The Time of Feasting

If Don Corleone and his Family sported fangs they'd fit right into this tale of a New York-based vampire clan whose members are embattled by both outside authorities and one another. For centuries, Victor Renquist has instructed his nosferatu in the discreet art of living inconspicuously among humans and of camouflaging their intervals of Feasting as the handiwork of serial killers or the atrocities of war. In the brood's current Lower East Side enclave, known as the Residence, Renquist's authority is challenged by brash Kurt Carfax, spokesman for the young generation of vampires, whose reckless impatience with the patriarch's cautious tactics has drawn the attention of both the police and Gideon Kelly, a defrocked priest who recognizes the clan as a force for evil. Farren invests his undead with pulsating life, endowing them with primal energies and volatile emotions that can overwhelm the civilized personas they cultivate. His mortals, by contrast, are lifeless and underdeveloped: his cops are predictably inflexible nonbelievers in the supernatural, and Kelly is a cliche who sees his one-man fight against evil as his only hope for personal redemption. Wisely, Farren limits their roles to serving as catalysts for pyrotechnical scenes of vampire death and destruction. The result is an uncommonly brisk dark fantasy that cannily exploits both our tolerance of alternative lifestyles and our anxieties about the folks next door. (Dec.)