The Radleys - Matt Haig

How well do you know your neighbours?  Well, as it would turn out, none of the Radley's neighbours knew the people along the street as well as they thought they did.  Tell tale clues, such as family dogs howling in distress whenever one of the Radley children tried to pet them, closed curtains on a sunny day, unnaturally pale skin and a diet high in rare meat., were missed.  True the Radley boy, Rowan was stigmatised as a freak  at school, but then that was likely to happen to anybody who was a little bit different.

But however much Peter and Helen Radley tried to follow the rules laid out in the Abstainer's Handbook, tension was always simmering just below the surface of family life and the pressures of not letting the kids know who or what they really are were steadily building towards boiling point.  This fragile balance was bound to be broken at some point and when daughter Clara was overwhelmed by adolescent hormonal rage when she was attacked by a boy from her school at a teenage party all hell was let loose. Literally.

Helen and Peter's pretence that they are a normal family was finally blown wide open and Peter had to act decisively to save his daughter.  But now the explanations had to begin and the truth faced, they were vampires not humans, and their children had to be told.for their own protection.  But there were more secrets  lurking in the background than the fact that they were a family of vampires, and when desperation leads to Peter's non-abstaining, hard living brother Will Radley being asked to help them, there is even more at stake than being revealed as blood sucking monsters.

Little do they know that Will has stirred up so much trouble and talk that he has lost the protection of the vampire community and is now a legitimate target for the secret police unit that hunts down and eliminates renegade vampires.  Little do they know that Eve, the girl at school that Rowan Radley has fallen head over heels for, lost her mother to a vampire attack and that the killer was none other than Will Radley.

So while Peter and Helen try to do everything they can to protect their precious daughter from the consequences of her blood-fuelled outburst, they are unaware that there are other dangers closing in on them.  Will Eve's frightened, grief-stricken father succeed in his plans to destroy Will Radley and the vampire family?  Will the police take reprisals against the family in the quest to take out Will Radley?

The explosive that threatens the very foundation of Peter and Helen's marriage will have to be faced before they can move forward and build a new future.  But who will survive?  How will the kid's take the news that they really are freaks? And will there be any happy ever afters?

After all the Hollywoodesque American vampire novels it was very interesting to read a British vampire horror and one that is set in suburbia.  This is no florid Gothic horror, but a tale of a family trying to fit in and be ordinary in an average British town.  But to thrive we all need to acknowledge our own natures and honour them, or eventually we will rebel. And as the Radleys find out, this can lead to tragedy and upheaval.

So The Radleys by Matt Haig is one to read while drinking a glass of deep, ruby red wine.  Put some extra garlic in your spaghetti bolognese if you are frightened and nail a crucifix of two to the wall.

The Passage - Justin Cronin

I have to say that for some reason all the publicity and hype about 'The Passage' by Justin Cronin managed to pass me by and I only became aware of the book when I found it on the shelves of the Horror section of my local library.  Cronin had started to write his epic novel telling the story of a virus induced vampire apocalypse in 2007 and says that he put together the story on afternoon jogs around his local streets with his young daughter Iris on her bicycle.  What happened after that is every author's dream, as when his agent started touting the novel around publishers, it triggered a frenzied, intense bidding war. The rights to publish 'The Passage' were eventually secured by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, for $3.75 along with two other books to complete the trilogy and the film rights were bought for $1.75.  Wow!

So one of the first things to be aware of before you dive into 'The Passage' is that it is a long book, the paperback copy I have is 963 pages long, so not one that even the fastest of readers is going to be able to gulp down in an afternoon.  But it would be the perfect book for long, lazy afternoons on that sun lounger or to while away the hours on a long haul flight.  It is also, to my mind, a book that invites comparisons, the most immediate being on to Stephen King's incomparable 'The Stand'.  It follows the same story line of the build up to the break down and end of the world as we know it and then the story of some of the survivors, albeit in 'The Passage' the story picks up after a hundred year break from when the apocalypse hit. It also reminded me a bit of the 2002 film 'Reign of Fire' where the world is terrorised from the skies by fire-breathing dragons, especially the scenes involving teaching the children and keeping them safe.

So what was the momentous, tragic event that all but destroys human civilisation in 'The Passage'?  Again it follows a relatively common theme, there is a top secret government experiment being conducted in the USA where prisoners who had been condemned to death were being injected with a virus that had been discovered in South America.  Ironically, the experiment was designed to find a way for humans to stay alive forever, and the virus changed the men into a type of preternaturally strong and quick vampire-like creature that never died. The experiment starts to fall apart when they introduce a strange six year old girl called Amy into the programme; the test subjects, who are known as virals or dracos, start infiltrating the dreams and minds of their captors and break free.  The devastation is immediate and catastrophic and in a few short months the fabric of American society has totally crumbled and the dark hours of the night are no longer safe.

We are then taken to the Colony, which comprises of a small band of humans that has managed to survive and scrape out a living for a hundred years after the advent of the virals.  They survive because they have have powerful lights that protect them during the hours of darkness, but they lead a very precarious existence.  The one thing that most of them do not know is that one day the lights will go out, as the batteries that feed them power deteriorate.  The tight-knit community of the Colony is thrown into disarray when one of its young watchers, Theo Jaxon, is taken by the virals and a strange young girl appears out of nowhere.

The inhabitants of the Colony do not know it at the time, but this young girl who causes them so much unease and is the trigger for quarrels and violence, is the key to their salvation and is the same Amy that was held in the secret government bunker a hundred years ago.  So it falls on young Peter, Theo's brother, to lead a small group out into the dangerous outside world that they had never before explored, to find the key to the mysterious Amy, to find some other humans to help them with their batteries and assuage Peter's nagging feeling that his brother was still alive out there somewhere.

So will the small band of brave humans be able to survive the dark nights out in the open, when the powerful virals range freely hunting for blood?  And will they find that they are not alone and that other groups of humans have survived?  And most importantly, will finding out the truth about Amy, give them the key to destroying the virals and reclaiming their world once again?

It's a long book so you will need more than lunch to keep you going.  It is the kind of book where you get really involved in the characters and you will probably pick your favourites and root for them to survive.  There are some very sad bits however, so chocolate and lashings of tea are called for.  It really seems to be a book about how you keep going and keep the human spirit alive, when it seems that you are up against impossible odds. A book about how you maintain hope in the future in a world of diminishing resources and increasing dangers.  A book that shows that we all need someone or something to follow or believe in; and in 'The Passage' that something is a strange young girl called Amy and an unsure, struggling young man called Peter.

The next instalment of the trilogy 'The Twelve' is due out on 18th December 2012 - a book about the apocalypse published so close to the date of 21st December that some say will be the end of the world? Marketing or synchronicity I wonder?

Broken - Kelley Armstrong

If you are a fan of Buffy, Angel or Torchwood, you will love the books of Kelley Armstrong. I suppose they could be described as supernatural horror or supernatural fantasy fiction. They are action-packed, have a bit of gore and can be very funny. The action centres around a Werewolf pack and a witch called Paige. Throw in some sorcerers, a few vampires and the odd necromancer and you have a rollicking romp that weaves between our world and that of that of the supernatural.

Broken takes up the story where pregnant werewolf Elena goes to Toronto to retrieve Jack The Ripper's 'From Hell' letter. What should have been a simple theft goes badly awry, and opens a portal that goes from Toronto to Victorian London and literally all hell is let loose. Cue infected rats, devious vampires and zombies until one of the werewolf pack has to risk their life to get the portal closed again.

Not really scary, but snuggle down on a comfy sofa with a bowl of nachos and sour cream and a large mug of hot chocolate!