Gothique

by Kyle Marffin

Step into the dark side of the darkwave. Join the children of the night--desperately hoping, dreaming, wishing for it all to be true, to become their songs, their books, their films, their role-playing games and all their fashionable flirtations and imagined supernatural power and dark romance. Oh please, be real... A city anxiously embraces the grand opening of Gothique. 'Nightclub Extraordinaire', mecca for the disaffected goth kids and decadent scene-makers. But a dark secret lurks behind Gothique's doors, where the evil is all too real, where a nightmare of bloodshed and something far worse than death is unleashed, where hopeless screams of despair are muffled by the relentless darkwave dance beat. Welcome to Gothique. You'll just die.

Genres: Vampires, Horror, Fiction, Urban Fantasy

448 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2000

Reviews

[Sean · Rating 3 out of 5]

Vampires set up shop in a trendy Chicago Goth club. The premise is interesting and at least the author goes for predatory vampires instead of the hip, lovelorn creatures we're often given. The cast of characters is too long, as tends to be the case in horror epics like this one, and many of them aren't fully fleshed out, but several of them are quite likable and you want them to survive long enough to find a happy ending. A lot of them don't. The novel's main weaknesses are the fact that it's rather overwritten, as if the author was trying too hard to get things "just so" during the creative process, and certainly overlong--as in by about 150 pages or so. Very few horror novels need to go on for 448 pages. Moreover, while I like the writer's decision to focus on the evil inherent in vampirism, the vampires of GOTHIQUE are not particularly formidable when their victims start to fight back, and when faced with a serious challenge they prove to be both cowardly and far easier to destroy than one might expect. On balance, though, GOTHIQUE is an above-average vampire story that gets more right than it does wrong and avoids some of the sub-genre's worst pitfalls.