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Vampires of Avonmouth
Plagued by his inner demon, a detective leaves behind his beloved daughter. In exile, he finds himself rebelling against a dystopian world of mental enslavement, where technology connects directly to the brain.
Everything changes when a ship arrives from his former home in West Africa, carrying a vampire who hungers not for blood but mental energy. He falls in love with the woman she hunts – despite himself. For the monstrous secret inside him wants to get out. How can they possibly survive?
Everything changes when a ship arrives from his former home in West Africa, carrying a vampire who hungers not for blood but mental energy. He falls in love with the woman she hunts – despite himself. For the monstrous secret inside him wants to get out. How can they possibly survive?
332 pages, Paperback
First published November 2, 2020
2 people are currently reading
35 people want to read
About the author
Tim Kindberg
7 books4 followersNottingham -> Cambridge -> San Francisco -> London -> Palo Alto -> Bristol -> Copenhagen -> Bristol -> Guangzhou -> Bristol.
Operating at the intersection of the strange and the mysterious.
Operating at the intersection of the strange and the mysterious.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
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May 23, 2021Vampires of Avonmouth is a beautifully rendered vision of the future (2087). It’s a techno-dystopian sci-fi but has some grounding in horror (possession of some sort and Vampiric in thematic devices - spliced with a distinct vision of the future).
Kindberg splices elements of science fiction into this offering with great aplomb and these reminded me of some of the work from Asimov and Dick in their visionary reach and crazy.
I didn’t particularly gel with the language of this offering I found it quite cold and clinical (intellectual) for my liking (but that probably speaks more about me that it does Kindberg’s craft, because the guy can write - this book was just a little out of my wheelhouse.
If you’re after something that different from the norm and visionary in scope I’d recommend checking this out.
It wasn’t for me - but I’m sure it’ll find an audience. (DNF)
http://vampiresofavonmouth.com
Kindberg splices elements of science fiction into this offering with great aplomb and these reminded me of some of the work from Asimov and Dick in their visionary reach and crazy.
I didn’t particularly gel with the language of this offering I found it quite cold and clinical (intellectual) for my liking (but that probably speaks more about me that it does Kindberg’s craft, because the guy can write - this book was just a little out of my wheelhouse.
If you’re after something that different from the norm and visionary in scope I’d recommend checking this out.
It wasn’t for me - but I’m sure it’ll find an audience. (DNF)
http://vampiresofavonmouth.com
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April 23, 2026What is lurking near the end of the grand pier with its wisht presence? Anyone who has taken a cursory glance at a field guide to the natural history of the vampire will know that there are vampires of blood, and other species hungry to feed upon the psyche. Those that inhabit the irresistibly titled Vampires of Avonmouth are the latter. Set in the late twenty-first century West Country and Ghana, the novel follows the efforts of the chief protagonists, rogue ID cop, David, tracking “renegades”, and the Ghanaian Pempansie, named after an Adinkra symbol of foresight and resilience. The relationship between the two is forged in a shared yearning to free their bodies and minds of their vodus, seemingly alter-beings that have entered them and dwell within. These, perhaps, are malevolent versions of those integrally connected dæmons familiar from their co-habitation of Phillip Pullman’s characters. This is a world animated by “mentalmagic” and populated by fleshren (humans), quasi-sentient, shapeshifting robots called bodais, electro-sorcerers and a dog called Coleridge. And, of course, there is the vampiric Obayifa, an attractive but menacing psychic predator, who unaccountably arrives on a rusting hulk of a ship. A haunting presence for the duration of the novel, Obayifa is more chilling than the common or garden sanguivorous vampire. Will she get her sustenance?
Like all good histories of the future, this novel extrapolates present trends into their fuller manifestation. After the time of “the Disruption,” (illegal to mention) trajectories of technological determinism have intensified. Artificial intelligence is a dominant controlling force, there has been a pandemic in the form of a dementia plague and bytecoins are in circulation. Errant Big Tech overlord’s increasingly condition present-day technologies from investment through research and development to their implementation, distribution and supply so that they are channelled to their interests and saturated with their ideologies. Here, the power of the undisclosed Big Mind is the controlling power. In this risky and uncertain reality, identity is a currency and David bends the rules of what is acceptable to the Big Mind in his pursuit of ID criminals. Most controversially he even periodically goes offline, a deeply suspicious and questionable activity. A misfit who breaks with his assigned role, David is a sci-fi noir character, recalling the desperate anti-heroes of Philip K Dick and William Gibson. Readers quickly find ourselves in a dystopian class society, where the unfortunate victims of vampirism are “nonned” into a zombie-like state:
Unresponsive, void-staring husks of human beings climbed into the branches instinctively and tottered until, finally weakened, they fell like empty, wing-clipped angels into the Accra-city streets.
