Bride of the Fat White Vampire
by Andrew Fox
(Ballantine Books, $14.95, 429 pages, trade paperback; published in
August 2004.)
In Fat White Vampire
Blues, Andrew Fox introduced Jules Duchon, a vastly  overweight
New Orleans vampire with a secret past as a Nazi-fighting superhero.
Bride of the Fat White Vampire continues where the first book
left off, reuniting Jules with many of his friends and foes from the
previous book and adding more characters to the cast.
The first book in the series established Fox's deft knack for combining
genres, and Bride of the Fat White Vampire confirms it. This
time around, Fox concocts a convoluted mystery in the hardboiled tradition
of Raymond Chandler, explicitly perverts the Anne Rice brand of vampire
fiction, and spices the plot with elements from James Whale's film
Bride of Frankenstein.
Jules is forced to work with several of his enemies from the previous
book as he is blackmailed into investigating the mutilation of young
female vampires, the killings (by vampires) of popular black preachers,
and how both of these cases connect with a controversial urban redevelopment
project and the reappearance of an old friend he'd believed dead.
Bride of the Fat White Vampire is an entertaining romp, but
it does suffer from sequelitis. Fox's first novel didn't shy away from
dealing head-on with the ethics of Jules's life as a bloodsucking murderer
and with difficult questions of race politics. This time around these
issues are given token nods, while the violence and brutality are never
real enough to hurt.
Fox loves his characters -- perhaps a bit too much. Fat White Vampire
Blues had consequences, giving weight to the comedy, while Bride
of the Fat White Vampire Fox, clearly setting up a series, ends
too happily and too conveniently to be as convincing as its excellent
predecessor.
Nevertheless, Bride of the Fat White Vampire does provide good
laughs and exciting thrills.
Originally published in
The Montreal Gazette, Saturday, 14 August 2004.
Claude Lalumière's Fantastic Fiction
is a series of
capsule reviews first published in the Saturday Books
section of The Montreal Gazette.
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