They Thirst

They Thirst, by Robert R. McCammon

May, 1981  Avon Books

Robert McCammon was a name I knew well in my horror-reading teen years; you’d often see copies of his super-fat paperbacks in middle school and high school. I was a Stephen King guy, though, and rarely ventured outside his world to other horror fiction. I do recall attempting to read McCammon’s Swan Song at some point in high school – yet another super-fat paperback, this one about the end of the world – but I couldn’t get over how similar it was to King’s The Stand (which I’d read in its recently-published uncut version shortly before), so I put it aside. Literally the only thing I recall about Swan Song was the description that one of the characters, a black professional wrestler, had a stomach that had gone to “marshmellow” due to his eating donuts or something, and that “marshmellow” description always stuck with me. 

 Well anyway! I’ve been on a horror kick lately, though to tell the truth it’s starting to wane now (it actually lasted longer than previous horror fiction kicks!), and I decided to give McCammon another chance. But as usual with me it couldn’t be easy. The book that really caught my interest was this one, an early novel of his, yet another super-fat paperback, about vampires in Los Angeles. Another one seemingly inspired by King, in this case Salem’s Lot. But folks They Thirst ain’t easy to get hold of. The days of Robert McCammon’s paperbacks being ubiquitous are long gone, especially when it comes to the first four he published, which McCammon himself has kept from being reprinted. They’re now known as the “Condemned Four.” 

Predictably, this means that those first four books are overpriced on the used books marketplace, even though they each went through a few printings. And They Thirst is the most overpriced of all. Hell, there isn’t even a digital scan of it on The Internet Archive. Sellers want $30 and up for copies. I became so obsessed with finding this book that I actually purchased a coverless copy of the original Avon Books edition…and it cost me a dollar. The thing is in super beaten shape, but hey, I just wanted to read the book, you know…I don’t really get worked up about “mint condition” and etc these days. Plus the cover’s kind of lame on this edition. And also, for the first time I’d been called for jury duty, so I thought I’d bring the book along to read. You don’t have to worry about maintaining the condition of a book when it’s already missing the front cover, has a broken spine, and in general looks like it was carried in a backpack on a trek across Europe. I also thought if they saw me reading a book about vampires in L.A. they wouldn’t pick me for the jury, but unfortunately that didn’t work and I was picked anyway. 

Running to 531 small-print pages, They Thirst is not a quick read. Not by a long shot! It took me a few weeks to read it. And I have to say, there were times when I was sufficiently caught up in it that I wanted to read nothing else. (I’m not always faithful to long books when I’m reading them.) I thought They Thirst might be this year’s Colony or The Tomorrow File, a long book that could’ve just kept going on and on, such was my enjoyment. And speaking of Ben Bova’s Colony, it seems to me that Robert McCammon was attempting the same sort of thing, like also what Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle did with Lucifer’s Hammer: a genre novel written in the style of the bestselling mainstream fiction of the day. They Thirst is ostensibly horror, but like those other novels it offers a panoramic view of a large cast of characters interracting across a large canvass of action, with the idea of appealing to a larger readership than just horror fans. 

But here’s the thing. They Thirst is usually loglined as “vampires in Los Angeles.” It wasn’t until around page 400, though, that I realized IT WASN’T EVEN A VAMPIRE NOVEL. I have no real knowledge of Robert McCammon, haven’t researched him at all, but if I am correct he has “banned” They Thirst and the previous three novels because he considers them subpar, or at least not good indications of his writing. I don’t know what he holds particularly against They Thirst, but my own personal guess would be because the novel suffers from identity confusion. I mean the first two hundred pages are like a crime novel about a serial killer in L.A., sort of a prefigure of Marcel Montecino’s The Cross Killer. Then They Thirst turns into an end-of-the-world disaster novel, before transforming yet again into a quest novel in the final quarter. Actual vampire stuff is scant, and like John Steakley’s later Vampire$, the vampires that do show up come off more like zombies. 

