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Monastery
"THOSE THAT ARE HERE WILL BECOME AS US. THOSE THAT COME HERE WILL MEET THE SAME FATE. NOTHING CAN STOP US. NOTHING."
Chinook Island, twenty-six miles off the coast of Washington State... a solitary place of windswept cliffs and brooding skies. A place where a godforsaken abbey stands sentry over an ancient, unholy secret. Long ago, two priests took a vow in blood-a vow to silence forever the evil entombed below. Today the guardians are gone. And with a promise forged in hell, the madness is beginning Again. Now a preternatural hunger stalks the people of Chinook Island. In the shadows, human flesh is torn, ravaged, drained. Bodies are resurrected. And gruesome solders form an unspeakable army. This time the creatures of the night... the living dead... will survive. Many will be lured within the hallowed, haunted chambers. They will find no escape, no peace, no rest. Not even death...
Chinook Island, twenty-six miles off the coast of Washington State... a solitary place of windswept cliffs and brooding skies. A place where a godforsaken abbey stands sentry over an ancient, unholy secret. Long ago, two priests took a vow in blood-a vow to silence forever the evil entombed below. Today the guardians are gone. And with a promise forged in hell, the madness is beginning Again. Now a preternatural hunger stalks the people of Chinook Island. In the shadows, human flesh is torn, ravaged, drained. Bodies are resurrected. And gruesome solders form an unspeakable army. This time the creatures of the night... the living dead... will survive. Many will be lured within the hallowed, haunted chambers. They will find no escape, no peace, no rest. Not even death...
346 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1988
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
December 29, 2025
Pretty glorious for a pulpy mess! Most of the tale takes place on Chinook Island off the coast of Washington State. After WWI, the church build a grand monastery there when the island hosted only an Indian tribe. Flash forward to now and the island has become something of a resort with a daily ferry to the mainland. Whalen takes his time at first introducing the main characters along with Braille our protagonist and they all gradually converge on the island.
Braille now works as a professional assassin and starts the novel returning to the island after a job; years ago, he bought an old lighthouse compound on the island and restored it. Leslie works for Christian television company and arrives on the island to interview Indian orphans to raise money, although she hardly 'buys' the Christianity part; she does her job for the money. Braille comes pretty close to a Gary Stu, with his extensive martial arts training and his marksmanship, and he meets Leslie by chance at a disco. Well, the two 'connect' and Whalen gives us a little romance.
The heart of the story involves the titular Monastery, which houses some 15 or so 'Ancients', e.g., old vampires, that the church somehow imprisoned them and now stores them at the monastery. Well, you guessed it, they get out and boy are they hungry! Whalen does not add much to the vampire lore here, except that the 'New Ones' the Ancients create are pretty feral, and will be for hundreds of years. Only when they reach an advanced age do they remember their 'humanity' to a degree and by this time they are quite powerful, able to tolerate the sun and such. The oldest of the Ancients, Gregory, comes off as something of a gentleman!
By pulpy mess, I mean the story is full of plot holes, odd plot tangents, moves with somewhat erratic pacing, relies on some old tropes and features many characters making dubious decisions. Nonetheless, I found this a lot of fun to read! If you dig OTT 80s horror trash, you may really dig this one as well. 4 toothy stars!
Braille now works as a professional assassin and starts the novel returning to the island after a job; years ago, he bought an old lighthouse compound on the island and restored it. Leslie works for Christian television company and arrives on the island to interview Indian orphans to raise money, although she hardly 'buys' the Christianity part; she does her job for the money. Braille comes pretty close to a Gary Stu, with his extensive martial arts training and his marksmanship, and he meets Leslie by chance at a disco. Well, the two 'connect' and Whalen gives us a little romance.
The heart of the story involves the titular Monastery, which houses some 15 or so 'Ancients', e.g., old vampires, that the church somehow imprisoned them and now stores them at the monastery. Well, you guessed it, they get out and boy are they hungry! Whalen does not add much to the vampire lore here, except that the 'New Ones' the Ancients create are pretty feral, and will be for hundreds of years. Only when they reach an advanced age do they remember their 'humanity' to a degree and by this time they are quite powerful, able to tolerate the sun and such. The oldest of the Ancients, Gregory, comes off as something of a gentleman!
