The Vampires

by John Rechy

On a beautiful private island somewhere in the Caribbean, the rituals of witchcraft and Satanism suddenly take over the lives of a group of people, exposing and shaping their destinies.

Genres: Fiction, Horror, Vampires, Gay

276 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

John Rechy is an American author, the child of a Scottish father and a Mexican-American mother. In his novels he has written extensively about homosexual culture in Los Angeles and wider America, and is among the pioneers of modern LGBT literature. Drawing on his own background, he has also contributed to Chicano literature, especially with his novel The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez, which is taught in several Chicano literature courses in the United States. His work has often faced censorship due to its sexual content, particularly (but not solely) in the 1960s and 1970s, but books such as City of Night have been best sellers, and he has many literary admirers.

Reviews

[mark monday · Rating 2 out of 5]

these characters are dangerously overripe fruit fit to burst, to spray fluids and seed everywhere, juices sickly sweet and pungently sour and acridly bitter, their flesh glossy, their innards rotting. they love their melodrama and they! love! their! exclamation! points!! they arrive on this island paradise ready to break down and ready to break each other down. they are witches and warlocks, actresses and groupies, innocent twins and a predatory 14 year old, priests and virgins and whores of both genders. they burst all over each other while playing various inexplicable games and enacting various inane rituals, all created solely to reveal their hollow cores and lack of soul, and to provide what skeleton there is of a plot. the characters and the story itself teeter constantly between seething malevolence and outraged shock.



this is a rarified world of sophisticates who are basically garbage people. it also appears to be a view of Straight World through a very dated gay lens. the women are mainly over the top, theatrically emotional divas - drag queens turned into women but who have no relation to any women that I've ever met. perhaps I should spend more time with sophisticated garbage people? there is a trans woman as well, treated respectfully by the other guests but quite cruelly by the far from woke author. the men are all studs, their bodies drooled over, fit and hung and hairy (even the priest and even the boy - whose oversize equipment and fuzzy legs are repeatedly described), all ready to fuck with your head while feigning interest in fucking your body. toxic predators, with a smattering of prey. the book itself is quite toxic in its hilariously overheated take on human nature, power, secrets, and sexuality. well, straight people have written gay characters as vicious predators for who knows how long, so I suppose turnabout is fair play. but that doesn't make the book any less noxious, and obnoxiously written. I imagine the lesson to be learned here, the underlying theme, is a fairly reductive one: trust no one, not even yourself; you are probably better off dead.



the book is pretentious, silly, and trashy, yet enjoyable in the way that a bad movie is enjoyable. a bad movie of the excessively mannered, melodramatic, arty sort. it takes itself all too seriously which makes it a pleasing experience to laugh at it. you have to understand that it is telling you nothing useful about the human condition and that its attempt at ambiguous storytelling is a joke; there is nothing in The Vampires that is actually worth understanding. but it is also a lot of fun at times, a rickety rollercoaster tour of garbage lives, a water ride where everyone is drenched and everyone's clothes have to come off. the book has a garbage perspective on relationships, gender, life itself. but! it! is! still! a lot! of pretentious! trashy! silly! stupid! mean! fun!

[Jordan West · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a challenging book to review; other reviewers here have compared it to a giallo or a film by Fassbinder, and in truth, it pretty much is the equivalent of a '70's Eurosleaze movie in novel form, a sort of psychosexual, sadomasochistic take on the 'Old Dark House'/'Ten Little Indians' formula, replete with oodles of angst, lust, decadence and suggestions of voodoo and the occult. Populated by a cast of damaged outsiders and hateful egomaniacs it's almost impossible not to envision as being played by the likes of Kinski, Kier, D'Allesandro and Fenech, if one enjoys that sort of cinema then they will likely appreciate this. However, the novel also possesses a uniformly histrionic and over-the-top tone that starts to wear after awhile, particularly in the final third of the book, which is comprised mostly of the characters' forming temporary alliances in order to attack the others while their darkest secrets are exposed resembles an episode of 'It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia' as penned by Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee; in the end I'm left unable to decide between two stars or three.

[Clayton Greiman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I relate "The Vampires" to an Agatha Christie mystery; however, the gathered players are sadomasochistic oddities who alternately want to eviscerate/control/murder one another. While all the characters are not stellar, there are enough good ones gathered on the tableau to earn a daring reader's interest.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

The literary equivalent of a Fassbinder film. Well worth reading.

[Bill Wallace · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've been reading early issues of Evergreen Review A couple of non-fiction pieces by John Rechy are outstanding even among the impressive content, and I remembered I had picked up a copy of this novel a year or two back but hadn't read it. As many of the other reviews here say, it reads like a description of a Eurosploitation film from the 70s, maybe something by Jean Rollin on a bad day. I'm keen to know why Rechy wrote this -- was it an attempt to catch splashed glory from Grove's recent sequel to The Story of O? Is it meant to be a satire on the seamy side of Olympia Press' shelves? Overheated on practically every page, occasionally hilarious (intentionally?) in its style, and largely ridiculous in its "plot," this novel has none of the charm of City of Night, itself a book with problems. Perhaps most puzzling for a work of "eroticism," by the end of the novel one finds that it is not heter0-, homo-, pan-, or any other common variety of sexual, but antisexual, with an abhorrence for physicality that would do an Xian aesthete proud. An intriguing mess, not without entertainment value, if only for its oddness.

[Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am a big John Rechy fan and have read a lot of his books. This book was very much of its time period (1973) with power games, sexual obsession, transvestism, lesbians with whips, deflowered virgins, sexually precocious youths, midgets, call boys etc. A group of disparate people visit a house on a lush Caribbean island to play these games. Rechy wrote a scaled down version of a similar story in 2018 called "The Blue Knight" and it reads much better than this baroque dated mess of a book. I recommend this only for completest fans of John Rechy. There a few good moments here that his readers will enjoy but not much else.

[Nick Melloan-ruiz · Rating 4 out of 5]

John rechy sumner keeps going

[William Thomas · Rating 2 out of 5]

i loved city of night. it was poetic and it was gorgeous, somewhwere inbetween beat and postmodern, the imagery and the situations and the observations made my knees weak. this book, however, is a departure from his previous novels and style. this one reads like a lame giallo script, something gothic and slow moving. there is very little intriguing about the book and with so many characters, its hard to keep track and care about any of them. reads like a lame italian horror flick.

[Mario · Rating 1 out of 5]

I loved City of Night, but this was terrible. In fact, I'm not sure why I keep bothering with Rechy. It's as if all of his best ideas went into one ok (a work that is largely autobiographical, or part autobiography and part fantasy). The Vampires seemed like an attempt to create drama, but it comes off as the worst of melodrama. I was painful to read.

[Damien · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting story, terrible writing. I first read this years and years and years ago, back when I fantasized about making movies (screenplay writer or director), and I was convinced that I could make an incredible motion picture based on this. Maybe it will one day happen.