To be sure, this is not a Dracula type of yarn; these vampires are not the suave sinister types who lure in young women (or men) and have their way with them one by one. Hell, Thirst is more of a “traditional” vampire novel than this is. Rather, They Thirst is more of a virus contagion sort of yarn, with vampirism quickly spreading across sections of Los Angeles and turning regular everyday folks into bloodthirsty vampires who thirst for blood. To me, it just all seemed more like a zombie apocalypse sort of story, only McCammon wants his cake and to eat it, too, as he tries to have it both ways – vampirism spreads to such an extent that almost the entirety of L.A. has become vampires, or knows about vampires, yet our author also wants to have it that the actual existence of vampires is still questioned by most people, especially those outside of L.A. This becomes especially hard to buy as the action becomes more and more apocalyptic in the final section. 

Oh and I almost forgot: above I wrote that They Thirst clearly seems to cater to the bestselling fiction template of the day, but one thing I was bummed to learn was that it was very tepid in the sleaze arena. I believe there’s only one sex scene in the novel, early on, and it’s minimal at best. What I’m trying to say is, this is certainly no Live Girls. And hell for that matter, McCammon doesn’t even exploit the setting much. When I saw this novel was about “vampires in L.A.” I imagined, you know, vampires running amok in the neon glow of Sunset Strip, but that never happens in the book. We get a lot of namedropping of various streets, buildings, and sections of the barrios, but for the most part the zombie-like vampires lurk in the shadows of empty houses, and the king vampire himself lurks above the city, in a castle built by a murdered horror movie actor. 

Now this bit really grinded my gears. Another thing the McCammon of today might not like about They Thirst is that there’s so much setup with little payoff, from characters to subplots. One of the latter concerns the wonderfully-named Orlon Kronsteen, a Bela Lugosi-type horror actor who starred in a movie about Jack the Ripper (and other stuff, though we are told woefully little of him) and had a castle built above Los Angeles. But “several years ago” Kronsteen was murdered, apparently in some sort of ritual deal, with his head cut off or something…and Prince Vulkan, the king vampire of They Thirst, decides this castle will be his perfect home base. But nothing whatsoever is made of Kronsteen, the entire mystery of why or how he was killed just totally dropped from the narrative…even worse is that some random biker seems to imply that he was there the night it happened, but this biker too is dropped from the narrative. 

It's like that throughout. In pure “bestselling fiction” style, Robert McCammon introduces sundry characters at the start of They Thirst, but he turns out to be like a pet-sitter who takes on too many animals to watch. I mean pretty soon most of these characters are just plain gone, and folks by the end of the novel they still haven’t come back! In fact it’s a wonder Avon Books didn’t package They Thirst like a blockbuster-type novel, giving a quick logline of the many main characters: 

Andy Palatazin – Los Angeles police captain who knows vampires are real and ultimately sees himself as the only man who can stop the infestation. Plus he’s haunted by the ghost of his mom. 

Gayle Clarke – Hotstuff reporter for a tabloid; when her boyfriend tries to drink her blood she realizes vampires might exist. Intermittently disappears from the narrative, only to return hundreds of pages later. 

Prince Vulkan – Dead since the 1400s, turned into a vampire as a teen, with the appropriate temper tantrums of an undead teenager. The chosen disciple of “The Headmaster” (ie the devil in all but name), for reasons not explained he’s only now decided to conquer L.A., despite being hundreds of years old. 

The Roach – Serial killer freak with a penchant for murdering hookers who look like his dead mother and stuffing cockroaches in their mouths. Serves as the would-be Renfield to Prince Vulkan’s Dracula. 

Kobra – Albino biker with the memorable intro in which he blows away some rednecks in a bar with his Mauser for absolutely no reason. Perhaps the most wasted character in the novel; Kobra is developed as this super cool badass but anticlimactically drops out of the narrative, only to return sporadically afterward. 

Tommy Chandler – Another teen, this one alive, a monster movie fan with posters of Orlon Kronsteen on his wall and also who knows how Kronsteen’s castle is layed out, thanks to a feature in an old issue of Famous Monsters Of Filmland. 

Wes Richer and Solange – He’s a rising star on the comedy scene with a hit show in which he plays a moron Sherlock Holmes; she’s his “Afro-Asian” mistress, a stacked beauty with a penchant for reading ouija boards and whatnot. In fact it’s through one of these that the title of the novel comes into play, as Solange receives the message “THEY THIRST” from the spirit world. 

Ratty – A ‘Nam vet who lives in the sewers beneath L.A., where he grows his own drugs. In his “Timothy Leary for President” shirt he’s the highlight of the novel, though only appears in the final quarter. 