By pulpy mess, I mean the story is full of plot holes, odd plot tangents, moves with somewhat erratic pacing, relies on some old tropes and features many characters making dubious decisions. Nonetheless, I found this a lot of fun to read! If you dig OTT 80s horror trash, you may really dig this one as well. 4 toothy stars!
January 12, 2017
I really liked the elegant vampire playing the starring role. A real gentleman. Quite a different vampire story and a really brutal one. Isolated island, vampires start to kill, ex POW turned killer (!) fights vampires. By the way those vampires face another enemy: radiation from a nuclear power plant. Great story, fluent read, all the cliches you need. I wondered why no one made a movie out of this story so far.
January 24, 2008
Patrick Whalen, Monastery (Pocket, 1988)
I knew five pages into Monastery that I wasn't going to like it. But still, I kept reading as per the fifty-page rule;... you give it fifty pages anyway, because it may pick up (and it gives you enough of a basis to write a scathing review, which is usually worth the time you put in). In this case, it DID pick up, and Monastery ends up being a compulsively readable little treatise. But the good parts end up underlining the bad more than canceling them out and showing how good a book this could have been. With a few more rewrites and a harsher editor, Patrick Whalen's name might well be sitting with King's, Koontz', and Barker's atop the pile of horror writers who can sell a million books by rewriting Mary Had a Little Lamb and including an axe murderer. That, however, did not happen, and Whalen sank into obscurity.
Monastery is the story of two basically unkillable folks, a hit man named Braille and an Ancient named Gregory. Gregory and his pal are vampires of an indeterminate age who were trapped by the Catholic church a hundred years before and imprisoned in the basement of a monastery (thus the book's title). A team of sociologists from a local college buys the monastery after the not-mysterious-at-all death of its caretakers and, as sociologists will, set about going out to the secluded island where the monastery resides and opening it up. Whoops. Braille, returning home to the island after a job, finds himself walking into something of a nightmare of vampires running around killing the townspeople, etc. Here's where the book diverges from other horror novels. Braille isn't your usual horror novel hero. No freezing in terror, no high-pitched shrieking, just a quick inventory of weapons and trying various ones out to figure out what's going to kill the vampires as quickly and easily as possible. This is the horror novel hero that horror novel fans have been waiting for for decades. Braille and Gregory, opposite sides of the same coin, are more like something out of a good martial arts film (or, actually, what came to mind immediately for me was Pacino and De Niro in Michael Mann's film Heat); the two grow to respect each other, almost becoming friends, while still realizing that one of them cannot survive. The question them becomes, what happens when the immovable post meets the irresistible object? And those are always the best horror novels, in my estimation.
Given such a great premise and such wonderful characters, why does Monastery not measure up? A lot of it has to do with the writing itself, unfortunately. Whalen is a little too transparent in where he's going at times, especially with character names (when you have a TV preacher named Chapel, you realize by page 20 one of the major twists in the final battle. After all, your hero is named... Braille). And after you meet the sociological team and see the inevitable end they come to, you've got the template for Whalen's minor characters. Every horror novel needs minor characters who are set up just to be killed, and even a few major ones, but ever since Stephen King pulled his "he's NOT going to kill HER!" twist in `Salem's Lot in 1974, every horror writer has aspired to follow suit: set up your minor characters as if they're going to become major characters. Make them more than cardboard cutouts. Most importantly, don't let the reader know they're going to die until they do (preferably in as inventive, spectacular, and grimly humorous a way as possible). Whalen handles the first two parts of the rule with considerable aplomb, but fails miserably at the third. And it's all the more painful because of the way he handles the deaths of various characters (impossible to show specifics without getting into plot spoilers, but one of the characters in the book you really, really want to die does, and his death could be--should be--a template for future horror writers to work from, specifically because it deviates from part three. Handled just a little better, it would have been one of the notable passages in horror writing in the past half century).
