Simon Clark's Undead Army of (Many More Than) One
by June Pulliam
Clark, Simon. Vampyrrhic. New York: Leisure, 2002. © 1998. 434 p.
Simon Clark's Vampyrrhic is a solid, well-crafted tale, an excellent example of what he does best: Clark can take a story that in the hands of someone less talented would be absolutely mindless, unbelievable trashy--and Clark can make it work. This is especially admirable because Vampyrrhic is a reissue one of Clark’s older works, yet it doesn’t suffer from the weaknesses found in the early works of many other writers.
Vampyrrhic is about an ancient race of undead warriors who live in the sewers and caves of the small English town of Leppington. Leppington itself is named for the family who founded the town, its patriarchs having come from what is now Germany sometime in the early middle ages. Leppington family legend has it that one day, Thor lost his hammer, and the first illustrious member of the Leppington line made him a replacement. The new hammer so greatly pleased the god that he saw fit to confer special favor on the mortal, who up until that time had been childless. To remedy this, Thor lay with the mortal’s wife, whereby she conceived a son, and thus, all future Leppingtons can claim they are directly descendent from a divine being.
But Thor had his own problems. The insurgence of Christianity meant that his own influence was waning, and he needed a mortal to help him mount a battle for supremacy. Thus Thor presents the elder Leppington with an army of undead warriors. This army has been amassed over the years with the help of Thor’s Valkyries, who according to legend, take slain soldiers to Valhalla. Apparently Valhalla is a sort of purgatory, where warriors carcasses have been collected. These warriors-in-limbo are now nearly immortal, in that their flesh has ceased to deteriorate after their death, and they are extremely difficult to destroy. Furthermore, they now have an insatiable desire for blood, hence they must be contained.
Thor desires for the elder Leppington to take this army of the undead and lead an assault on humankind, either restoring the old god’s kingdom on earth, or simply doing away with most of the human race. The elder Leppington initially agrees, but at the last minute changes his mind and declines to go along with Thor’s plot. He then flees to England with this army of undead soldiers in tow, and now has the interesting problem of having to contain them for all eternity.
Time passes, and generations of Leppingtons keep the army of vampires contained and fed through frequent animal sacrifice. In the 19th century, a Leppington infected with true Victorian zeal mechanizes the care and feeding of the family hoards of undead. He builds a large and efficient abattoir, with sluices to catch the blood leading into the sewers, thus keeping the killing floor clean, and basically using everything but the squeal (or moo) in the slaughter process. But a well fed vampire army can’t be contained forever, and changing times means the decline of the Leppington slaughterhouse industry as well.
Flash forward to the late 20th century, and the last of the Leppington line has been called back to the town of his ancestry to see his dying uncle. Meanwhile, people have been disappearing from the town’s only hotel, where something mysterious is locked in the basement. Now Dr. David Leppington must do what his ancestor should’ve done centuries ago, and destroy the vampire army.
Horror, like fantasy and science fiction, is a genre that strains credulity as it is about things that our everyday experience has taught us are impossible. So the problem that any writer in the genre faces is how do you get readers with their rational, 20th century mindset to suspend disbelief in events often fueled by supernatural intervention, if only just long enough to enjoy the story and more fully enter into the illusion. Clark does this through character development, and the skillful unfolding of a tale. His characters are fully actualized beings who behave much the same way we would if confronted with such fantastic events. The educated characters are especially skeptical of the events unfolding before their eyes, desperately searching for any possible rational explanation, no matter how far-fetched, before they’ll ultimately embrace a supernatural explanation. Thus, when Dr. Leppington sees a man whose arm was ripped off after he stuck it in a sewer, at first he believes the accident was the work of really large rats, or of an ancient pump that no one remembered being down there. But when he examines the man’s wounds, the evidence seen with his own eyes tells him that this injury wasn’t caused by a mechanical device, or even by a rat, since Leppington has no rodents (they’ve all been eaten long ago by the subterranean army of the undead). The mysterious disappearances are equally easy to dismiss, since it is not uncommon for people to check into a hotel and then slink into the night due to pecuniary embarrassment. David’s logical, scientific mind won’t let him even consider the possibility of supernatural agency until he has seen a gory murder that has no rational explanation.
The monsters themselves are frightening, mainly because we don’t see a great deal of them—they move too quickly, and when we do see them, it’s really dark. Nothing is more frightening than fear itself, and Clark devotes a great deal of time to the various mortal characters’ dread. This is a common element in Clark’s other novels as well. Blood Crazy , Darkness Demands, Nailed by the Heart, and Darker all emphasize the characters’ dread of what lurks out there more than they linger on describing the actual monsters themselves.
NOTE: Vampyrrhic is a reissue of an older book by Clark, whose work was recently made more available in the United States when he signed a contract with what is now the major publisher of horror in the U.S., Leisure Books, an imprint of Dorchester Publishing.