THE GLOOM

In Taylor’s horror-series starter, an awkward young man and an arachnophobic classmate struggle to survive a vampire apocalypse.

The business of vengeance can hollow out the soul—but sometimes it can jump-start an affirmation of one’s humanity, as the Providence, Rhode Island, teenagers in Taylor’s dystopian vampire adventure learn on the eve of the Everton High School prom. However, the foreboding started long ago for Monty Smith, who can’t parse the meaning of his persistent nightmares about a giant spider, even after he rescues Sofia, his classmate with a deep fear of the insects, from a black widow in class. Sofia, for her part, can’t understand why she’s so strongly disturbed by a hearse she sees driving around the city. She has a good reason for her feelings, as she and her classmates discover, because the hearse contains Vampress, leader of Dell’Ombra, a secret organization of beings that “conspire in shadows to cast gloom upon the world.” The group, led by Vampress’ maniacal second-in-command, Vincenzo, soon unleashes an attack on the locals that leaves Monty, his prom date Cindy, and Sofia and other classmates running for their lives and struggling to make sense of a world turned upside down: “Vampires cover the place—crawling on the walls, hanging from the ceiling, crouched on the floor.” Monty and his friends soon discover that Vampress is the living reincarnation of Amelia Montgomery, a young woman who initially died in the 1880s. But the new world in which they live isn’t one in which knowledge offers immediate power; they still have a long battle ahead of them.

As the story goes on, Monty, in particular, must make a series of terrible choices—which person to rescue, which one to leave behind—if the group is to have any hope of navigating their ever-shifting, dangerous new circumstances. The story effectively makes use of multiple first-person points of view—from the feral brutality of Vincenzo and his powerful boss (“We have a singular goal: to flip the world on its head. Good will be punished; evil will be rewarded”) to Monty’s struggles with his domineering aunt and his abusive past: “That’s how her brother—my late father—looked at me before beating me to the brink of death.” This sort of cross-cutting enables Taylor to weave his characters’ inner turmoil into broader themes: notably, how humankind can fight a natural world that seems to have turned on them. The final takeaway is about accepting the reality of change in all its cold, hard finality, as Monty does; he acknowledges a tragic loss, and he tells Sofia how she allowed him to understand that loss’s implications: “She was everything to me. She still is, but she can’t be my lifeline. No one can. I needed to find purpose inside myself, and you helped me do that.” It’s one of many fine instances of nuanced storytelling that will stick with readers long after they’ve turned the final page.

A well-crafted deconstruction of dystopian vampire tropes with style and class.