When Lawson was left for dead on the Shiloh battlefield along with other Confederate soldiers, he did not expect to catch a glimpse of a world of supernatural wonders and terror much less find himself engulfed by it. However, when the strange creatures skulked among the dead and dying, feasting on the blood of the nearly dead, that was exactly what happened. Some time later, Lawson finds himself the bearer of vampiric abilities but hampered by a soul that yearns to be mortal once more. A legend claims that should he find the creature who turned him into his state and drink the black ichor from her veins, then he shall become human once more. However, until he finds the vampiric devil called LaRouge, he exists as an adventurer for hire. His card makes two claims: ALL MATTERS HANDLED and I TRAVEL BY NIGHT.
As the novella in the series opens, Lawson finds himself contacted by a terrified father. David Kingsley’s daughter has been taken. The ransom message demands six hundred and sixty six dollars in gold to be delivered to some unheard of small town in southern Louisiana called Nocturne. Further, the note stipulates that Lawson be the delivery man, and the message is signed by one Christian Melchoir. Having never met any of the principles in this drama, Lawson is intrigued. The whole matter stinks of a trap set by the Dark Society, the mysterious occult group of which LaRouge is a member. When Lawson encounters one of their agents shadowing the grieving father, he knows immediately that his assumptions are correct: The Dark Society is involved.
Still, he agrees to perform the task for a substantial fee. On this latest adventure, he will encounter an unexpected ally, deadly foes, and a town sinking into the muck of the Louisiana swamp lands . . .
I TRAVEL BY NIGHT is the first published adventure for Robert McCammon’s vampire adventurer Lawson, but in the best pulpy adventure ways, the man has been pretty active prior to these events.
“I have become an adventurer for my livelihood,” Lawson continued. “I will go where I am summoned, and do the task I am asked to do, for payment. I choose who I will work for, and why. It all becomes night work, eventually. I have hunted and brought to bay the killers of a judge in Texas. I have bested a gunfighter in Wyoming who terrorized a town for extortion money. I have tracked three escaped convicts and their hostages through the snow in North Dakota. I have brought a cunning fox of a blackmailer to justice in San Francisco, and in Chicago I put an end to a maniac who lured young women and reward their love with a razor blade. And in all that time and in those places and many more, I looked for signs of the Dark Society’s presence. I searched for news of the drained bodies they would leave behind, and I searched the places I thought they might be hiding. Several times I found them by following their trails, and we had our battles. I’ve killed quite a few, and they’ve nearly killed me. […]” (location 864)
In fact, the story kicks off with a gothic setup, and then delves down into a thrilling encounter with one of the shape shifting members of the Dark Society before coming back up for air. The one-two punch of atmosphere and high action pretty well encapsulates the story that follows, which deals with a journey into dark territory (both literal and metaphoric), bloody business that needs tending, and then an escape from that dark place.
Lawson himself is cut from classic heroic material. He is the sort of protagonist who is good at what he does, and though he finds himself up to his neck in trouble more often than not, he manages to get out of it through ingenuity as often as he does with smoking pistols. Of course, pulp author and creator of Doc Savage Lester Dent made popular a formula for such adventures, but in fact that formula is pretty well just a modernization of classic myth. I TRAVEL BY NIGHT has all the feel of a pulpy adventure as well as a mythic tale set in the weird west, and it is a treat to read.
McCammon’s style is easygoing and yet rich in details. His use of description and action is metered pretty well. There are dashes of humor, a couple of over the top grand guignol scenes of violent vampire mayhem, and plenty of moody ruminating on both Lawson’s past and the quest that drives him from his nightly adventures. Take for example this passage about wrestling with the loss of the life he had known following his assault:
It was the stuff of nightmares, this death in life.
He had twice gone to visit his wife and daughter, after the events at Shiloh. He had twice gone to the house in Montgomery, in the concealing night, to press himself against a window and wish himself back with his loved ones. The first time, in a driving thunderstorm, the flash of a bolt of lightning had revealed him, and Cassie must have awakened and seen him through the glass, for her scream had sent him running. The second time, years later, he had followed Mary Alice on an evening in May, and noted that she had aged and was walking more slowly, and under the paper lanterns at a festival in the park she met the young woman Cassie had turned into. Also at that park was a handsome young man who held Cassie’s hand, and Lawson’s daughter held the hand of a little blonde-haired girl in a pink frock, and perhaps this was among the most cruel moments because everyone was so happy and the brass band’s music was bright and the world had kept turning while Lawson fought the demons. (location 693)
There are some authentic emotional writing there without a hint of irony or purple prose. It’s almost Bradburian in its elegance. And then consider this one-off line about fangs and fundaments:
Then with the cigar between his teeth and his fangs back in their sockets where polite vampire gentlemen kept theirs, Lawson took a first step and nearly fell on his southern comfort. (location 213)
Finally, consider a bit of dialogue about the town of Nocturne, taken from a man who rents boats and knows more than anyone else about Lawson’s destination:
“You say Nocturne is a ghost town? Destroyed by a hurricane? What else?”
