American Vampire #2

Chapter Two:  "Morning Star" and "Deep Water"
written by Scott Snyder and Stephen King
art by Rafael Albuquerque

Once again, an otherwise excellent story is slowed by its double-billing, and in this case an extra helping of exposition.  Following fast on the heels of her attack and desert disposal by a swarm of European vampire movie-execs, Snyder's "Morning Star" finally transforms his heroine Pearl into a vampire herself.  And once again, Skinner Sweet steals the scene.  Dying in a hospital bed of blood loss and internal damage after having been found staggering and bleeding in the desert by Hattie and Henry, Pearl is rescued by Sweet, and her "infection" is strangely delicate, a delicacy that is all the more surprising after his uninvited and somewhat predatory entrance through the window of her hospital room.  Though it does mimic his own transformation, Sweet chooses to infect her by kissing her eye with his bloodied lip.  Though, presumably, any means of entering her bloodstream would have transformed her, Sweet's choice is both tender—he could have simply dripped into any of her multiple open wounds—and politely restrained—he could have kissed her lips.

Their conversation following Pearl's awakening in the morgue and return home is considerably less dramatic, even as it is considerably longer.  While it imparts some necessary information to the reader, though, to be fair, an attentive reader could probably have pieced together most of it on his own, and it provides Pearl with a slight vampire-orientation lesson, the elaboration of the differences between Skinner and Pearl—the American vampires—and Percy, Bloch, and the rest of the Europeans is somewhat dull and a bit pedantic.  It does, however, continue the ambiguous characterization of Skinner Sweet, whose motivations and personality remain as enigmatic as before.  Because he jests almost out of habit and oozes wryness out of his greasy pores, its nearly impossible to pin him down.  He makes no secret out of his desire to use Pearl and her revenge to poke back at his own enemies, to use Pearl against Bloch for his own purposes, but his response to Pearl's question about why he turned her seems equally honest and true, even as it is triple-sided:  "Oh, I don't know—maybe because I'm just sick of Bloch and his kind having their way with pretty little country girls.  Or maybe because I can't keep out of trouble.  Maybe just because I like you, Dolly."

If "Morning Star" is heavy on exposition, "Deep Water" is structured by it.  One week after Pearl's transformation, author of Sweet's non-fiction "fiction" story Bad Blood, Will Bunting, hosts a re-issue reading at which he recounts his story.  Thus, Sweet's story becomes a dramatic flashback rendering the events between his transformation and his exhumation by divers scavenging outlaw memorabilia over a decade later.  And Bunting's account reads like a summary, a whirlwind version of Bunting's time at the coat-tails of Jim Book and Felix Camillo during the hey-day of western expansion and settlement.  The telling of it may be a little dry, that is, relevant but flat and compressed, but Albuquerque's artwork is excellent, particularly of Sweet's captivity in his coffin—his first meal on a rat, his awakening under water, and his re-emergence from his grave.

[June 2010]

As collected in American Vampire, Volume 1 (ISBN 978-1401228309)