Agency is a privilege of the digitally well-endowed. The wealthy inhabit communities that are more firewalled than gated, enjoying a state of “virtual segregation” a kind of class apartheid secured by algorithms. Others live in the realm of the “down-below”, fed “sensa” through mechanisms of telepathic domination so that a state of “numbed peace” prevails. For most of society, therefore, history has ended in perpetual social sedation. As one character scoffs, with a nod to Fukuyama, “I thought history ended decades ago”.
If the world of Vampires of Avonmouth for the most part exists outside time, much of it is also an atopia, a non-place where local distinctiveness has been erased. Only in pockets of “down-below” do differentiated streets and parishes of the eponymous Avonmouth endure in folk memory:
The city’s regions were but topological contingences of the built environment, without individual character. And yet flesh sometimes referred to parts of the down-below with the names of streets as used to be: Merebank, Kings Weston, Ironchurch.
There are some familiar place names such as Arnos Vale, but this is not recognisably the West Country as we know and love it. Now a hub, Avonmouth.city, has become the main centre of settlement, cheekily eclipsing Bristol.city which:
lay drab and dilapidated, unrecognisable from its days as a centre of creativity and technology early in the century. Now it was little more than a collection of cemeteries. They left the uninhabited suburbs, soaring above the fleeting landscape. The Avon, with its crinkly mud walls at low tide, snaked back to the Severn Estuary beside them.
Beloved cultural institutions that help create a sense of place have lost their purpose and disappeared,
“… there were no longer any parks, gardens, galleries or museums, since those could be experienced virtually, telepathically via sensa delivered at optimum times.”
Tim Kindberg has more fun with “Super Mare”, which is somewhat legendary location, at turns the end of the rainbow and an El Dorado in the popular imagination. “Not on any map”, for much of the novel the characters are unsure as to whether it actually exists. It is also apparently protected by a field of repulsion that ensures outsiders rarely visit.
Cities are typically hubs with domain-names signalling that the distinction between the physical, organic world and virtual world has largely blurred and collapsed. The physical world of the post-Disruption has clearly suffered from traumatic ecological crises. Despite the presence of solar panels and wind turbines, urban dwellers live in fear of rising sea levels and migration, as presumably large swathes of the planet have become uninhabitable. Echoing the concerns of David Goulson’ Silent Earth, this is also a post-insect land. It is unclear how crops might be pollinated. Indeed, not much eating or drinking occurs in the novel, even on the part of the characters who are flesh. An exception is David’s consumption of an “unmeatburger” in Spoons, the eateries that have somehow survived like corporate cockroaches. As David breaks away to a freer life an unexpected experience of biophilia in a garden of fragrant flowers and embracing trees is a moment of therapeutic liberation. However, both he, and we readers, are left uncertain as to whether this green place of beauty is authentic.
Kindberg’s expertise in computer science enable him to conjure a complex other world that is convincing, if bewildering, in its detail. It evokes an alienating future technosphere where digital identity is both a vulnerability and a refuge and where there is no religion but “the worship of consumption”. In this context, memory is a form of resistance; even David is unsettled by the unnamed notepad and pen-wielding heretic, his cellmate who speaks of the forbidden times of football, skateboards, and bicycles. Vampires of Avonmouth has pace and momentum. It is recommended reading for all West Country sci-fi fans and for those with a taste for speculative history. Future Song, Kindberg’s new novel forthcoming at the time of writing, is also set in a West Country of impending decades, beset by climate change. It will be one to listen out for and to look forward to. (Review for Bristol Radical History Group)
Like all good histories of the future, this novel extrapolates present trends into their fuller manifestation. After the time of “the Disruption,” (illegal to mention) trajectories of technological determinism have intensified. Artificial intelligence is a dominant controlling force, there has been a pandemic in the form of a dementia plague and bytecoins are in circulation. Errant Big Tech overlord’s increasingly condition present-day technologies from investment through research and development to their implementation, distribution and supply so that they are channelled to their interests and saturated with their ideologies. Here, the power of the undisclosed Big Mind is the controlling power. In this risky and uncertain reality, identity is a currency and David bends the rules of what is acceptable to the Big Mind in his pursuit of ID criminals. Most controversially he even periodically goes offline, a deeply suspicious and questionable activity. A misfit who breaks with his assigned role, David is a sci-fi noir character, recalling the desperate anti-heroes of Philip K Dick and William Gibson. Readers quickly find ourselves in a dystopian class society, where the unfortunate victims of vampirism are “nonned” into a zombie-like state:
Unresponsive, void-staring husks of human beings climbed into the branches instinctively and tottered until, finally weakened, they fell like empty, wing-clipped angels into the Accra-city streets.
