Fiction Reviews
When the Night Falls
(2024) Glenn Rolfe, Flame Tree Press,
£12.95 / Can$21.95 / US$16.95, trdpbk, 233pp, ISBN 978-1-787-58809-7
Vampires come to a small beach community in Maine to find out the truth behind the rumours of serial killer Gabriel Riley, aka the Beach Night Killer.
This is the sequel to Until Summer Comes Around, handily published by Flame Tree Press, along with another of Rolfe’s novels August’s Eyes. Rolfe hails from New England and has been prolific in the horror field since 2014. This is the twelfth novel that he has written in the last ten years, as well as three short story collections and five novellas. Given the relative short length of the novel and the fact that it consists of a prologue, 41 chapters, and an epilogue then the reader can expect a fast, bloody ride, and read. Here, the events take place ten years after Until Summer Comes Along, and true confession time, I’ve not read that book, but I didn’t feel short-changed or confused as Rolfe manages to fill in the reader relatively seamlessly.
Vampires in Maine, where have I come across that before? But while Stephen King set his epic Salem’s Lot in a remote, rural part of Maine, having thought that was somewhere an actual vampire manifestation could go unnoticed, Rolfe sets his novel in a seaside town, namely Old Orchard Beach, but instead of gangs of bikers descending on the town, it’s a bunch of vampires who have arrived looking for Rocky Zukas, who survived the previous book. Except the vampires aren’t alone as the media have turned up wanting to interview Rocky, except Rocky just wants to get on with his life, being a bit of a loner and trying to get memories of November - a girl he met previously - out of his head and out of his heart, as well as all the events that left him as the last man standing.
Unlike Stephen King who set his vampire novel in Maine and played against vampire lore with a pretty straight bat – not really adding anything new in the way of myths and legends and abilities to vampire-kind, Rolfe’s vampire’s aren’t immortal and they can go about in daylight. Given that ten years have passed since the first book, which was set in the 1980s, we are now in the 1990s, and Rolfe does a pretty good job at capturing the cultural references of the times, although admittedly I’m looking at them afar in terms of time and distance and through a UK lens, US readers will be the ultimate judge of how good he has been at capturing America in the 90s. It’s no surprise, given that Old Orchard Beach is his own creation, that this novel really has a strong sense of place, with Rolfe bringing it to life with its geography and the families who live in the houses, some of them with very dark secrets.
As for the plot, Rocky is the unwanted centre of attention from the living and the undead, especially as people are going missing in the town, again, which begs the question about there being a possibly copycat killer on the loose. Rolfe does a good job at getting inside Rocky’s head. He was only a teenager when the Beach Night Killer struck, but now he's ten years older, with his life at a crossroads. He works for the local fire department, but big decisions are looming for him. Physically he’s on the mend, mentally not so much, and it doesn’t help that he still is in love with November, so much so, that he senses she is back in town and watching him from the shadows, but so are others.
As things turn darker, the tension and the action and the gore build up to a satisfying finale.
Rolfe always said that he wasn’t going to write a sequel to Until Summer Comes Around, then he hit upon an idea and four years later we have a sequel. As previously mentioned this book can be read as a standalone, although I had so much bloody fun reading When the Night Falls, I’m tempted to go back to the first book, despite the spoilers, and who knows? Maybe by then, lightning will have struck again and Rolfe will be working on the third book in the series.
Ian Hunter
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