UNDERLAND

Third in Farren’s vampire series featuring Victor Renquist (begun with The Time of Feasting, 1996)—although Victor prefers the term “nosferatu” to vampire.

In Darklost (2000), Farren decided to branch off into Lovecraft’s Cthulhu myth, as have dozens of horror fantasists sucking up the Providence master’s purple tints, but he kept the bigger Cthulhu ploys in reserve for Underland. Here, Renquist finds himself kidnapped from Washington’s Watergate complex and bound to a mechanical chair in the bowels of the NSA’s Paranormal Warfare Facility, a laser ready to beam into his brain through an eyeball. As it happens, the 100-year-old Director of the PWF, Herbert Walker Grael, who has his own semi-immortality serum to keep him pumped up and running (with a big Viagra charge thrown in), wants Victor’s help in standing up to, even siphoning off the paranormal powers of, the Cthulhu, a subterranean intelligence first contacted by Apogee’s Council of Nine, who were defeated in the previous installment. First, though, Victor is given Thyme Bridewell (four times dead and returned) to feast from in order to regain his strength. He likes Thyme, who has micro-circuitry implanted in her brain, doesn’t drain her, and, in fact, leaves her as a darklost, halfway between human and nosferatu. Then Grael reveals his object. It seems that the Nazis discovered an Underworld in the Arctic and by 1947 had built flying saucers that operated out of their belowground base. Renquist must now lead a team down under. At Ice Station Zebra in Greenland, the team meets Nazi Underlanders who take them aboard a flying saucer for the journey’s last leg and a Tour of the Fissure, or Underland, a cavern as deep and wide as the Grand Canyon that zigzags about the planet and is connected by trains and monorails. Here is a whole civilization that worships the Serpent, or Dhrakuh, a Central Mind tied to the original Nephilim visitors from outer space.

Overburdened, but a daring mix of Jules Verne and the vampire genre.