The Big Drink and Beyond — David McDonald

In SHARED BLOOD, his brilliant premiere novel, David Erasmus McDonald tells the modern day story of Adam Giroux, a young Charleston-born physician recently transplanted to Vancouver, BC, and Roi Kirkland, a mysterious sculptor lately arrived in the Pacific Northwest from Great Britain. With a passion for language and a rare gift of storytelling, the author traces the history that places Adam and Roi in each other's lives, hearts--and beds. The story examines the beginnings and histories of three societies that will profoundly affect Roi, Adam, and all whose lives they touch: the Primes, the more ancient of two vampire societies, whose population comprises those who promote the dark glamour and predatory mastery of the traditional vampire; the Sympaths, who seek to join Humanity and enrich its culture; and the Vanator, the militia-like force with its ancestral roots in Germany's Neander Valley, whose ancient charge is to prevent--or at least delay--an all-out war between the two vampire societies. Since the Primes and the Sympaths hold diametrically opposed philosophies, physical hostilities escalate, and war seems inevitable. As Roi and Adam discover what it means to become vampires--and to be in love--the Vanator maintain the uneasy peace. The story spans millennia and begins with a prequel placed in the declining Ottoman Empire and travels westward through the expanse of Europe, across the Atlantic, to Baltimore and New York, on to San Francisco, and eventually to Vancouver. This fast-paced prologue encompasses the lives of real people and fictional characters alike, from the actual British aristocrat Lady Jane Ellenborough to the homoerotic vampire romance of the fictional Gedrec Kirkland and Cezar Balanescu, whose relationship is shattered--and yet, hundreds of years later, ultimately reconciled--by the incursion of Gedrec's charming female assistant, Elspet Munro. This rich reimagining of vampire legends and history delivers the reader to modern day Vancouver and the beginning of the story of SHARED BLOOD, a track whose amazing story gallops through its three volumes to a heart-stopping, mind-bending conclusion--and defines a new genre in modern fiction. ??? Michael Russell