Radiance Inviolate

Bram Stoker hits you with the hard sell on this hallucinatory Gothic extravaganza haunted by nightmare revenants of aristocracy undead, you’re reeled in like absolutely yes Dracula’s crawling on the wall like a salamander that’s awesome I love salamanders, then Stoker switches to his real focus, gadget bros breathlessly pledging to each other their sacred honor until their secretary does three seconds of work and goes guys you solved the mystery ages ago, they pause, gaze longingly at each other, I guess this means we must go into battle, to which the other is like, I pledge unto you my sacred honor that I shall fight by your side until death do us part, or persist indefinitely, depending on the whole, you know, vampire thing.

So we’re right on beat with a vampire named Lysander who “so longed to feel that fleeting warmth again. To drink deeply. To quicken his idle heart and bring color to stiff fingertips.” Par for contemporary aesthetics, we’ve flipped the moral matrix of the Victorian reference, softening the vampire by assuring readers that Lysander is primarily focused on “a drive to consume those already craving relief from suffering. / Acts of mercy that fueled him” and hardening his foes into brutal inquisitors, a litany of “Paladins and fiend-flayers and their growing hordes of frothing zealots” who “punished ever more obscure sins.” A refugee of church intolerance, Lysander is possessed of the “moral clarity” that eludes the wasteful hunters from whom he hides. Our vampire is merely misunderstood, in need of a little mercy; in a mood crumbling exuberance, Lysander even recalls his gig as a Ratatouille for the village cheesemonger: “At his most embraced, he worked as an affineur, attuning his supernatural sense of smell to divine the status of ripening cheese in exchange for safety from sunlight in the cellar, and regular access to blood.” Perhaps he’d be a better fit for the other side of the charcuterie board.

Don’t worry, though, a couple cackles from the organ can rescue the mood, from “Their nuptial bonfire lapped at the darkening sky” to “The heady scent had only grown, sublime iron gathering at the back of his throat.” As any good vampire knows, you can make up for so many sins with a sexy line: “Shall we scandalize the fireflies?” Alas, our trysts are always preempted by the Chaperones of Radiance Inviolate…

Wise to the creeping thinness of genre, there’s only so many times you can mention the moon, Radiance Inviolate holds together best when it travels swiftly from Neck A to Neck B, flittering through the flashback from mundane to the startling quickshift of tragedy, captured here charringly from the sobering distancing of others in “the opportune lover had vanished. What remained was a noble calculating an expedient solution for an inconvenient problem” to the abandonment in situation that surprises you when you are no longer a part of it: “The stream and its rocks. / The fireflies and the half-lit moon, too. / All of them proved indifferent to his suffering.” Where the precision evocation stumbles, like in this unsubtle unsubtlety, “Rene had rather unsubtly asked to be shown, “The cask from which poured nectar of such sweetness,” as he had so ostentatiously put it”, we recover immediately into the next pulse to tempo, caught in the clasp of a little lyric pull: “Through this cleft flowed sweet glows of green and gold whose heat took hold.” Glitches in our emanation engine indicate one too occasional trances under the genre allure, recapitulations of the obvious whyness sidetracking a reader who really would rather snap out of it to seek the next sensation. Take this meanderment, from which any inspired hunter would rescue the resonant second sentence: “In light of their relentless campaign to bring all accursed beings to face the sun’s vengeful brilliance, his caution amounted to nothing. The dorries were many, mighty, and meticulous in their takeover. They’d made it harder and harder for him to cross back into the city, withering his connections with the meager few who still cared for him. They’d made targets of anyone lending protection or support or sustenance. Vigilante smiting had intensified his fear, making him afraid to seek blood.” I rather suppose they hope so.

Still, as any up to no good demon knows, you can relish so many sins with a sexy line. Starting in Chapter IV, the story wobbles a little weird to the reader’s relief, carving some inventive mythifications of vampire tropes to sprinkle in room for grandiose gestures like “And what a beautiful thing it is, a fig, made delectable by the wasp that gave herself to its pollination, crawling inside to spread her brood.” And as much darkness and stars and sun and moon as we stargaze, genres transfixtures with our relentless lust for what once was more wondrously: “Death approached from above. / Her face sublime darkness he could not gaze into. / Her hair blue-bright fire that seared red streaks across sickled eyes. / Her vestments gossamer shawls whose edges wisped into smoke. Quicksilver pooled at his fingertips, braiding stars into her wrappings. / She bowed, unspooling tendrils of light that streamed all around him. / Uncanny faces writhed unfabric.” What else can you ask for? You chose to read a story about a vampire named Lysander. How bewitching.