Blood Red James A. Moore Earthling, Oct 2005, $40.00, 331 pp. ISBN 0976633814
Black Stone Bay is a quaint affluent town, filled with more mansions than regular homes, and is the home of two Ivy League universities. Two weeks before Halloween, Jason Soulis moves into the small Rhode Island town, and his coming will change Black Stone Bay forever. Soulis is no ordinary man, but a vampire with a brilliant mind, who knows how to survive and intends to use the inhabitants in his experiments.
College student Maggie Preston pays her tuition by prostituting herself. Soulis hires her through her pimp for the night. He wants her to seduce all the clergy in town, which she does quickly and easily. Ben, who lives in the same building as Maggie, loves her, even when he discovers her profession. She fears making a commitment while she has been with Soulis. Maggie turns into a vampire during a frat party that turns into a blood bath, but Ben cleans her up and cares for her until she wakes up. When they confront Soulis, he explains that exchanging bodily fluids turned Maggie into a thinking vampire like him. On Halloween night, he frees the missing people that were turned into vampires to see what they will do. Ben has won Maggie over, so she tries to keep him alive during the feeding frenzy.
BLOOD RED is a complex, imaginative and deep vampire novel, that readers will believe will become a classic like Stephen King's SALEM'S LOT. The characters are three dimensional, and even the vampires have the personality they had when they were alive, instead of becoming two dimensional caricatures. James A. Moore has proven with his latest novel that he is one of the grandmasters of the horror genre.