Let’s review: 13 Bullets

So first, an admission. I picked this book up for a quid in WHSmiths for my holiday and didn’t have high expectations. It was just something to fill the time while I waited to come home to my WiFi. I picked it up because it had a cool blurb and was on clearance.

I am so glad I did.

I opened it up the first night and only put it down when I was three quarters of the way through it. I woke up and picked the book up again. I was as hooked to it as its antagonists were hooked to blood!

Yeah, it’s a vampire book but more action adventure than horror. There is magic, psychics, zombies and vampires. There is even a Van Halsing type character. I enjoyed this a great deal and am keen to hunt down the next installment of the Laura Coxton series.

I’ve picked out five things I really enjoyed about 13 Bullets.

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5 – Gay female main character

So it might be a bit ‘woke’ of me but this was a refreshing change. In your classic vampire tale, it’s the woman who gets saved. In 13 Bullets, the main character is more than capable of saving herself, is gay and isn’t represented as sexual promiscuous. Hell, I’m a straight hetero male (ignore the rumours) and I could relate to her. She flipped a lot of the tired old trope on their head.

4 – Van Helsing is a broken man

In all the films and in classic literature, the vampire hunter is presented as being a man of action and solid moral absolutes. No spoilers, but Arkeley is not at all in control despite his best efforts…

3 – Full Throttle Pace

There are no still, quiet moments in 13 Bullets. It is a white-water rapids of a story and you can’t (or I couldn’t) put it down.

2 – The Faceless

Vampires create minions. This is a trope dating back to the first legends of the vampire. The minions in 13 Bullets are called the faceless. They are sitting carcasses that serve their masters mostly out of year. They have little characterisation but we do get snippets to show how they are more victims than monsters. Morality in the book’s universe seems a very grey area.

1 – The Vampires

So cool. The vampires in this story are different enough to make them feel unique. They are more the monsters in the vein of Nosferatu than clones of Dracula. They can make themselves more than a physical match for even a powerful human. Conor McGregor and Floyd Mayweather wouldn’t last a round with these crazies. They feel ‘post-human’ in the story, beyond human. And through the the text, they are compared to crack addicts – needing blood like a junkie needs a fix. To Wellington’s credit though, things are more complicated.

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Like a thief in the night…

I am going to steal a few things from David Wellington. Or at least, I am going to try and include them in my writing.

What is done so well in the novel is that common horror tropes are turned on their head: the camel rescues herself, the vampire hunter is more sociopath than the vampires, the undead are far from beautiful. This is no Twilight, no glitter-vamps here. That subversion of expectation wasn’t forced into my face either, rather I only realised it when I tried to assign tropes to what I had read. I would really like to do something like that in my own fantasy work. Could I subvert traditional tropes, much like in Game of Thrones?

Wellington writes with a pace that makes his story hard to put down. Something is always ‘happening’. I try and do the same in my own stories – especially in KINGDOM OF THE LION – so I plan on dissecting portions of the story to help me do that in a more effective way.

Finally, even when it would be easier to hide a plot detail, Wellington instead commits fully. When the Faceless banged on Victim’s window, I knew something was up. But I didn’t know what until almost the last chapter. That is, to me, a well crafted story.

13 Bullets is the first of a series of books. I’m looking forward to reading the next installment.