Book review: 'The Night Eternal'

Book: The Night Eternal
Guillermo Del Toro & Chuck Hogan
HarperCollins 
372 pages
Rs250

What if human beings were supplanted at the top of the food chain by a “creature race of superior strength”? What if their staple diet was human blood? And how would this affect your relationship with your son/girlfriend/father/ boyfriend/mother/office colleague? This thought experiment is carried out with frightening attention to detail in film director Guillermo Del Toro and novelist Chuck Hogan’s trilogy of vampire thrillers, of which The Night Eternal is the third and final instalment.

The superior species in question is, of course, the vampire. But Del Toro and Hogan’s vampires are not Twilight-type creatures with emo good looks and a weakness for luxury sedans (Edward drives an Aston Martin V12 Vanquish while Carlisle owns a Mercedes S55 AMG). They are humanoid monsters whose interest in you is similar to what a lizard feels for a cockroach. And human beings are pretty much below the cockroach in the new world order established by the Master, the super-intelligent, telepathic, preternaturally powerful, 2000-year-old vampire that takes control of the planet after subjugating the human race.
With the wily vampire hunter Abraham Setrakian having died at the hands of the Master, it is now up to a motley crew of bickering resistance fighters — Dr Ephraim Goodweather, his former girlfriend Nora Martinez, rat catcher Vasiliy Fet, a black gangbanger Gus, and Mr Quinlan, an estranged offspring of the Master and the lone vampire aligned with the humans — to overcome the Master and bring the old order back.

This page-turner strikes the ideal balance between effective characterisation and fast-paced plot. The consequences of a vampire-dominated world for human relations and outlook are imaginatively worked out. In one passage, for instance, Alex Creem, a gangster, talks about the women he has saved from being ‘turned’ (into vampires). He protects them so he can sleep with them. “The women were nothing very special, a few desperate strays they had picked up along the way — but they were women and they were warm and alive. ‘Alive’ was very sexy these days.” In a world ruled by the undead, where most ‘women’ are out to suck you dry — only of your blood, alas — ‘alive’ would indeed be the high point of sexiness.

The vampire-ruled world is one where there is no shopping, TV offers only reruns of shows past, and night is day and day is night (because sunlight is fatal to vampires). And human beings are organised into a new caste system based on their blood group. They are bred in captivity for their blood, much like livestock are for their meat or milk or eggs. No school for you, and no office — just sit there and make blood.

Contrary to what we might believe — given our exalted notions about humanity and so-called civilization — not all humans find the new reality to be worse than what existed before. Many make their peace with their vampire overlords, and do well for themselves. Everett Barnes is one of them. A doctor and entrepreneur, he runs industrial camps where humans are farmed for blood, which he packages and distributes to the vampire population.

Barnes’ justification for these camps (not unlike our SEZs and sweatshops) is eerily reminiscent of the neoliberal orthodoxy that dictates government policy in most countries today: “The basic human biological function — the creation of blood — is an enormous resource to their kind [vampires]…the camp exists neither to punish nor oppress. It is simply a facility, constructed for mass production and maximum efficiency.”

You can’t have a more accurate description of the moral philosophy of free market economics. If vampires and zombies have come back with a vengeance in mass culture, there must be reasons for it, and you can be sure cultural theorists and social psychologists will have some ready. Yet one can’t help but speculate on the socio-economic parallels between a world where humans exist to service vampires and a world where humans exist to service vampiric capital.

In both cases, the moral imperative is displaced by the economic imperative. Is the return of the vampire and zombies in popular culture also a return of a repressed truth about the plight of humanity in today’s world?

To their credit, the vampires in this book, unlike their human counterparts on Wall Street and the PMO, are no hypocrites. The Master admits that it believes in no morality. And this amorality makes it easier for the vampire to achieve dominance over humans who have retained a semblance of morality even under extreme circumstances.

The character of Ephraim Goodweather embodies this struggle between the logic of expediency and the logic of morality — a morality that is closely tied up with whatever it is that lends a person his or her humanity.

But in the end, which is a bit of a mish-mash in this book, it is this very humanity — which is not an economic resource, and therefore has no value in the calculus of capitalism — that trumps, and stumps, the all-powerful Master. Can the little humans in the real world put up a similarly strong fight against their equivalent of the vampire adversary, marauding capital? Well, you’ll have to be around for a really long time to find out. And that, only a vampire can do.