Agency is a privilege of the digitally well-endowed. The wealthy inhabit communities that are more firewalled than gated, enjoying a state of “virtual segregation” a kind of class apartheid secured by algorithms. Others live in the realm of the “down-below”, fed “sensa” through mechanisms of telepathic domination so that a state of “numbed peace” prevails. For most of society, therefore, history has ended in perpetual social sedation. As one character scoffs, with a nod to Fukuyama, “I thought history ended decades ago”.
If the world of Vampires of Avonmouth for the most part exists outside time, much of it is also an atopia, a non-place where local distinctiveness has been erased. Only in pockets of “down-below” do differentiated streets and parishes of the eponymous Avonmouth endure in folk memory:
The city’s regions were but topological contingences of the built environment, without individual character. And yet flesh sometimes referred to parts of the down-below with the names of streets as used to be: Merebank, Kings Weston, Ironchurch.
There are some familiar place names such as Arnos Vale, but this is not recognisably the West Country as we know and love it. Now a hub, Avonmouth.city, has become the main centre of settlement, cheekily eclipsing Bristol.city which:
lay drab and dilapidated, unrecognisable from its days as a centre of creativity and technology early in the century. Now it was little more than a collection of cemeteries. They left the uninhabited suburbs, soaring above the fleeting landscape. The Avon, with its crinkly mud walls at low tide, snaked back to the Severn Estuary beside them.
Beloved cultural institutions that help create a sense of place have lost their purpose and disappeared,
“… there were no longer any parks, gardens, galleries or museums, since those could be experienced virtually, telepathically via sensa delivered at optimum times.”
Tim Kindberg has more fun with “Super Mare”, which is somewhat legendary location, at turns the end of the rainbow and an El Dorado in the popular imagination. “Not on any map”, for much of the novel the characters are unsure as to whether it actually exists. It is also apparently protected by a field of repulsion that ensures outsiders rarely visit.
Cities are typically hubs with domain-names signalling that the distinction between the physical, organic world and virtual world has largely blurred and collapsed. The physical world of the post-Disruption has clearly suffered from traumatic ecological crises. Despite the presence of solar panels and wind turbines, urban dwellers live in fear of rising sea levels and migration, as presumably large swathes of the planet have become uninhabitable. Echoing the concerns of David Goulson’ Silent Earth, this is also a post-insect land. It is unclear how crops might be pollinated. Indeed, not much eating or drinking occurs in the novel, even on the part of the characters who are flesh. An exception is David’s consumption of an “unmeatburger” in Spoons, the eateries that have somehow survived like corporate cockroaches. As David breaks away to a freer life an unexpected experience of biophilia in a garden of fragrant flowers and embracing trees is a moment of therapeutic liberation. However, both he, and we readers, are left uncertain as to whether this green place of beauty is authentic.
