Reclaiming the Dead

Darkly comic with a sinister, but sly spirit, James Patrick Brotherton's literary vampire novel, Reclaiming the Dead, recounts two hapless roommates' transformation from your average wimps to otherworldly wunderkind as they slay vampires and cart off untold loot on countless visits to a pawnshop. The protagonist, Merton Daniels, faces additional demons as the dark secrets of his own family history and the torment of inner voices and delusional hallucinations hound him with a relentlessness that exceeds even that of his undead adversaries. At first glance, Merton Daniels looks more like the butt of some cosmic joke than an adventure hero. Reduced to crashing on a friend's couch, with his vocational prospects pared to weekly visits to a plasma center to exchange his blood for cash, Merton awakens from an unintentional drunken stupor to find a mysterious calling card tucked under his arm. A subsequent meeting at a deli with a beleaguered, thread-bare bureaucrat sets Merton, along with his perpetually hungry and ceaselessly chattering roommate, Coaler, on an unsupervised apprenticeship in the finer points of vampire slaying. As Merton wrestles with dark internal and external forces, Reclaiming the Dead tracks a compelling and thought-provoking mythology of the undead, charting the origins of a centuries-old, shape-shifting predator - an unnamed, blood-thirsty creature whose existence spans from biblical times at Calvary to the present-day Midwest. This debut novel offers a wildly imaginative and engrossing story rife with adventure and fantastic tales of vampires and otherworldly creatures, as inexorable forces set in motion the inevitable life-or-death culmination of Merton's adventure. Resonant with existential echoes of Sartre and Salinger, with a sense of humor that recalls Vonnegut and Palahniuk, Reclaiming the Dead is an infectious and inventive tale that stands the fantasy genre on its ear with a literate and sophisticated story of modern life and redemption.