'I caught my breath, even from across the room. All I wanted to do was look into her eyes. It was as if she knew the reason I was there and that I was looking for her.'
The body of a young woman found in an Arizona border town walks out of the morgue. To the CDC investigator called in to consult the local police, it's a bizarre medical mystery.
More bodies, dead of a mysterious disease that solidifies their blood, begin disappearing from morgues nearby. In a futile game of catch-up, the CDC, the FBI and the US government realise that it's already too late to stop it: the vampire epidemic will sweep first the United States, and then the world.
Impossibly strong, smart, beautiful, and commanding, these creatures refuse to be called 'vampires', they prefer 'gloamings'. They quickly rise to prominence in all aspects of modern society: physically graceful at sports, endlessly enthralling on TV and incredibly intelligent at business - soon people are begging to be 're-created', willing to risk death if their bodies can't handle the transformation.
But just as the world begins to adjust, the stakes change yet again when a charismatic and wealthy businessman, recently turned, decides to do what none of his kind has done before: run for political office.
This sweeping yet deeply intimate fictional oral history - told from the perspective of several players on all sides of the vampire uprising - is a genre-bending, shocking, immersive and subversive debut that is as addictive as the power it describes.
**
Review
*Praise for A People's History of the Vampire Uprising *
''A wide-angle, wild and weird exploration of politics, pop culture, and a diseased America. This tale of misguided hero worship and encroaching terror may be the perfect analogy for our own strange times.'' --Thomas Mullen, author of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist Darktown
''A People's History of the Vampire Uprising is that rarest of rare creatures, an absolutely unique work of the writer's art that, while drawing on several distinct streams of narrative style, emerges from all of those rivers without any parallels... Villareal starts this brilliant sideways take on the vampire genre by setting up 'The Gloamings'--his sardonic name for the vampire changelings that are the book's driving force--as a problem for, get this, the Center for Disease Control, a witty--and risky--take that, in less skilled hands, could have forced the book into a narrative box car on a one-way track to Been There Ville. Because Villareal has the skills to hold several competing plot-lines and a cast of intriguing characters in his head and the talent to deal them out with economy, style, and a sardonic wit, the book becomes, among other gonzo things, a political parable for these lunatic times, a horror story, a trip down some of the darkest corridors of The Ancient World, and finally, an oddly epiphanic take on what it means, exactly, to be human. It cries out to be made into--not a movie--it's too good for that -- but into a television series, and when this happens, and it will, I'll be binge-watching it. Well done, Raymond Villareal. Welcome to the world of writers, and may God save your immortal soul.'' --*Carsten Stroud, author of Niceville *
''Told in the jumbled, frenetic urgency of a discarded case file, this is the history of both a social movement and a vector for disease. Mr. Villareal's vampires are not the ones we find most comforting. They are not seductive or beautiful or tormented anti-heroes. No, they are more terrifying than anything like that, an infection that will spread throughout our body politic, our institutions, our history, and ourselves.'' --Paul Park, author of The White Tyger and All Those Vanished Engines
''A major document dump--and that's a good thing! We have it all here: a complete oral history of how our world--our species changed forever. Raymond Villareal's sense of fun is palpable as he plays with legal thrillers; good, old, dogged police work; international intrigue; hard science; dirty politics; and, yes, classic, heart-stopping horror. Somewhere, Dracula himself is sitting up late into the day enjoying the hell out of this.'' --John Griesemer, author of Signal & Noise and filmmaker of the web series Parmalee
About the Author
Raymond Villareal is a graduate of the University of Texas School of Law, and is currently a practicing attorney. This is his first novel.