Kindberg’s expertise in computer science enable him to conjure a complex other world that is convincing, if bewildering, in its detail. It evokes an alienating future technosphere where digital identity is both a vulnerability and a refuge and where there is no religion but “the worship of consumption”. In this context, memory is a form of resistance; even David is unsettled by the unnamed notepad and pen-wielding heretic, his cellmate who speaks of the forbidden times of football, skateboards, and bicycles. Vampires of Avonmouth has pace and momentum. It is recommended reading for all West Country sci-fi fans and for those with a taste for speculative history. Future Song, Kindberg’s new novel forthcoming at the time of writing, is also set in a West Country of impending decades, beset by climate change. It will be one to listen out for and to look forward to. (Review for Bristol Radical History Group)
January 5, 2021
I thought the vampire genre had been pretty much done to death, perhaps even a stake firmly driven through its heart. However, Kindberg avoids the Transylvanian clichés and finds a distinctive new angle with African vampires and has plenty to say in his journey beyond the analogue and digital into a convincingly constructed dystopian future world. With a heady mix of legend, witchcraft, AI, and a population sedated by consumerism, there is a quest underlying the action and we are left guessing to the conclusion, who really is the hunter and who the prey, who can be trusted and who will survive. This can be read as just a good story, but Kindberg weaves into the action questions about the nature of consciousness, free will, love and plenty more. There are even nods to the Turing test, and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; never a bad thing. I would possibly have preferred the seriousness leavened with a bit more humour, but in the film of this intensely visual book, there will be a wonderful sight gag to play with as a robot has to continuously regenerate in different humanoid forms for reasons you will discover when you read this book. The most enjoyable vampire book I have read since Barnham’s, “Among the Living”.
January 18, 2021
This Afro futurist gothic noir finds interesting ways of re telling elements of classic vampire fiction. Set in a strange near future, made almost unrecognisable by advancements in communication technology, yet eerily familiar, so as to act as a cautionary tail in a way reminiscent of the the best episodes of Black Mirror.
The world building is consistent, thou not overbearing, logically extrapolating a future based on the way we interact with technology now and taking it to its bleak and dehumanizing conclusion.
The narrative follows someone isolated in this world who must shed his daemons to find connection.
The world building is consistent, thou not overbearing, logically extrapolating a future based on the way we interact with technology now and taking it to its bleak and dehumanizing conclusion.
The narrative follows someone isolated in this world who must shed his daemons to find connection.
February 21, 2021
Compelling vision of our realities in the present day, through the lens of the future, you realize just how much our minds are inhabited by psychic vampires manifesting as corporations. I loved the use the adinkra symbols to convey messages.
June 9, 2021
Vampires of Avonmouth is actually the first book I have finished in a very long time. The author evokes a dark, dystopian future whose psychological challenges drive the key protagonists ever deeper into a form of seemingly insurmountable trauma whilst they are driven on by the overwhelming desire to achieve ultimate liberation of mind. The skillfully painted scenes are superbly atmospheric. I felt an empathetic connection with the struggles of the characters as the narrative itself simultaneously entices the reader to wrestle with the conceptual ideas of mind & meaning. Creatively juxtaposed Ghanaian symbolism & the interplay of "altered" minds artificial, controlled, invaded, liberated all serve to highlight how precarious the journey to understanding ourselves has already been and how it will inevitably only continue to become more and more convoluted. An essential & unavoidably human story. Thought provoking and highly recommended.
January 18, 2021
This is a tense dystopian thriller, well-written and so brilliantly described that it is completely believable. ID cop David lives in Avonmouth, a hot polluted city in 2087 England. He has been forced to flee the free zone of Westaf to protect his daughter from a psychic vampire implanted in his brain. Afraid the vampire will grow in strength if he falls in love, he avoids friendships and visits prostitutes in a seedy hotel.
There, he meets Pempamsie, a woman eager to banish her own vampire - and flee from a far more dangerous foe, who is already crossing swords with David.
The thrilling adventure that follows offers David and Pempamsie hope of a better future, while also plunging their lives into danger.
There, he meets Pempamsie, a woman eager to banish her own vampire - and flee from a far more dangerous foe, who is already crossing swords with David.
The thrilling adventure that follows offers David and Pempamsie hope of a better future, while also plunging their lives into danger.
January 5, 2021
This complex, intelligent, intriguing novel makes the reader work gratifyingly hard to keep hold of the enticing, overlapping threads which explore, from intersecting angles, what it is that makes us human. Futuristic and ancient ideas are set against a backdrop of familiarity which is almost out of reach, and at the same time, very near. The characters are infused with a sense of longing to return to a simpler time which stays with the reader long after the book is read.
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February 22, 2022DNF - Unfortunately the style and world here didn’t grab me as much as I was hoping for - not my cup of tea
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews