Bloodletter

The filming of a successful author's erotic vampire book is about to begin when Hollywood experiences a series of grisly murders by a killer who litters the streets with his victims, and the author develops a vampire-like insanity.

From Publishers Weekly

In this erratic stab at neo-gothic horror, Eva LaPorte, a Beverly Hills psychologist, takes as a patient suicidal novelist Stephen Albright. Creator of the hugely popular Bloodletter series, about a vampire who can enter our world to slake his thirst only when an artist or magician invokes his spirit, Stephen is convinced that he himself is one such artist and that he must die to stop the monster's current reign of terror--which he believes is manifest in the form of Diver Dan, a brutal serial killer who has been murdering women in the Bloodletter's name. Unable to resist Stephen's morbid appeal, Eva immediately becomes his lover and, it seems at first, a player in his dark fantasies; too soon, though, the vampire reveals himself, alive and well. Beath ( The Death of James Dean ) handles the female characters with a degree of misogyny unusual even for a genre not known for its feminism; in fact, the only character who seems to get a wry, tacit stamp of approval is Diver Dan. And though the premise is clever, the prose energetic and Beath's love of the genre apparent, the jerky, uneven plot proceeds largely via characters' explanations of their slenderly motivated actions. The novel's imaginative dismemberments might please splatterpunk fans, if they're willing to take their gore without a redeeming modicum of suspense. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

It's too easy to say that a bad vampire book really sucks, but in this case, it's all too appropriate. Bloodletter is a nasty, evil-spirited novel that makes the reader want to take a shower every time he or she reads it. The plot concerns the tribulations of a horror novelist who has conjured up the spirit of a particularly loathsome vampire, resulting in a grisly series of murders and sparking a new cult religion among the Generation X set. Unfortunately, all these goings-on have unhinged the novelist/hero's mind and slowed down his prolific production of best-sellers, so his creepy agent hires pop psychologist Eva LaPorte to try to help himand maybe seduce him on the side. This is a book full of people you'd never want to meet, but Beath is actually a reasonably good storyteller. Remarkably, he almost manages to make this foul brew palatable. Given its Hollywood setting and a higher-than-average gore content, the novel will probably be in demand among public-library horror fans. You'll circulate it a lot, but will you still respect yourself in the morning? George Needham

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