This is a sequel to Garton's spot-on Live Girls of 1987. Unfortunately it's more of a stain than a spot, as it spills out as an investigative procedural souring with predictability. As a summer read, however, it's damn, ah, lively.
Some Stephen King-like author wants to discover if vampires are real. He hires two detectives who find a hidden world of vampires living amongst us, socially structured quite similar to humanity but far more primeval. The club Live Girls in Times Square which was destroyed in a blast from the previous book, is referenced as a bloodsucker's bushwhacking paradise, creating a multitude of don't-wannabe vamps who treat it as an affliction and wear very heavy sunscreen and drink bottled blood. The two brought forth are Casey and Davey(1), working as screenwriters in Hollywood, speculatively the future scripters of True Blood, if they can survive this novel. When our investigators meet them, unwanted connections are made and the Brutals show up, abducting the two girls but leaving the guys for obvious plot reasons.
The Brutals. Ahh, the vampires of legendary familiarity. Full-bore sociopaths with fangs, a perchance for darkness and flying around on batwings(2). They've got a fleabag hotel in North Hollywood with 5 stories of locked rooms holding their blood drinking fountains, and they use them in the sex trade business until they look too emasculated and unappealing to their human and post-human customers. Immediately the two girls—Karen and Casey—get slotted for abusive porn filmwork. They are videoed being gang raped and savagely beaten by a dozen guys over and over again. Casey gets the worst of it, culminating when the Brutals send her severed head back to her husband(3). Karen is chosen by the queen Vampirella Anya as her personal sex toy.
Meanwhile, the guys are ramping up for an assault on the Royal Arms Hotel with MP5s and stun grenades. Fuck the silver bullets and wooden stakes; it's all about the volume of lead poured into these archfiends until they're a mound of gore. The NRA would be proud.
Once the plot gets spanked out of its seeking agenda, it takes off like a howling alley cat. The actions of the two mainplot groups—the vamps and their victims against the investigators and saviors—hook together in alternating syncopation toward the inevitable, big-bang finale. In fact, it reads more like a movie script out of its screenplay format, mainly because author Garton details most indiscriminate actions as if visualizing for the set designers and dialogue blockers, forestalling most use of metaphors and irony and their more evocative, innervational connections. A lot of it reads as filler, as in “he went to the sink and washed his plate and fork clean, then put them on a drain rack to dry. He dried his hands on a hand-towel tied to the handle of the refrigerator . . .”(p.76). However, this bare-ass approach does force the thriller action straight into your face immediately with inescapable captivation. Any subtextual message is absent, too, unless you see this as an apologue about teenage runaways starry-eyed with fame and fortune meeting their unjust rewards by being monetarily forced into the sex and/or the slave trade.
In conclusion, this is a passable Summer Read but doesn't contain that wildcat and vanguarding astonishment of Live Girls. Twenty years has softened the original ground of blood-and/as-semen vamp exploitation to the level of soft pornography. On that point, Night Life is lost in the crowded, mad rush to relocate to a trailer park in Bon Temps, Louisiana.
1) Davey Owens is blood-bitten in Live Girls and ends up being the hero who blows the club up. He pretty much repeats that feat here. I guess once bitten, twice shy doesn't apply.
2) There is really no reason for this transmuted affectation. Yeah, pulling Susie out of her convertible BMW as she enters the garage and flying away is a cool visual, but it also adds to the Groan Factor. Although, later finding your wife bunched up on the front door welcome mat as a massive gangbang bruise is quite impressive.
3) Author Garton cops out here. He gives us anal and gang rape scenes, plus lesbian and straight fuck peekaboos, but no decapitation scene, only its consequence. I mean, gorror is gorror, and these monsters are certainly capable of a genuine skull fuck, or, at least, some headless-corpse torso boning mayhem. Oh, come on, don't look at me that way! This is 21st Century, internet-addicted America, you chodas.
