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John Millen

The Kiss of Death By Marcus Sedgwick
Published by Orion
ISBN 978 1 84255 185 1
With the runaway success of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight, both as a best-selling novel and a hit movie, vampires are currently the height of fashion in the world of teen fiction.
But the vampires in Marcus Sedgwick's latest thriller are not of the romantic persuasion. These life-suckers are very much in the mould cast by Bram Stoker in the classic vampire novel, Dracula (1897),  the sort you certainly wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley.
The Kiss of Death is a spine-tingler that sets out to thrill and frighten, not a slice of romantic fiction with spooky undertones. These vampires are the real deal and they want only one thing .
Sedgwick is a classy, imaginative writer. One of the strengths of this tale is his brilliantly evoked setting, the Italian city of Venice in the 18th century.
This ancient city of canals and lagoons is here a decadent, disease-ridden metropolis of wickedness.
Sedgwick begins his story slowly with a young stranger arriving in Venice. Marko comes from an isolated village, and until circumstances dramatically change, Venice means nothing to him.
Marko's father, the village doctor, has travelled to Venice to help an old friend, a glassmaker called Simono Bellini. Since the day he left, the family has heard nothing of his whereabouts.
Marko decides to go to Venice to search for his father. He meets up with Sorrel, Simono's daughter, who denies knowing anything about Marko's father.
Sorrel has her own problems. Her father is slowly losing his mind due to a strange inability to sleep. Marko has arrived in Venice just in time to help her.
There is everything here that a teenage horror fan could hope to find in a novel about the undead.
The setting is spooky and atmospheric. There are zombie-like figures hiding in the shadows.
There's an ancient vampire hunter who is out to halt the spreading corruption, and there is an enigmatic and beautiful woman who could very well turn out to be far more sinister than she seems.
Sedgwick is an elegant and concise storyteller whose well-crafted novels stand well above the competition. The Kiss of Death is a genuinely scary read, with a terrific, heart-stopping ending.
Here is another superior Sedgwick novel that will please all his fans and introduce new ones to this classy writer's unique fiction.
John Millen can be contacted on MillenBookshelf@aol.com



A dark and frightening world of vampires and zombies