A Tasty Gumbo in the Big Easy

By June Pulliam

01/17/2005

Bride of the Fat White Vampire, Andrew Fox. New York: Ballantine, 2004. 429 p.

Andrew Fox's sequel to his 2003 novel Fat White Vampire Blues is a hilarious and engrossing romp through contemporary New Orleans with a cast of characters that Louisianans will recognize as either real life N'awleanians or literary characters associated with the Crescent City. Whereas Blues was a sort of vampire parody of John Kennedy Toole's quintessential New Orleans novel A Confederacy of Dunces, Bride of the Fat White Vampire is a detective novel in the tradition of the 1940s pulps.

When the younger members of the High Krew of Vlad Tepes are attacked and dismembered, their leader knows of only one person who can help them solve the mystery: their old enemy, Jules Duchon, the fat white vampire who is considerably déclassé compared to their exalted ranks. However, Jules, who has been missing for the past 8 months, after his battle royal with Malice X's rival vampire gang, must be resurrected and "persuaded" to work for his old enemy. When he was last seen, Jules discarded his gargantuan corporeal form to become 187 white rats.  Now his best friend and former sidekick, the transgendered "Doodlebug" Rory/Debbie Richelieu, vampire and spiritual guru, must find all the rats in order to bring back Jules. The transformation is successful, mostly.  Like Isis restoring Osiris, Doodlebug is able to reassemble all but one part of Jules.  That part continues to wander the French Quarter in the form of an enormous, intelligent white rat, and predictably, given the body part it represents, has a mind of its own.

Once Jules has been restored and begins investigating the case, he mixes with many colorful people who are characterizations of famous residents, such as fried catfish mogul Van Goodfeller, a thinly veiled parody of restaurateur Al Copeland, and Courane L'Enfant, a living, breathing version of Anne Rice's vampire Lestat de Lioncourt in his rock star incarnation. In a parody of the Anne Rice/Al Copeland Battle, the two are fighting over the redevelopment of a former New Orleans housing project on the edge of the Garden District. Predictably, the gentile L'Enfant wants to preserve the area's former character as a living space for patrician New Orleans vampires, whereas the more working class Van Goodfeller wishes to build a housing units that will hold people of various classes, all centered around a Goodfellers's processing center and a GoodiesMart, a pastiche of all of the big box stores who have a reputation for driving small merchants out of business.

Meanwhile, the newly restored Jules has his own agenda to pursue.  Maureen, the corpulent Bourbon Street stripper, Jules's mother in darkness and the love of his life, was killed in Blues, her ashes scattered to ensure that there is no chance of her coming back to life. Nevertheless, Jules will ultimately revive her in the fine and campy tradition established in the Universal Studios monster flicks.

Unlike other sequels that really only succeed in beating a dead horse by tricking the reading public to purchase another work by the writer when he or she has nothing more than a financial interest in continuing the story (and here, I am thinking of some of Rice's lackluster entries in her Vampire Chronicles and Mayfair Witch series), Bride really does have a life its own. Jules Duchon has grown since his adventures in Blues, both mentally and physically. While in rat form, Jules has managed to consume enough fat laden food from restaurant dumpsters in the Quarter to add an extra fifty pounds to his already amazing girth, so he now tips the scale at over 500 pounds. But he has grown as person as well.  In Blues, Jules is a man whose heart is in the right place, but he is often waylaid by his desires for sex and food, as well as the limitations imposed by his considerable size, since even vampires have health problems when they are this much over weight. In Bride, Jules is no longer as controlled by his primal desires, in part because of what is missing from his new fleshly form, and in part because the High Krew gives him a regular supply of blood from their stash while he's in their employ, obviating the need to hunt. Freed from these earthly concerns, Jules is a fairly clever and engaging private dick.

Fox's novel is a delightful gumshoe gumbo of various types of genre fiction: the comic vampire novel, the detective novel, the local color novel set in the Big Easy. Fans of any of these sorts of books will find Bride of the Fat White Vampire hard to put down.