ince 1978, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro has published over a dozen books chronicling the exploits of her vampiric hero Saint-Germain and those associated with him. This volume is the latest entry in the series. It covers the years 1845 to 1892 in the life of Madelaine de Montalia, a mere youth of a vampire at only 150 years old, focusing mainly on her time in America circa the Civil War. Saint-Germain himself appears only for a few pages toward the end of the book.
Madelaine, looking eternally 20, is an amateur scholar and researcher of sorts, an "antiquarian," if you will. She conceives of the project of studying Native American tribespeople, and so with a few caskets of the "native earth" she needs to survive, a huge sum of money transferred to American banks, some useful nostrums and philtres and her innate wits and supernatural talents, she sets out on a journey few white women—or white men, for that matter—before her have attempted: to live among the Amerindians and annotate their cultures. By 1855, she is back in civilization for a break, having taken quarters in San Francisco. There she meets the handsome and charismatic banker William Tecumseh Sherman. The pair soon fall in love, and Madelaine reveals her nature to Sherman, who is moderately shocked but not disinclined to continue as her lusty blood donor. While in San Francisco, Madelaine manages to use her healing abilities to save a woman's life and to ease Sherman's asthma. But soon she is on the road again.
Madelaine journeys across the West and South, learning much from the Zuni, the Havasupai, the Choctaw and other tribes, under their primitive and often deadly daily conditions. Various native guides and frontiersman aid her. But when the Civil War bursts upon her, she is living in the relative comfort of a household in Georgia. Trapped by the conflict, she will stay here for almost the entire war, becoming the legendary "French Angel" as she succors the wounded of both sides. Eventually, she and Sherman—now the renowned General Sherman of the history books—reunite in an explosive affirmation of their love.
When the war is over, Madelaine feels her time in the United States is up, and she returns to Europe. Many years pass before Sherman re-enters her life. Realizing the bond between them, Madelaine offers to make him a fellow immortal. Sherman's decision will either shatter or uplift her heart.
A picaresque romance without real fangs
In his recent book Midnight Mass, F. Paul Wilson complained about the vitiated presentation vampires receive in modern literature. No longer ravenous monsters symbolic of mankind's baser urges, they are super-sensitive, misunderstood loners with good intentions and fine aesthetics. I fear Wilson would hold up Yarbro's latest novel as an example of just what he's denouncing.
Madelaine de Montalia is the nicest vampire you have ever met. A veritable Florence Nightingale, she has to be pushed pretty hard even to lash out in self defense, as she does against a fellow named Chance Howard when Howard tries to force his attentions on her. Her necessary blood-takings do not automatically confer vampiric status on the victims—according to Yarbro's version of myth, that happens only if a mortal himself ingests vampire blood—and the love-bites are portrayed as kind of hypnotic lullabye experiences that confer pleasant erotic dreams on the donors. (See the instance on page 136, for example.) There's nothing scary about Madelaine, and in fact, for 90 percent of the time she might just as well be a mortal heroine of exceptional qualities.
Having adjusted to this manner of portrayal—and Yarbro does succeed in bringing Madelaine's character to life in a rounded fashion—the reader will find plenty to keep herself interested in Madelaine's adventures. But the interest is in the historical re-creationism and the love story, not the supernatural. Yarbro has done excellent work in depicting this period in America's history, filling her story with convincing period detail and much anthropological heft. One particularly impressive accomplishment is the speech patterns of her characters, impeccable in Victorian syntax and vocabulary.
As for the love story, Sherman and Madelaine do exhibit a genuine chemistry together, and the various separations and trials they must undergo do tug at the heartstrings. Their couplings have a certain erotic charge as well.
Still and all, the book generally drifts in an episodic fashion without any shapeliness to the plot. We never learn what there is in Madelaine's backstory to make her have such interest in Native Americans. And when she's sated, she's sated, and moves on blithely to something else. This combination of perseverance and flightiness is perhaps the most extra-human quality about her.
