Go Sabs Go! A Review of The Sab

By Tony Fonseca

05/14/2005

Zinger, Steve. The Sab. Authorhouse, 2004. 508 p.

The book description sounds common enough: a vampire had plagued Heather Langden for about as long as she could remember.... Vampires haunt Montréal, from the cobblestone streets of the old city, to the gaudy, laissez-faire rue Ste-Catherine, where strip clubs nestle next to churches. Heather, far too young to have become an immortal, is one of them. Yet Heather is also haunted, but she can’t quite figure out why....

However, Steve Zinger's novel (which is actually more of an event than a novel, see all The Sab merchandise at www.stevezinger.com) is anything but your common vampire fare. In fact, I will go out on the limb and say that this may be perhaps the most important vampire novel since Poppy Z. Brite's Lost Souls, which restored the fangs to the castrated undead after the success of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles. Zinger's vampires are arrogant, cunning, vicious, and powerful—Lestat on coke if you will. They have no compunction about using humans towards their ends, and their mastery of psychology—of the mind game—makes them very difficult to resist. To put it bluntly, Zinger has made vampires interesting again.

In addition to introducing a new vampire mythology, The Sab has something else very important going for it: Zinger is a damned good writer. His description of the seedier side of Montreal is vivid and dynamic; his dialogue is crisp and believable, even when vampires are doing the talking; and his characters’ emotions ring so true that their various plights—teenaged sexuality, alcoholism, failed marriages, loneliness—draw the reader in. You won't be able to help feeling Heather's pain as she watches her world crash around her, or Graham and Julia's frustration and sadness as their marriage dissolves, or Korson's desperation as he hunts the evil and seductive Talissa. Not only are Zinger's characters believable and their actions valid, but his prose is hypnotic and subtle. While he went for the jugular in Ray McMickle and The Kentucky Vampire Clan, here he goes for the gut, producing a psychologically disturbing and complex gothic masterpiece, especially when it comes to character relationships and story lines.

Basically the chronology of The Sab is this (this may include spoilers, so skip this paragraph if you want to avoid them): Korson, a young Blackfoot, is roaming the wilds of New York state after his tribe has been wiped out, and is found and turned by a female vampire. With time, he begins to go a little insane, and it becomes very difficult for him to handle the time continuum of immortality, sometimes finding himself living in the past, present and future at once. Forward to modern day Montreal, where he finds an insomniac Montreal Urban Community policeman, Graham St. Croix, and enlists his aid in stopping the vampire Talissa. Talissa, Korson's vampire master, had awakened a century previous from a long hibernation and is now angry because her love was not returned (hell hath no fury like a female vampire scorned). Like Akasha in Queen of the Damned, she wants the world to suffer, so she is amassing an army of the undead, and has found her newest recruit, a teenager named Heather (echoes of "Carmilla" abound in the early chapters of the novel). During one of his night patrols, Graham finds Heather after one of her first kills and walks her home, thinking she is a strung out runaway. This is where the fate of the three intermingles. It is up to Heather, Korson and Graham to stop Talissa from destroying humanity.

A vampire mythology of this complexity is difficult to create. In fact, I can think of only a handful of authors—Rice of course, as well as Jeanne Kalogridis, Kim Newman, Dan Simmons, and Brian Lumley—who have done it masterfully. I believe that fans and critics alike will be adding two new names to that list in the next decade, the first lady of splatterpunk, Charlee Jacob, and this Canadian newcomer. The Sab is certainly a step for Zinger in that direction. It combines the philosophical nature of Rice's vampires (and Lestat's wicked sense of humor, I should add) with raw sexuality, a taste for hands-on violence, and a desire for cruelty and pain. In short, it is a vampire novel that will entertain and leave you wanting more. Of course, to achieve such complexity takes time, so it weighs in at 500+ pages; if the epic tale is not your cup of tea, reading The Sab will seem daunting. However, the task is well worth it. The Sab is, to use the words of one reviewer, "tense and creepy."