A vampire book with bite…I need to work on these titles
A newspaper article is the first thing we read: a bit of a dry prologue, setting up what appears to be the common tropes. Beheadings? Check. A gritty atmosphere? Check. That palpable sense of decay and the dark stirrings of a city’s underbelly? Check, and check! Yep, we are in a noir/vampire novel folks. But that’s where the similarity between this and those other glorified fanfiction dredges you may have been subjected too, end. Sangre, the Wrong Side of Tomorrow is good. Quite good.
Carlos Colon’s story opens in a flash-back to a New York of the 1960’s, seen through the eyes of a Hispanic kid named Nicky Negron. Right off the bat he’s involved in something precarious: he’s pining after a record department cashier. The scenes are believable and helps to ground the character. This will be the first of many such chapters, splicing up the current timeline action. In lesser hands such jumping around would throw off the rhythm completely, but Colon’s turn here is vivid and compelling. These pages simply live. You see New York. You smell it. Moreover, this is an author that understands loss and the murk of human emotions surrounding it, as seen through the eyes of Nicky as he lives navigates an emotionless parent left broken by the death of his sister.
In the present day we find Nicky dealing with more internal problems – and by internal, I mean the disembodied and violent thoughts of Simone, his expired vampire sire and psychopath from the previous novel. Turns out Simone is not quite dead yet. Worse, our protagonist’s “genetic resistance,” a quirk that keeps him from degenerating into a feral vampire, also makes him a prime target. For what, you may ask? Well the answer to that has Nicky terrified. It seems the vivid dreams and memories he is having are the first steps of Simone’s attempt to take full possession of him. In order to prevent this from happening he seeks out Dr. Gunder, a vampire researcher and doctor looking to avenge the death of her son and wipe out vampire-kind. This includes Nicky.
Sangre: the Wrong Side of Tomorrow is a compelling, action packed adventure that is deeper than it appears, and more fun than it should be. Sure, there are some problems. The time-jumping can be confusing at first, sometimes causing a break in the budding tension. These moments are few, however. Also, in my opinion the ending of the story, while good, drags on longer than needed. But the characters are believable, and the setting brilliantly established. All together this a solid Vampire, noir, paranormal, whatever-the-hell-genre-these-are-called-now, book.
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