NECROSCOPE: RESURGENCE

Ninth doorstopper volume in the Necroscope series, a towering vampire cycle and rousing sequel to 1995's Necroscope: The Lost Years (not reviewed). Volume two fills in the lost years of Earth's greatest vampire hunter, Harry Keogh, the Necroscope who can talk with the dead and teleport in space and time. When Keogh died and was reanimated in the body of brain-dead Alec Kyle, Harry's wife Brenda, unable to live with a total stranger, disappeared with their immensely powerful infant child. Three families of vampires banished to Earth from Starside, an alternate world, have been warring for millennia. Harry goes on leave from ESPionage, Britain's parapsychological intelligence group, to find his wife, but ESP hypnotically blocks his mind so that alien powers can't tap his hidden talents. It doesn't work: B.J. Mirlu, 200-year-old vampiress with whom Harry's in love, seizes control of his will, and, between B.J. and ESP, Harry loses large portions of his memory. During this lost period, a werewolf kills a rapist who's attacked a girl who works for B.J. at a bar B.J. owns in Edinburgh—an incident serving to reveal the plans of the two other vampire factions intent on destroying B.J. and those around her. The renewed vampire war couldn't come at a worse time: She and her moon-children guard the aerie where her master, the dog-Lord Radu, has been immersed in a vat of resin since the Black Plague, from which it's taken him 600 years to recover. Now his resurgence is at hand, and, if still infected, he'll move into Harry's body and rebuild it in his own image. B.J. is torn between her love for Harry and the possibility of her becoming a full-blown Wamphyri! But can Harry survive Radu's resurgence? Can the star-crossed B.J.? No diminution either of energy or of billowing High Purple prose.