And so I'm stuck figuring out how to rate this novel. I'd unhesitatingly recommend it to readers of horror fiction, because there's a lot of good here, and there was potential for greatness. That recommendation, however, comes with the caveat that you can expect to be disappointed overall. As someone said in a movie I recently saw, "when it's good, it ain't bad, and when it's bad, it ain't good." ** ½
I knew five pages into Monastery that I wasn't going to like it. But still, I kept reading as per the fifty-page rule;... you give it fifty pages anyway, because it may pick up (and it gives you enough of a basis to write a scathing review, which is usually worth the time you put in). In this case, it DID pick up, and Monastery ends up being a compulsively readable little treatise. But the good parts end up underlining the bad more than canceling them out and showing how good a book this could have been. With a few more rewrites and a harsher editor, Patrick Whalen's name might well be sitting with King's, Koontz', and Barker's atop the pile of horror writers who can sell a million books by rewriting Mary Had a Little Lamb and including an axe murderer. That, however, did not happen, and Whalen sank into obscurity.
Monastery is the story of two basically unkillable folks, a hit man named Braille and an Ancient named Gregory. Gregory and his pal are vampires of an indeterminate age who were trapped by the Catholic church a hundred years before and imprisoned in the basement of a monastery (thus the book's title). A team of sociologists from a local college buys the monastery after the not-mysterious-at-all death of its caretakers and, as sociologists will, set about going out to the secluded island where the monastery resides and opening it up. Whoops. Braille, returning home to the island after a job, finds himself walking into something of a nightmare of vampires running around killing the townspeople, etc. Here's where the book diverges from other horror novels. Braille isn't your usual horror novel hero. No freezing in terror, no high-pitched shrieking, just a quick inventory of weapons and trying various ones out to figure out what's going to kill the vampires as quickly and easily as possible. This is the horror novel hero that horror novel fans have been waiting for for decades. Braille and Gregory, opposite sides of the same coin, are more like something out of a good martial arts film (or, actually, what came to mind immediately for me was Pacino and De Niro in Michael Mann's film Heat); the two grow to respect each other, almost becoming friends, while still realizing that one of them cannot survive. The question them becomes, what happens when the immovable post meets the irresistible object? And those are always the best horror novels, in my estimation.
Given such a great premise and such wonderful characters, why does Monastery not measure up? A lot of it has to do with the writing itself, unfortunately. Whalen is a little too transparent in where he's going at times, especially with character names (when you have a TV preacher named Chapel, you realize by page 20 one of the major twists in the final battle. After all, your hero is named... Braille). And after you meet the sociological team and see the inevitable end they come to, you've got the template for Whalen's minor characters. Every horror novel needs minor characters who are set up just to be killed, and even a few major ones, but ever since Stephen King pulled his "he's NOT going to kill HER!" twist in `Salem's Lot in 1974, every horror writer has aspired to follow suit: set up your minor characters as if they're going to become major characters. Make them more than cardboard cutouts. Most importantly, don't let the reader know they're going to die until they do (preferably in as inventive, spectacular, and grimly humorous a way as possible). Whalen handles the first two parts of the rule with considerable aplomb, but fails miserably at the third. And it's all the more painful because of the way he handles the deaths of various characters (impossible to show specifics without getting into plot spoilers, but one of the characters in the book you really, really want to die does, and his death could be--should be--a template for future horror writers to work from, specifically because it deviates from part three. Handled just a little better, it would have been one of the notable passages in horror writing in the past half century).
And so I'm stuck figuring out how to rate this novel. I'd unhesitatingly recommend it to readers of horror fiction, because there's a lot of good here, and there was potential for greatness. That recommendation, however, comes with the caveat that you can expect to be disappointed overall. As someone said in a movie I recently saw, "when it's good, it ain't bad, and when it's bad, it ain't good." ** ½
May 1, 2012
Monastery is a book that was recommended to me several years ago from a friend who also enjoyed horror literature. However, I never guessed how difficult it would be to find this book. But I'm glad I finally did. Monastery is set on an island in the Pacific Northwest where the Monks who maintain an old Monastery guard an ancient evil force. When the inevitable happens and this evil is released upon the island, the only man who stands a chance against it is a solitary professional assassin. The lines between good and evil become somewhat grey in this story and by the end, you know that the final battle has not been fought. If you can find this book at a reasonable price, it's well worth the read. (originally posted on Amazon.com)
January 19, 2009
An interesting, entertaining twist on the vampire legend. The one unfortunate thing about this book is that it gets bogged down in repetition. While I have nothing against long novels, better editing could have cut this book to a tight, edge-of-your-seat 275 pages or so.
