Robert R. McCammon – They Thirst

Vampires have come to Los Angeles. Each night they walk the streets drinking the blood of the unsuspecting people that they find, increasing their numbers in a bid to take over the city. How can the people fight against an enemy that they don’t believe exists?

I like a good vampire novel and this is a very good vampire novel. It took me quite a long time to read it – 16 days – I normally read an average of a book a week. This book is longer than it first appears. It has 531 pages but it is printed in a quite small typeface and new chapters start on the same page rather than starting from a new page as they do in most books. I think if it was to be reprinted now the page count would probably increase fairly considerably. It is currently out of print but I was lucky enough to pick up a second hand copy at the Book Barn a while back. The only other Robert R. McCammon book that I have read is Swan Song and that is my second favourite book ever (after The Stand by Stephen King) so I thought it was about time that I read another of his books.

The book has a large cast of characters which I liked about it. The characters were all memorable and well written so it was easy to keep track of who was who. The vampires were old school evil vampires, only interested in feeding and increasing their numbers. They were quite creepy, which is good.

I enjoyed the story. I did feel that parts of it were a little farfetched but that didn’t really matter and it all served the overall plot. A couple of times I found myself wondering why the characters didn’t have mobile phones and I had to remind myself that the book was written in the 1980’s and people didn’t have mobiles back then! I think this shows that the book had a modern feel to it as it didn’t feel dated at all in any other way.

I think it’s a shame that this book is out of print. I have tried to find out why but the only information I could find was that the author deliberately keeps it out of print. I can’t find any reasons why (If anyone knows I would be interested to hear). I’m hoping that it will be put back into print at some point in the future as it’s a book that deserves to be read and enjoyed. (As an aside, when I first got Swan Song about 12 or more years ago it was out of print in the UK and I had to do a special order and pay quite a lot of money to get it. It wasn’t as simple to just get things over the internet like it is now. But Swan Song is now back in publication here so maybe there is hope that They Thirst will be re-published one day).