The Nymphos of Rocky Flats. By Mario Acevedo. Rayo/HarperCollins. $13.95.
There’s nothing particularly new about a supernaturally endowed detective anymore. But a Hispanic vampire detective investigating an outbreak of nymphomania at a nuclear-fuel facility? That’s new. Unfortunately, a brief description makes The Nymphos of Rocky Flats sound better than it is. First-time novelist Mario Acevedo has a lot of interesting elements here, but the superstructure on which he assembles them is almost unbearably creaky.
A detective should have a tormented past, and Acevedo gives one to Felix Gomez in a terrifyingly chilling first chapter drawn from Acevedo’s own experience as an Army infantry and aviation officer and a veteran of the Desert Storm campaign in Iraq. It is after a mind-numbing combat tragedy that Gomez is bitten by a vampire and becomes one himself – but, because of the nature of the tragedy, he cannot bear to drink human blood.
At this point, the creakiness begins. A reluctant vampire can make for interesting drama. But the structure of this book makes vampires traditional in almost every way, including that of their predator-prey relationship with humans. If vampires could sustain themselves, however imperfectly, with non-human blood – as Gomez is at pains to do – then why would they be so deeply hated and feared by humans for so many centuries? Acevedo turns this plot point into an exploration of whether non-human blood may be insufficient to maintain Gomez’s vampiric powers – but really, the whole thing is a straw man (or straw vampire). Extreme reluctance would have worked quite as well as refusal.
Gomez has the vampire’s hypnotic powers – but his don’t work very well the first times we see him use them. He is a creature of the night, with the ability to see auras and with super-keen senses – but he keeps falling victim to plots against him. When that happens, Acevedo gives us pure Sam Spade scenes: “A stream of cayenne pepper spray splashed my face. My eyes burned. In the instant before I clamped them shut, I glimpsed the brilliant-red aura of my attacker. I bent over, gagging, and rubbed my face to wipe away the searing liquid. Something hard slammed into the back of my head. My thoughts exploded into a thousand colored sparks that quickly dissolved into blackness.”
This is potboiler stuff – and not even good potboiler stuff. Gomez gets the nympho case because of his earlier successes, but this woebegone werewolf (sorry, vampire-wolf) is such a tyro that it’s hard to see how he survived to this point. For example, he deliberately walks into a trap, knowing it is a trap both through vampire senses and because he has been told it is one; and the trappers, too dumb to make it hard for him to figure out how to get into the building where the trap is laid, simply leave a single way in; and Gomez, too dumb to look anywhere else, goes in exactly that way – and is, of course, trapped and tortured. It’s an “oh, come on already” moment – one of many.
Add to this the fact that Acevedo doesn’t always play fair with the reader – for instance, he gives no hint of the existence of supernatural beings other than vampires, but then Gomez goes to a party and, out of nowhere, a character of an entirely new sort shows up – and you have a recipe for a real clunker of a book.
But The Nymphos of Rocky Flats is no clunker. Thanks to good pacing, a wide variety of plot twists, an unusual assemblage of characters (although the reader never really cares about any of them, even Gomez, except in that highly dramatic first chapter), and a talent for getting his feckless hero in deeper and deeper every few pages, Acevedo delivers a book that is better than, analytically, it deserves to be. It’s best not to analyze it at all, and to accept its absurdities, missteps and internal inconsistencies as those of a first-time novelist who is just gaining control of a potentially sprawling form. There will surely be further adventures of Detective Felix Gomez to come. They are likely to be better put together than this rather discombobulated first effort – which, however, has enough offbeat charm to be worth reading for its own sake.
March 23, 2006
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