Bit of a sucker punch

In his first book for adults, Sedgwick creates a gripping narrative reminiscent of Hammond Innes and Dan Brown.

Marcus Sedgwick's novel chases vampires across Europe after the Second World War. iStockphoto.com

"I've chased him for 20 years, and across countless miles, and though often I was running, there have been many times when I could do nothing but sit and wait. Now I am only desperate for it to be finished." So says Charles Jackson, an English medical researcher who is on the trail of his nemesis, the diabolical Verovkin, on the first page of A Love Like Blood.

Rewind two decades and we find a much younger and saner Jackson in Paris towards the end of the Second World War.

The 25-year-old Royal Army Medical Corps captain, who is attached to a field hygiene unit tasked with digging latrines and finding safe sources of drinking water, is on R&R in the recently liberated French capital recovering from the horrors of D-Day: “Scurrying on to the Normandy sand amid a German bombardment was not how I had imagined my first trip abroad.”

Peering into a dark and abandoned German bunker during a day out with a fellow officer, Jackson witnesses a horrific act of madness: “What I saw there I saw only for the length of time it takes a single match to burn down, and yet it changed my life … Crouched on the ground, just a little way away, was a man. His hair was short, dark, swept to one side, and from his mouth blood dribbled on to the woman’s once white blouse. His hand was on her left shoulder, holding back her clothing to expose a long and fresh wound from which blood flowed freely, and from which, I understood at once, he had been drinking.”

Vampire fiction fans expecting a spooky tale of the supernatural may be a little disappointed with the young-adult fiction writer Marcus Sedgwick’s first foray into the grown-up world. As the title strongly suggests, there is plenty of vampiric drama from beginning to end, but the bloodsucker in this case, unlike Bram Stoker’s arch-fiend Dracula and countless other creatures of the night that have emerged in more recent years, is a mere mortal who happens to have a rather acute case of what is now known as Renfield’s syndrome – clinical vampirism. In other words, he really likes the taste of blood – other people’s blood.

This is, above all else, a psychological thriller, albeit one spattered with enough of the red stuff to make cannibal black pudding for the Chinese army.

Badly shaken and wondering if perhaps he had imagined it all, Jackson returns to England and becomes something of a prodigy in the field of, you guessed it, haematology – the study of blood.

After being elevated to the rank of consultant at an unusually early age, the ambitious young medic returns to Paris in 1951 to speak at an international conference on leukaemia. There, much to his horror, he is reacquainted with a demon from his past in a crowded brasserie:

“I knew at once it was the man from the hole. He was turned in profile to me, sitting across a small table from a young woman, in her early twenties I guessed. I remember that for a moment I questioned myself, told myself I was being fanciful, wanted to dream up this powerful coincidence in an attempt to destroy the ennui that pervaded me … but it was, unquestionably, him. My first impulse was to run …”

And so begins a long, violent, trans-European – and generally quite entertaining – cat-and-mouse game. To reveal any more of the narrative would do readers a disservice.

A Love Like Blood is a taut thriller that has, in terms of tone, pace and structure, much in common with the novels of the late British author Hammond Innes, whose protagonists, like Jackson, are ordinary people who have suddenly been thrust into extreme situations by circumstance.

However, Blood, grisly, dark and perverse as it is, is far more likely to find its way on to the bookshelves of fans of the exceptionally popular but critically unacclaimed mystery novel The Da Vinci Code. Dan Brown’s readers will no doubt be attracted to the European travelogue aspect of the narrative, as well as Sedgwick’s exploration of the psychology, mythology and theological symbology surrounding that most vital of all fluids.

Paul Muir is the deputy editor of The Review.