Author: Gabrielle Faust
Cover Artist: Wojciech Zwolinski
Publisher: Immanion Press
Binding: Paperback
Publication Date: April 2008
Eternal Vigilance: From Deep Within the Earth is the first book in Gabrielle Faust’s Eternal Vigilance series, which could be roughly described as post-apocalyptic vampire fiction. It’s not quite like any other vampire fiction I’ve read (and I’ve read my share), and that was, for me, the book’s greatest strength. Faust in many ways stuck to the traditional vampire canon–they are immortal, they feed on human blood, they cannot go out in the sunlight–but she also included a legend of their creation that goes back to ancient days and is being tested by the human conflicts at the time of the book.
Specifically, it is set about a hundred years from now, in a world that has been re-worked by war and the global takeover by a shadowy, seemingly all-powerful and nearly omniscient regime. Human society has been stripped of most technology, except for the members of this organization who thrive in a compound of the most advanced technology of all, and the average person’s life has gone back to the Hobbesian model: short, nasty, and brutish.
The vampire Tynan awakes to this brave new world from a sleep that was supposed to be eternal. He had gone to ground just before this last world war, and can find little of the familiar in this new society. Vampires have been “outed” so he no longer has to hide what he is from humans, but this in turn makes him a potential target, as the new regime seems determined to exterminate vampires. Tynan is not just any vampire, either: he was a philosophical leader for many of his kind, until he began to doubt his own teachings; and he is the only vampire whose emotions seem to heighten as the centuries pass, instead of dim. So he is both extraordinary and universally loathed by his own kind and fearful humans alike.
Into this backdrop comes the threat of an ancient power the regime is attempting to reawaken. Tynan must sift through the lies and manipulations from his creator and the various rebel factions the vampires have aligned themselves with in order to decide for himself whether he can help those who look to him as their savior…and whether he wants to save any of them at all. Including himself….
So, I am split on how I feel about this book after having read it. In the first place, I have a soft spot for vampire fiction, and in the second, I have a soft spot for dystopian futures, and this book has both of those elements. Superficially it sounded like it might be similar to Robin McKinley’s Sunshine, which I really loved, so I thought I’d give it a try for that reason as well (note: it’s not really anything like Sunshine). I really wanted to like this book, and it was an interesting idea…but it had problems. Some of them are probably particular to my sensibilities as an editor and not to the average reader; you can judge for yourself whether the issues I bring up will be deal-breakers for you.
One of my two main issues was that Faust seemed like she was playing puppetmaster. Tynan’s reactions were not always logical (either in the sense of actual logic, or the expected emotional reaction) but neither were they sufficiently alien to demonstrate that he wasn’t human. They seemed more orchestrated than anything, that she needed him to be in X frame of mind when Y happened to him, so she put him there whether or not it made sense. This made some of the pivotal scenes frustrating for me as a reader, because I couldn’t quite follow his emotional leaps. If the function of this style was to demonstrate how fractured and illogical his mind was, then I think the story would have been better served without any attempt to explain or justify his reactions.
The other big thing was that Tynan was a vampire that things happened to. He didn’t make a whole lot of decisions or take a lot of responsibility for his actions, despite his claims to have done so. The entire book is one thing happening to him after another–he was not proactive at all, but yet throughout he was also kind of emo and whiny about how hard he had it. It reminded me of the movie The Good Girl, and Jennifer Aniston’s character’s assessment of both The Catcher in the Rye and then the story Jake Gyllenhaal’s character wrote for her: “It was about a boy, who was put upon,” and, “It was about a girl, who was put upon.” At times I felt like this book was about a vampire, who was put upon. By the end Tynan does man up and actually make a decision, so I assume the whole was supposed to build to this huge moment when he finally takes control of his fate. But perhaps there might have been a way to do so that still allowed me to connect more with him as a character? Maybe not. I did feel an inordinate sense of relief when he finally decided to act, so in that sense the tactic was effective.
Finally, two smaller issues that are probably specific to my knowledge of the book’s setting and my own tendency to overanalyze rhetoric. As to the first, the fact that the story was set in a bombed-out Austin (Texas) was a mixed bag for me (I graduated from UT). On the one hand, it made it much more visual than normal for me–I could easily picture the scenes being described because I could make a guess as to exactly which street or even building Tynan was looking at. On the other hand, I know too many people from Austin and not really from anywhere else who subscribe to the particular philosophy blithely tossed out as inexplicable truth by Tynan (a philosophy that might make more conservative readers roll their eyes)…and also who use patchouli, which came up as a scent from like four or five different people. But maybe that was the only remaining scent, or the only one strong enough to overcome the scent of bodies washed only once a week?
As to the second, the writing itself was…disjointed. There were some obvious contradictions (my favorite was a “humid desert night”) and some places where the words sounded pretty and poetic and profound, but on deeper reflection seemed to have little meaning (“…how easy to lose myself in the new physical manifestation of all that is philosophical”–maybe I’m just an idiot, but what does that even mean?). But there were other places where the style was really great. Faust chose to use an adjective-rich, colloquial style of narration, and that, at least, was employed consistently throughout the book. In some parts the prose flowed clean and dark, and the hypnotic poeticism of the language seemed comprehensible and inevitable at once. It was just not as consistent as I would have liked.
What I saw most in this story was potential, and that was what kept me reading. The potential for an epic, cataclysmic confrontation. The potential for a fantastic new take on an old, worn-out mythos. The potential for a hero to overcome all odds and remake the face of the world. My hope, going into the second volume, is that the issues I had were just growing pains from a relatively new writer, and that the process of writing the first one helped her realize that potential in the next.
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