In Wilson's universe, that event signaled the mass uprising out of their ancient seclusion of a race of vampires. Flowing out of Eastern Europe, the vampires quickly colonized all of their home continent, then easily swarmed the rest of the world, due to their geometric rate of multiplication. (Each drained victim, in the classic manner, becomes a vampire, who in turn begets more vampires.) All this action is backstory, however, for when the novel opens the undead have arrived at America, the last bastion of human resistance. Easily conquering the East Coast, the invaders are temporarily sated and get busy consolidating their hold on the United States. Our focus is a few small towns on the New Jersey coast, and the Empire State Building, which the vampires have made their HQ.
In Lakewood, N.J., two of the human holdouts against the vampires are Rabbi Zev Wolpin and ex-nun Carole Hanarty. Brave as they are individually, they are unable to rally the community of huddled, frightened humans to resist the vampires and their turncoat human helpers. That job requires a charismatic figure such as the ex-priest Joseph Cahill. But Cahill is drinking himself to distraction, having been previously drummed out of the priesthood on trumped-up pedophile charges. Risking his life to travel to Cahill's current residence, Rabbi Wolpin manages to convince him to return to Lakewood and lead the human resistance.
Once back in town, aided by Carole and Cahill's niece Lacey, Father Cahill succeeds in thwarting some of the worst depredations of the vampires, particularly the vampire who was once his superior, Father Palmeri. Carole, in her own deadly way, has become a scourge to the human "cowboys," or "Vichy," who guard the vampires during the daylight hours while the undead sleep. But just as the humans' prospects are starting to look hopeful, Father Cahill is kidnapped and brought to Manhattan to meet Franco, the leader of the vampires. There Cahill will be subjected to a strange fate before being returned to Lakewood. Once home, he must re-earn the trust of Carole and Lacey before the war can continue. But can Cahill trust even himself, in his altered form?
The children of the night done right
F. Paul Wilson is up-front about his artistic goals in this novel: "Midnight Mass was born out of my dissatisfaction with the tortured romantic aesthetes who have been passing lately for vampires." In other words, Wilson is seeking to drag vampires back into the nitre'd crypt where they belong. His undead are concerned with only one thing—as Franco reveals to Cahill—and that's blood. Power, sex, love, cultural matters, all are meaningless to a vampire. These beings are simply killing machines who utilize the remnants of their human intelligence to perfect a more efficient abattoir out of the world.
This conceptualization and portrayal leaves Wilson free to stage grandiose slaughters and battles without a lot of moral hand-wringing. As Cahill tells Lacey, "[T]his is a war ... like never before. In past wars, the enemy gets propagandized into monsters, subhuman creatures. In this war, we don't have to do that. They are subhuman creatures." This is not to say that all human sentiment or ethical dilemmas are missing from the book. All the human characters do have initial qualms about the massacres they are forced to enact in order to survive. But the reader doesn't have to dither, and so we get to just sit back and enjoy Wilson's deft Hammer-Films-style gorefest. In a way, it's analogous to the manner in which Neo and Trinity can blamelessly off hundreds of Matrix slaves without alienating the viewers.
Wilson consolidates the core traits of vampires across various films and novels into a coherent whole that explains their actions. He extrapolates from this base to conceive of such institutions as cattle farms where new human feedstock is raised. He almost ventures into science-fictional territory by questioning the physics and chemistry of such beings, but stops short of providing any hard-science rationales for their existence, leaving the book firmly in the fantasy camp. Likewise, while religious icongraphy and beliefs play their part, Wilson draws the line at invoking any actual deity or angelic or satanic presences at work. In his universe, God is mysteriously silent.
Painting with broad strokes in the manner of his predecessors in this genre, Wilson employs a lot of stereotypes, from avaricious Wall Street brokers to Jackie-Mason-style Jews to Old Sod Irish nuns to druggy biker mercenaries to Eurotrash undead. But he also imparts enough individuality to his creations to make us feel along with them in their agonies and triumphs. This book rockets along like a streamlined hearse. And, apparently, it's already made its way to film. Visit www.lionsgatefilms.com to learn more.
