Review Detail

Night Road by A. M. Jenkins is not your typical vampire story. In fact, hemovores find the label vampire to be an insult. Vampires are depicted as cursed evil creatures viciously feeding on the blood of innocents, gleefully discarding the remains. Hemovores are humans with human feelings that subsist entirely on blood yet have the same problems as mythical vampires; they cannot go out into the sun and they can be killed if drained of blood. But unlike Hollywood vampires, they care about their food source, omnis, normal people that eat what they wish and walk around during the daylight. Omnis worship hemes just as groupies worship their favorite rock star and live with them in Manhattan in the Colony.

Cole is a heme and has been for a couple hundred years yet he looks like a typical teenager. Cole has had a lot of time to practice the art of taking only what he needs to stay alive and learn that omnis are not prey to be slaughtered but people with souls to be treated with respect for the humans they are and the sustenance they provide. Cole prefers living on his own and traveling during night hours but has been called back to the Colony to help Gordo, a newly created heme that is having trouble letting go of his past, his family and his girlfriend. Cole has been asked by the group to take Gordo and another heme, Sandor, (Gordos creator by sheer accident of being in the wrong place at an unfortunate time) on the road to teach him how to live as a hemovore without attracting unwanted attention. What actions Gordo takes next will determine his future of learning to live within the boundaries of the Colony or his destruction as a danger to the group.

Once started, I had a hard time putting this book down. Night Road is a different take on what you are used to reading and watching about vampires. The hemovores have moral questions such as: Do they have souls? What causes them to be a hemovore, a virus? Can it be cured? The hemovores, forever young, are at different stages in their moral dilemmas and judgments and mental development just as we all are in our own lives. We just dont have forever to get it right.