Robert Ford’s Sapphireundead concerns a woman-turned-vampire searching for her identity.

The story starts with a young Haitian woman waking up on the London Underground with no memory. A cursory look through her phone reveals that her name is Sapphire, but very little else; her sharp teeth and newly acquired thirst for blood tell her she’s a vampire, although she can freely walk about during the day.

Feeding allows Sapphire to recover her memories. It also gives her access to a sort of sexual mind control. As she meets a wide range of characters – a flirtatious barista, a helpful hematologist, two newly minted vampires– Sapphire seeks to learn who she was, how she lost her memory, and what all this has to do with a mysterious figure known as “Hek.”

That’s a solid premise for a pulpy vampire horror novel, but Sapphireundead is undermined by its execution. The text is replete with copy editing errors: (e.g., Sapphire hears a “serious [sic] of muffled sounds” before she sees villagers “lamentng” [sic]). Other problems involve tone miscalculations: a sex scene (actually, a feeding scene, but sex and feeding are intertwined here) immediately follows a character watching her family get killed in the Ukraine war, and another scene where Sapphire is led to believe she sexually assaulted someone is followed by her typically profane, irreverent internal monologue.

Indeed, the internal monologue is what truly sinks Sapphireundead. The ceaseless cursing would be tolerable (“fuck” is used 564 times) were it not for the prose’s clumsy, fragmented rhythm: “What sort of damned monster takes others’ blood? Wait. I know. I know. A fucking vampire; that’s what. But why? Why must I feed on their blood? Tavia had no choice. I just went down on her like she was nothing. God, it was good. But, fuck! It was wrong. So wrong…”

This type of narration quickly becomes wearing. Given the story’s many issues, only the most determined readers will persist through these pages.

Also available as an ebook.