Father Silvera – A brawny priest with a hidden disease that’s killing him, he takes the expected route of denying that vampires exist, then realizing it, then refusing to go on the quest to the Kronsteen castle to kill Vulkan, and then instead saving his flock…before finally heading to the Kronsteen castle. 

There are sundry other characters, many of them unnecessary, like the hotstuff real estate lady who helped Vulkan buy the castle. She gets a few chapters, then just flat-out drops from the narrative. Same goes for the owner of a funeral parlor chain. Or Rico, who is searching for his lost girlfriend in the barrio. Or a doctor at a hospital who realizes too late that her “dead” patients are really vampires. Many of these characters are of course turned into vampires, but even then they disappear afterwards, with no “I’m a vampire now!” shock return. It’s a bit disappointing, but it must be said that, while you’re reading the book, you don’t realize that the majority of this stuff isn’t going to pan out. I mean it’s about the journey, not the destination, as I’m sure Ratty would say, but still. It wasn’t until around page 500 or so that I realized so much of this stuff was not going to be resolved. 

The first couple hundred pages were by far my favorite. McCammon delivers a taut suspense thriller with only minor supernatural overturns; this opening section is almost a standard crime novel, with Capt. Palatazin obsessed with finding and stopping a serial killer the papers have dubbed the Roach. It’s very much a police procedural, with no action, just Palatazin going about the work of deduction and following clues. And we have stuff from the Roach’s point of view; curiously, his day job is as a pest exterminator, same as the serial killer in Lou Cameron’s The Closing Circle. The horror novel stuff gradually develops, mostly through the strange bit of corpses being mysteriously dug out of graves at night. Palatazin, whose father was bitten by a vampire when Palatazin was a child in Hungary, knows something is going on. 

But the “vampire virus” stuff builds up and soon it’s more of a zombie apocalypse yarn, with whole sections of the barrio for example overrun by vampires. Then the end of the world vibe begins; Vulkan uses his powers to bring down an apocalyptic sandstorm on Los Angeles, blocking the city off from the world and keeping people from leaving. Phone lines are down, planes can’t leave, etc. This section goes on for a long time and again made me think of King’s The Stand. It’s very much a piece of disaster fiction now, with long sequences of various characters getting trapped in cars or in their homes and trying to get out before the daylight goes away so they can kill vampires. This part was my least favorite in the novel. 

Then the final quarter takes on a quest angle. Some of the characters band together to get to the Kronsteen castle, where they figure the “king vampire” might lurk. This too takes up a large brunt of the narrative; I mean they aren’t like “Let’s go there,” and then they’re at the castle the next chapter. It’s almost grueling and again takes away from the vampire stuff the reader might want. It’s really just characters fighting their way through blinding clouds of sand and trying to figure out where they are. To tell the truth it was exhausting to read. What makes it worse is that McCammon drops the ball in the finale. Major characters are dispensed with in an almost offhand fashion, and worse yet the entire point of certain characters even being here is rendered moot. No spoilers, but Palatazin in particular. I mean this guy’s dad turned into a vampire, so he has a personal, uh, “stake” in the matter, but he doesn’t contribute much to the climax. 

Even funnier, McCammon doesn’t seem to know when to end the novel. So even after the good guys have sort of won, we get like an extended 20-page bit where Gayle Clarke, who has mostly disappeared from the novel at this point, tries to escape from the military base in which survivors are being held. And it just keeps going on and on. All so she can get out to the real world and tell the story that vampires exist…not that anyone believes her. Even though the entirety of L.A. turned into vampires, complete with even the deejay on a radio station taunting the last few humans in the city. But like I said, McCammon wants his cake and to eat it too. 

So yeah, I was a bit underwhelmed with They Thirst. I do think though that I enjoyed it more than Will did, over at Too Much Horror Fiction. I was sufficiently caught up in it, at least for the first few hundred pages. But once it got to the apocalyptic sandstorm bit it started to lose my interest. I also felt the climactic assault on Vulkan in Kronsteen’s castle could have been more thrilling, but McCammon was so focused on showing how dire the plight of his characters was that he did succeed in making it all seem hopeless. But then he makes it seem so hopeless that the climax is a bit hard to buy. 

I’ve got some more Robert McCammon novels which I might read someday; one of them, Wolf’s Hour, about a werewolf in World War II, is one I really wanted to read back when it came out, but just never got around to.