Arctangential

I finished Out of the House of Life yesterday afternoon — it took me a while because, frankly, the book is pretty dull.

The book is about Madelaine de Montalia, a French antiquarian who also happens to be a vampire, but this fact is not actually all that important in the book. The book is billed as “historical horror”, but it’s really just a simple drama, all about the lives, loves and betrayals of a group of European antiquarians excavating in Egypt in the 1820s. The narrative is pretty complicated — there are lots of characters to keep track of, most of which have long and complicated British or French names, the rest having shorter but more confusing Egyptian names. Personal relations are difficult to track, what with not being sure of who is who, and also with part of the story being told in periodic epistolary passages which are used to inject information and viewpoints from outside of Egypt, whence the story never strays. Each section also begins with a letter from the Count Saint-Germain (a recurring character for the author), who also happens to be a vampire, recounting stories of his time in Egypt, thousands of years ago. These stories are actually a lot more interesting than the main story, but they’re annoying short and distressingly unrelated to the main plot line.

The basic idea here is that the head of the expedition is a Frenchman (whom I thought of simply as “B”) is kind of an asshole — he takes credit for all of his underlings’ discoveries, sells ancient artifacts for political advantage, etc. As the story moves forward, he gets inexplicably more and more disgusting, starting off by making advances towards Madelaine, then threats. It’s intimated that he tries to kill her, first with a scorpion and later with a cobra. By the end of the book he’s a complete ogre, raping and impregnating the daughter of a local magistrate, luring Madelaine and her friend into a trap where they’re shot at — her friend dies saving her, and still she almost dies. While she’s holed up in a cave, this B guy shows up again to kill her, for reasons unclear; luckily she’s a vampire, so she can stab him(?). The end.

It really seems like the author just wanted to write this story about infighting at an Egyptian dig, but felt that she needed to throw in her popular character and some other vampire crap to be more popular. She didn’t fool me though — I bought this book to fill in the “Y” section of my collection.

Now I’m reading The Macedonian, by Jon Williams, the 4th in his “Privateers and Gentlemen” series. It’s not bad.