Self Published Book Review: The Book of Thoth by Paul Leone
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Considering my dislike of vampires, I seem to review a lot of books about them. Either vampires are hard to avoid or I just can’t help myself. Paul Leone’s The Book of Thoth is part of his Vatican Vampire Hunters series. As you might guess by the name of the series, Mr. Leone does not shy away from religious themes. Or vampires. In his series, vampires are literally demons escaped from Hell, occupying the bodies of the dead. This explains why they so hate and fear anything sacred, whether it be holy water, crucifixes, churches, or even the blood of the righteous.
Nicole van Wyck is an heiress who has no interest in going into the family business and who is rapidly losing interest in the clubs and parties all her friends are involved in. Her life is threatening to become the aimless drifting of so many of the rich and irresponsible. That is, until she friends meets her first vampire. Fortunately for her, the vampire is being tracked by a group of church-sponsored hunters, who chase it away with no one the wiser. Except for Nicole, who suspects that there’s more going on than the friends who are with her realize. When she does track down the hunters, they make her an offer to join them and Nicole concludes that if vampires are real, then fighting them is not optional.
Nicole is certainly not another vapid heiress. She works hard, whether tracking down a mystery or training to fight vampires. She also has a strong moral center, which comes through both in how readily she leaps into the fight and in how she is willing to argue against her own team when they cross the line. Nicole is certainly a capable heroine, but she and her fellow hunters are not facing run of the mill vampires, but a veritable count of Hell, Count d’Aubert, and his very dangerous minion, Alice. The demons in dead flesh are after the titular Book of Thoth, which holds the secrets of Satan himself. To do that, they must gather three keys to open up the book’s hiding place.
In 1984, writer Jan Morris spent several months in Hav, an idiosyncratic city in the Eastern Mediterranean. She left it just ahead of a violent insurrection and collected her letters describing the city into a book, Last Letters From Hav. Twenty years later, she returned to Hav to document what had changed, in a piece called Hav of the Myrmidons. Both were collected together in one volume, called simply Hav.
V.E. Schwab had written a number of YA novels when, in 2013, Tor published her book Vicious. Billed by some as a super-hero story, it had elements of that genre while also, to some extent, questioning its assumptions. Reading it, I found that the book seemed interested in questions of morality, heroism, and villainy, but that the super-hero aspects were so attenuated I doubt it would have occurred to me to consider it as a super-hero story without the claims of the book jacket. Its handling of ideas of heroism felt like a reiteration of themes comics (Marvel, DC, and independent) have been interrogating relentlessly (if not neurotically) for at least thirty years. In some ways, it’s best to simply ignore the ‘super-hero’ tag. If you do, you’re left with a well-paced and sharply-structured novel. And on its own terms, it’s an enjoyable tale.