McGuire took a long drink and turned the gold coin between his fingers. “Not all destroyed. Some of the mansions are still there, but they’re half-ate up by the swamp. See, Nocturne was built on higher ground. Well, it was higher ground then. Fella who built it was a strange sort. A young man from a rich family. Came into the loggin’ business to compete with his father, they had a kinda rivalry goin’ on. Young fella was a little out of his mind is what us jacks figured. Well…maybe a lot out of his mind. We heard his father was a bully, ragged that young fella all the time about being worthless. So he spent money, time and labor buildin’ an opera house and concert hall out in the swamp. Buildin’ big mansions for himself and his business partners, but they didn’t stay very long when they saw what he was doin’. Tryin’ to build another New Orleans, make a port out of it. Puttin’ all his money in makin’ a fancy town where the ‘gators used to drop their eggs and the snakes coiled in the mud by the hundreds. Then that hurricane hit.” McGuire angled the coin so lamplight touched it and laid the color of gold across his scarred face. “Oh, Almighty God … that was a blower,” he said quietly. “A monster, that thing was. Flew in on black wings, it did, in the middle of the night. Brought the swamp and the creatures of the swamp right into those workmen’s houses, into those company stores, into that church and school and the opera house and concert hall and right into those mansions. Everything that wasn’t blowed away or flattened was flooded. The dock and all the equipment destroyed. It was like … a punishment from God, for pushin’ too far. You know what I’m sayin’?” He looked to the vampire for understanding.
“I do,” said Lawson. (location 642)
The writing is confident and yet fueled with a giddy fascination for its own topics. This quality of careful sentence structure and excitement at its own material is infectious. I found myself reading at a good clip but actively restraining myself from getting too quickly to the end. I was eager to find out what happened next, and yet interested in the wonderful details. I like authors who can paint in the corners with their description, and McCammon excels at evoking just enough to make rooms feel complete or swamp encounters to feel real. It’s the quality of verisimilitude, which so many dark fantasy authors attempt to evoke and which many miss. The effect is not achieved with a ton of words, it is achieved by using the right words in an evocative manner. Sometimes that can be a sentence or a paragraph or a chapter.
“Thank you sir,” Lawson answered, and then he began to row between the larger workboats toward the great dark expanse of the swamp. The torch burned at his back, but whether the light was welcome or not was an open question. He kept rowing slowly and steadily, as the town fell away behind. The fiddler’s music and the sound of civilization faded away. The humming, chirring noise of the swamp—a true nocturne—rose to meet him. (location 681)
McCammon is writing at the top of his game these days, and while many consider the epic works he penned in the eighties (such as the apocalyptic SWAN SONG or his thrilling WWII werewolf espionage novel THE WOLF’S HOUR) to be his best, and while I appreciate many of these works (particularly the often overlooked USHER’S PASSING), I am more of a fan of his latest works. Whether that takes the shape of his historical mysteries starring Matthew Corbett, a meaty horror novel like THE FIVE, or his slender but nevertheless rich novella length tales such as I TRAVEL BY NIGHT.
In fact, the novella continues McCammon’s fascination with vampires, building on some qualities he established long ago in his fourth novel THEY THIRST. Later, he would kick off the first of the HWA’s mass market releases by editing UNDER THE FANG, an anthology of stories set in a world where vampires had risen from the shadows to claim the world. He penned an introductory piece for that antho, which might well be the far future of Lawson’s world. In fact, one of the novella’s antagonists pretty much states straight out the Dark Society’s intentions to make the world McCammon devised for UNDER THE FANG a reality. Christien Melchoir’s phrase, “My town, our world” (location 1005) serves several roles, as a rallying cry for the Dark Society, a political statement of his own ambitions, and a hint of the lineage to come.
The vampires in this novella have similar rattlesnake qualities to those found in McCammon’s epic fourth novel. For example, their fangs spring down like a snake’s as opposed to sliding down like movie monsters. Of course, this could just be the author’s own favorite image and not a direct connection between works. One of the strange habits human beings have is finding patterns even where none is intended. Critics do it, scientists can do it, and fandom is rather expected to do it . . . I may be guilty of doing this myself. Be that as it may, there is a certain fun-quotient in wondering about whether these Lawson adventures and that big, old novel from the 1980s might be connected, blips in history for a single world. For all I know, they are isolated bubbles in the author’s multiverse, but if this novella does not invite such speculation it tolerates it.
The last decade or so seems to have brought about a renewed interest in McCammon’s storytelling. Specialty houses are putting out his back-list novels (and in some cases short stories) in lovely limited and trade editions. However, the man continues to write some quality entertainment in both series and standalone format. I TRAVEL BY NIGHT kicks off the start of a new cycle of stories (originally appearing in a lovely limited edition in 2013, it has been followed up already with 2016’s Last Train from Perdition and a new installment will hopefully be announced soon). I look forward to seeing future installments.
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I TRAVEL BY NIGHT was once available as a limited edition hardcover from Subterranean Press. These days, it is available in an eBook edition (which is on sale for the month of October, so you can grab a copy of both this and its follow-up for less than three bucks a pop).
Next week, we will venture into deep waters to see a lady about a mermaid . . . a bloodthirsty mermaid to be sure. We will tackle Mira Grant’s ROLLING IN THE DEEP, which like the other books we’ve reviewed this month was released as a Sub Press hardcover and is now available in eBook format.
This article copyright © 2018 by Daniel R. Robichaud.
WORKS CITED
McCammon, Robert. I TRAVEL BY NIGHT. Burton, MI: Subterranean Press. 2013.
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