Blood Feud

Writer Bunn (The Sixth Gun) milks the “hick horror” genre for all its worth in this tale set in Spider Creek, Mo., where the locals mostly keep to themselves and adhere to arcane ways scoffed at by more “citified” types, while the forces of darkness run rampant with dire results. Good ol’ boy protagonist R.F. Coven and his friends must contend with the uncontrolled horrors unleashed by the Whatleys, who are in a long-running feud with another family, the Stubbs. The Whatleys are spoken of only in whispers, and the rumors of their allegiance with less-than-holy entities prove true when they unleash a hideous plague of vampires to take out their enemies once and for all, unwittingly dooming the entire town. Rendered in a cartoonish style by Moss and Filardi that offers the perfect visual counterpoint to the story’s horrific set pieces, this is a welcome alternative in a market glutted with zombies. (July)