The BFI sometimes pick the wrong writer to cover certain films for their Film Classic series. Anne Billson is one of the better writers. She doesn't confuse the reader and covers the film from start to finish. The only draw back is that it does sometimes seem that she is just recounting the story, using her own words to add tension, but she does make up with some interesting commentary.

Ms.Billson's book is an invaluable resource to anyone who has recognized the true genius of Mr.Carpenter's movie. I have been haunted by the themes and images of this film ever since I first saw it over 15 years ago. The greatness of this true horror classic is wonderfully defended by Ms.Billson with a style that not only makes for easy reading but allows the film's fans to once again relive the heart pounding brilliance of Mr.Carpenter's masterpiece.

As a devoted fan of John Carpenter's The THING, I was thrilled to come across Anne Billson's definitive tome about Carpenter's greatest film. Here Ms. Billson eloquently defends what she deems a horror classic. Describing the film scene by scene and injecting a lot of personal theory, Anne Billson has lovingly penned a tribute to the best monster movie of the last 30 years. A must for any fan of John Carpenter and horror films. Only Paul M. Sammon's wonderful Future Noir comes close to equalling the excellence of Billson's book.

Okay, so while Suckers isn't the most inspired vampyre novel out there, it can hold its own. But i was especially disappointed in it, because while the auther didn't bring out the magificence of the vampyres, rather she made them look shallow and stupid. I've read a lot of better vampyre novels, but this is a pretty good flick, if you're bored. ...

I picked this one up figuring it'd be a quick, superflouous read that would help me increase the hit rate this year and not spend too much time floating around in my skull. And that's exactly what I got, though I didn't expect it to be quite so good. Billson is a writer of the McInerney/Ellis/Janowitz stripe, and must have gotten this MS. in just before the cutoff for eighties-style fiction guillotined across the publishing landscape. However, Billson keeps the greed-is-good atmosphere to just that-- an atmosphere. When she needs to drop names, she makes them up rather than sounding like an overworked Sharper Image catalog, as most of her contemporaries do.

The story centers around Duncan and Dora, a not-quite-couple who, thirteen years ago, were part of a love triangle with a vampire. The vampire was found out, staked, dismembered, and scattered. Probalem is... she seems to be back, under another name and with a whole lot more power, as the head of a publishing empire. What's worse, the publishing empire happens to run a major fashion magazine... and so everyone starts dressing, looking, sounding, and otherwise behaving like vampires. It's comedy, but it's black comedy of the blackest stripe. Billson's publishers were going for the heavy-lit crowd, and so the blurbs on the jacket are from writers like Salman Rushdie instead of Stpehen King. And, oddly, despite this being a comedy/horror novel with a decidedly eighties bent... it might not be too out of place in the heavy-lit world. Billson's writing is crisp, while of that same easy-to-read stripe that distinguishes less heavily-marketed horror novels. Her satire, both of the vampire-novel genre and of the time, is spot-on.

If you like vampires, hey, it's worth a couple of days. ***

Yuppiea as vampires in thrall to a multi-national corporation,gradually taking over London from their Docklands base.They wear black,drink blood from their local hostelry and supplement it by exsanguinating passing tourists in messy fashion.
While not short of the odd visceral shock with vividly rendered dismemberings the prevailing mood is dark comedy with a wit as black as pitch.
The narrator is Dora,a "Creative Consulatant" for advertising agencies(meaning she invents survey results and doctors the findings--something I suspect,indeed know, is done all the time).When she and her friend Duncan ,for whom she has long nursed a wholly unrequited passion where menaced some years earlier by an opera loving vampire named Violet they killes her and scattered the dismembered body to all parts of London.They are somewhat taken aback to discover that Violet has not only returned from the netherworld but is now the head of a multinational conglomerate which is taking over the advertising and media industries
Can Dora stop the tide of the designer nosferatu or will the whole land be taken over by people resembling extras from a Robert Palmer video?

Tghe real delight of the book is Dora and we see through her eyes aspects of metropolitan life that helped make the 1980's the worst post war decade by a country mile-yuppies,penniless and pretentious art students,self centredness on an Olympian scale,the growth of the century's most pernicious practices -marketing and saturation advertising.(The devil does not look like Liz Hurley in Bedazzled;the spawn of Satan being an ad man or woman with no language other than jargon)

The vampire code is efficiency and humanity must battle the accountants and number crunchers to maintain a toehold on the mountain of society.
Yes Dora is a real heroine.Cynical.Amoral.Dishonest.But with a spark of decency and brio.Van Helsing meets Cindi Lauper.

It is not a comfortable book and adherents of the traditional vampire fare may well not agree but I like its spirit and mordaunt edge.....