One note to potential readers: This book has apparently become extremely difficult to find. Used paperback copies are selling on Amazon and Abebooks for more than $20.
One note to potential readers: This book has apparently become extremely difficult to find. Used paperback copies are selling on Amazon and Abebooks for more than $20.
May 27, 2020
An odd mix of vampire novel and 80's kung-fu, shootem-up action flick with a hero reminiscent of some puffed-up Chuck Norris character. Fun at times, frustrating at others, laughable a few, and even surprising.
March 2, 2018
This was a good and scary book Loved it a lot .
November 22, 2019
IT WAS OK
August 14, 2021
Excellent book. One of the best vampire novels I have read!
March 29, 2022
I was unsure at first and a few times throughout. I didn't care for Leslie Chapel. I thought she was kind of annoying, lol. but that ending..... wow! Worth it!
May 10, 2024
Great book!!!! Braille is an awesome anti-hero!! Can't wait to read Night Thirst!
November 20, 2024
4.5 rounded down for GR. Amazingly unique take on vampires and packed with action and intrigue. Could have bene a 5 had it not been for some of the glaring outdated / problematic elements.
October 21, 2025
Best vampire tale ever
I have this paperback book and read it years ago. The characters are perfect. This is a story to be read again and again.
I have this paperback book and read it years ago. The characters are perfect. This is a story to be read again and again.
December 11, 2013
I really like the layout of this story and I had certain expectations regarding the main character, Braille. The way he survived was somewhat surprising...
Repetitious trips to town got old. Still, the action carried the story past that problem. Perhaps some of Braille's supplies could have been found by going someplace other than 'town'.
The two remaining old ones came off as sort of wooden. It would have been nice to have more of the story about them if only to get me to care more when their final scene occurred.
In the end, there seems to be an opening for more. Will Gregory and Braille meet up again? Did even one of the new ones escape the death cloud? I'd read more about these characters, particularly if Gregory and Braille meet up again.
Repetitious trips to town got old. Still, the action carried the story past that problem. Perhaps some of Braille's supplies could have been found by going someplace other than 'town'.
The two remaining old ones came off as sort of wooden. It would have been nice to have more of the story about them if only to get me to care more when their final scene occurred.
In the end, there seems to be an opening for more. Will Gregory and Braille meet up again? Did even one of the new ones escape the death cloud? I'd read more about these characters, particularly if Gregory and Braille meet up again.
October 7, 2013
A rather crudely written horror action-thriller, with far too much mindless carnage; the latter oddly anticipates some recent zombie novels, only here the advancing, slavering hordes which must be hacked or blown to bits in diverse ways are vampires, not the living dead.
Still, some of the melodrama is effective, and there is an eerie scene (somewhat spoiled by sophomoric humour) near the beginning when the long entombed Ancients are first discovered. The narrative careens forward like an out-of-control locomotive, but the pace isn't quite hectic enough to distract the reader from clumsiness of plotting and characterization.
Still, some of the melodrama is effective, and there is an eerie scene (somewhat spoiled by sophomoric humour) near the beginning when the long entombed Ancients are first discovered. The narrative careens forward like an out-of-control locomotive, but the pace isn't quite hectic enough to distract the reader from clumsiness of plotting and characterization.
April 4, 2022
I really wanted to love this book. I mean, having a kung-fu super soldier who cuts and guns down vampires that overun the small island he's on should be an obvious formula for success right?
The real problem with the book are the scenes in between the delicious, violent cheese. The characters, they're not great, and I think too much time is spent with em. I hope at least there's one book of his I can call great. Since when this book wants to be an entertaining farce, I find myself enjoying it a great deal.
The real problem with the book are the scenes in between the delicious, violent cheese. The characters, they're not great, and I think too much time is spent with em. I hope at least there's one book of his I can call great. Since when this book wants to be an entertaining farce, I find myself enjoying it a great deal.
June 23, 2009
This book is fantastic if you want a campy fun read. Just like most of the pulp horror novels of the early nineties, this one is low on substance and character development, but it reads fast has a pretty novel take on the vampire myth. I hope you enjoy it.
November 29, 2007
This book was one of the first vampire books I ever read. I recall it being really sweet at the time. But I was like nine years old. So who knows if it's actually good.
July 30, 2019
I love this story. Not your typical Vampire book. The way the story is told is almost believable.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews