Rating: 
Summary: Good vampire gross out
Review: With "The Light at the End," Skipp and Specter create a down and dirty vampire story on the streets of the big city. Though not as good as King's "Salem's Lot" or Robert McCammon's "They Thirst," it still beats Anne Rice's wimpy interview with a vampire series by a mile. Gross and engrossing, this is not your grandfather's vampire story.
Rating:
Summary: Good vampire gross out
Review: With "The Light at the End," Skipp and Specter create a down and dirty vampire story on the streets of the big city. Though not as good as King's "Salem's Lot" or Robert McCammon's "They Thirst," it still beats Anne Rice's wimpy interview with a vampire series by a mile. Gross and engrossing, this is not your grandfather's vampire story.
Rating: 
Summary: Kudos to Stealth Press for bringing this one back!
Review: You know you're getting older when all your favorite songs are labeled oldies, the sports figures you admired are playing in "Old Timers Day" games, and some of the books you've read are now considered "classics." It's distressing to realize you're not immune to the passage of time, and also that your prior perceptions about what was worthwhile might have been misguided, if not outright wrong. The flip side of this particular coin is rereading the favorites of your youth and finding that they still stand up. In recent years I've had that experience with many of Stephen King's earlier works. This past spring, I experienced it with the new Stealth Press hardcover reprint of Craig Skipp and John Spector's The Light At The End. For those of you who aren't familiar with this work, a brief summary is in order. The book focuses on two characters, punk/goth vampire Rudy Pasko, and the man who has vowed to kill him, the aptly named Joseph Hunter. Rudy, a jerk and a loser in life, gains his vampiric powers by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, stumbling upon a grisly subway massacre perpetrated by an evil ancient entity. Sired merely to amuse that entity, Rudy starts to groove on his new powers, using them to push back against a world he's always hated. The massacre, coupled with Rudy's high profile activities, brings him to the attention of Hunter, a hulking, gruff, compulsive do-gooder looking for something to hit after the death of his beloved mother. Their anger brings them into conflict, and also drives the horrific events to come. And they are horrific, even if they seem a little tamer to me due to the passage of time and to changes in my perception of what should be labeled "extreme." In 1986 The Light at the End stood at the center of the then-raging debate of splatterpunk v. quiet horror (thank goodness we all realized the genre was big enough to include works from all points in the spectrum -- now if we could only stop talking about whether horror is dead, thriving, comatose or irrelevant). Skipp and Spector, striding through the horror community like the rock stars they emulated, championed a more visceral, high energy, in-your-face kind of horror than that to which we were accustomed, pushing out at the boundaries. They had their progenitors of course: folks like Robert Bloch, Stephen King, Richard Laymon, Jack Ketchum and the young upstart Clive Barker (whose "The Midnight Meat Train" seems to have inspired Light's grisly opening sequence). This book, considered with works such as S. P. Somtow's Vampire Junction, seems in hindsight to have been almost a seminal influence on later writers. One could make the case that the stylish Light made splatterpunk more acceptable, paving the way for writers as diverse as David Schow, Nancy Collins, Poppy Z. Brite, Christopher Golden, Ray Garton, Rex Miller and Edward Lee, giving them permission to go over the top in their own writing (although, in Garton's case, it may just have validated over the top work he'd already published, like Seductions). It was a no holds barred style of storytelling that has trickled down to movies and television, as evidenced by the work of folks like Joss "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" Whedon, whose character Spike bears more than a passing resemblance to Rudy. This was and remains a swift paced, high-impact book, long on action, but also on character development -- Rudy's anger is tangible, as is Hunter's grief. The supporting cast is well developed, and the New York City backdrop is effective -- Skipp and Spector's New York vividly captured much of America's perception of the city as a cesspool. Yes, they do show signs of their relative inexperience at the time (for instance, a number of chapters end with annoying tag lines like, "That was the last time they would see him alive"), but these are easily overlooked when compared to the overall quality of the narrative. This book can be enjoyed by "old farts" and "whippersnappers" alike, either reliving fond memories or creating new ones. Kudos to Stealth Press for bringing it back in this handsome hardcover.
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