The Blood Gospels

Read the first chapter of The Blood Gospels

Read an interior chapter of The Blood Gospels - "Faye's Seduction"

Read a later chapter of The Blood Gospels - "Faye's "chirological" exploration of the Maya"

Searching for that perfect agent, an author can easily forget what a rare possession he's got in his hands. To remind myself, therefore, I put here at top the high words of praise for The Blood Gospels from the only person that I know for sure has read and devoted himself to every word of the novel. Adam Kintopf, as Senior Editor of a now-defunct literary agency, gave me the benefit of his insight along this excellent quote:

“I finished reading your final draft of The Blood Gospels and enjoyed it immensely. In addition to being a potent page turner, it's full of my favorite ingredients in a novel, including a great plot, interesting and well-realized characters, exotic locale, loads of atmosphere, and more. You've skillfully blended gothic with contemporary and created a unique and believable world. Also, it's delicious prose. I love your wit, energy, and cleverness. It is full of your usual trademarks: articulate first-person voice, clear language, lovely flowing style, touches of sly humor.”

Synopsis

In a payload of revelations in the last words of The Blood Gospels the reader understands that he—or she—has actually become a character in the novel. The you that the quartet of narrators have been addressing since page one, telling their stories of the birth of a new being, is in fact that new being. And these are the gospels according to Mark, Faye, Angie and Constantin.

All four narrators begin their gospel with, “For me, it starts here.” Three of the four are a family of Americans who fall into their adventure of horror and rapture in the jungles of present-day Yucatan. Faye and Mark August, along with their 14-year-old daughter Angie, meet Constantin Liliane, a being unlike any human in his ruthlessness and ability to change form but very like every human in his quest for love and profundity.

When Constantin first sets his fascinated eyes on Faye, he recognizes her as the descendant of Ilona, the young wife and mother whom he loved and beside whom he died centuries ago in the black mountains of Moldavia. He also recognizes in Faye’s capaciousness of mind and soul a partner with whom to share eternity. He intends to make her into a being like himself. For that, however, he needs to obtain her willing partnership.

Faye's attraction to Constantin is immediate and unfathomable to her. Never would she dream of being unfaithful to Mark or Angie. But the magnetism is undeniable and unconquerable, just as it is with Angie. Mark is jealous and bewildered, and his love for his wife and daughter set him directly in the path of Constantin's desires and intentions.

The string of horrible deaths in the Yucatan village where the August family live wraps around them more and more tightly. Faye's scientific mind is at first angry at the villagers who lay the murders to supernatural causes—the witches of their legends. But as the deaths become more certainly bloody murders, it becomes clear that the villagers have good reason to believe as they do.

Faye is at the center of the story, a complicated woman whose love of life battles the ennui of her own life and the human beings who inhabit it. Her devoted mothering of Angie and wifely attentions to Mark are both challenging and maddening to her. As Constantin circles and moves in on her with his extraordinary powers, Faye struggles against his enchantment and tries to divert him from her family.

Mark sees Constantin as a very human threat, a man of great sexual appeal and vigor who has set himself after his wife. Mark brought his family to the Yucatan to escape from another such predator of his wife in San Francisco. In the Yucatan, Mark has established himself as an eradicator of the vampire bats that have been threatening the livestock of the Yucatecans. Now, as the gory human deaths mount up, he begins to understand that there is another kind of vampire in the Yucatan— Constantin—and Mark turns his entire mind and soul to the eradication of that vampire.

Angie, with teenage infatuation, tumbles hard for Constantin’s charms and has a fresh way of appreciating them. When she is the victim of a vampire bat attack, one of Constantin’s many changes-of-form, she falls even more deeply under his spell. But when she begins to understand that Constantin is really after her mother, and that her mother and father are saying and doing more and more wild and insane things, Angie realizes she must get her family back to San Francisco where they can get medical or psychological help.

SPOILER ALERT! I hate to ruin the fun of a fabulous ending unique in all literature, but (sigh) I guess a prospective publisher would want to know. So, read on if you wish to spoil a great first read-through!

Faye and Mark also decide they must flee to San Francisco, both now finally understanding —yet so misunderstanding—some little part of Constantin’s brutal and enduring nature.

Bloody events follow in a rapid crescendo of violence: Constantin traps Mark on an ancient Maya pyramid, rips out his throat and drinks his blood; Mark’s undead body, shipped to San Francisco, rises and stalks Angie, tearing into her flesh with his teeth and infecting her blood with Constantin’s nature; Angie fights back furiously at the creature that was her father, managing to maneuver him into the rays of the rising sun which destroy his body, but not quite all of his being; Constantin seduces Faye into his eternal life, the first step of his process to consume her blood, digest it, and in three nights allow her undead body to take it back into her own shell, transmuted.

But Constantin is thwarted by what he has never imagined—Angie together with Mark in their new manifestation, a new being never before found on the planet: Anhelo.

Anhelo—a word in Spanish that is nearly untranslatable in its bigness and smallness—is a desire so great yet so intimate that it is all but suffocating.

Anhelo is the narrator of the last chapter. She-he-they are a composite of all the victims of Constantin we have met during the novel, their bloods, their memories, their natures. All, that is, except Faye, who is now residing only partly formed within Constantin himself.

Born in the light of the rising sun, Anhelo is a creature of the day and must hunt down Constantin before nightfall or be at the mercy of Constantin who —Anhelo knows too well— has no mercy. For Angie and Mark, within Anhelo, to find their mother and wife now wholly within the corpus of Constantin, it is a moment of dire, unknown and unknowable decision.

Anhelo decides to take them both. As Anhelo bites into Constantin’s throat, gulping down his blood filled with the essence of Faye, the quartet of voices begin their murmurings into Anhelo’s ear, telling their stories from the beginning, relating the gospels of the birth of this new being.

“And for me, it starts here.”

Audio Book now available (9 hours:12 minutes)

Read the entire audio script of The Blood Gospels.

Listen to Disk 2 of 8, "Angie in the Cemetery" 15 minutes, pages 32-36 : Blood of Children