The Inside Scoop on Gaming

I have my napkin tied round my neck, and my plate ready. I am prepared to eat crow.

In April of 1999, White Wolf began the release of the Clan Novel series for the Vampire: the Masquerade game line. This series of novels, each focusing on one of the thirteen clans, was advertised as an epic tale to add insight and enjoyment to White Wolf's very popular World of Darkness series of games and supplements. It got off on weak footing, with Clan Novel: Toreador reading like a trashy romance novel; since then, however, the quality of novels has increased dramatically, as Gherbod Fleming, Richard Dansky and Kathleen Ryan have painted beautiful portraits of life and unlife for the reader.

It's due to the overwhelming quality of some of these novels that I greeted Clan Novel: Malkavian with such trepidation. The Malkavians are the clan of insanity, in which every vampire suffers from at least one derangement that serves to disconnect them in some way from the rest of their world. Malkavians are a wonderful concept, and easily my favorite of the clans, but they're often poorly played and dismally written. To top it all off, the author of Clan Novel: Toreador is the author of Clan Novel: Malkavian. I didn't know what to expect; Toreador left me feeling sick with disappointment, but the excerpts for Malkavian, in the back of its two preceding novels, made me think it might be very, very good. And in every review for every novel, I have gleefully taken a stab at CN:Toreador along the way, so that I might further tarnish Stewart Wieck's reputation as an author.

Maybe he took a writing class. Or maybe I just failed to appreciate Toreador, but regardless, I was way wrong. Malkavian proves it; it's not perfect, but it's a long way better than Toreador.

As with other novels, I'll be dealing with:

tone,
characterization,
plot and
what this novel means to the rest of the series.

Tone

Toreador was a tragedy of tone; I don't mean it was tragic, I mean it was a total failure. It was just bad, and there's no getting around it. Malkavian, though, enjoys a much different tone. There's still a penchant for, lacking for a better word, I call "Melrose-ism." Victoria Ash, returning to make another appearance as everyone's favorite vapid manipulator (oxymoronic, I know), is still dressed in slinky outfits and high heeled boots to go into a fight. Anatole makes one of his first appearances by stripping down and diving into a river in Bosnia, washing his long, blond hair. There's still a sort of "Dynasty" sense of everyone having nice suits, nice cars, nice hair - for a Vampire novel, there's a striking lot of nice to be seen.

However, all this is peripheral. Where Toreador made me think of undead high school kids playing the politics of a senior prom, Malkavian enjoys something more to its tone, a grittiness that Toreador lacked. This feels like something by one of the co-creators of the World of Darkness. But, I'm getting ahead of myself. (Perhaps a review of a novel about insanity can't help being a little fractured, itself.)

The tone of novels prior to Malkavian has, overall, been mature. These are novels about a world darker than our own, in which terrible monsters come out of the night and snatch you away if you're not careful. If you're even less lucky, you become one yourself. I was afraid Malkavian would go soft on this aspect, perhaps hold up vampires as too much the heroes, too human, too...fluffy. I was wrong. Wieck uses a very grown-up voice in telling his tale, an effort complicated by the fact that his main character and occasional narrator is utterly, irrevocably, incurably insane. Anatole is the Mad Prophet of Gehenna, plagued and blessed with visions of the end times when Caine, or the Antedeluvians, or someone will come back to wakefulness and destroy as many of their offspring as they can. So how do you let the reader see with ostensibly sane eyes through the visions of a madman? You don't hold back. You just let it go, and trust the reader to be intelligent enough to work it out on their own. This is what Wieck does in Malkavian and it works, beautifully.

The novel's first page is a monologue by Anatole - I say monologue rather than narration because it left me with the sense that Anatole was not talking to me (thank some Divinity, somewhere), but talking to himself. Not nattering on in nonsense about something that doesn't exist, but going through his own thoughts with the fine-toothed comb of lucid self-examination surrounded by the darkness of dementia. Rather than the hokey, comical Malkavians of so many tabletop and live-action Vampire games, content to run around playing pranks and giggling at each other, these first few pages describe a confusing trek through a labyrinth of images and metaphors for the roots of Anatole's thoughts. They set an important precedent for the rest of the novel. We the reader are going to see madness, full-blown schizophrenia, delusions, manic depressions, fractured minds, all built on a concept so few people seem to understand about real-world insanity.

"Crazy" people are not jokes or cheap tricks. Insanity isn't about someone being a freak to laugh at. Insanity is simply the name we attach to a mind that might have once been much like any other, but now it works, or interprets or classifies information, differently. So differently is this done, in fact, that some majority of people whose minds all more or less work the same can, with some degree of certainty, label the insane mind as being "broken." Insanity is not to be laughed at; insanity is something that can happen to one's self. This is a vitally important point which Wieck makes so very well. It's also absolutely necessary to keep in mind if one is to enjoy this novel; it's this basic premise that sets CN:Malkavian apart from all the other books, and which makes me want to apologize, to some degree, for trashing Toreador so mercilessly.

So what does this have to do with the tone? The tone of this book is pure, unadulterated horror. This isn't a book about becoming a monster, that assumes all normal mortal humans are somehow inherently better. This isn't a story about the supernatural inflicting itself on innocents. This is a novel about how precious one's own mind, and the influences over it, should be. It's the fact that while vampirism is the stuff of fantasy, insanity is very real to you and me here in the real world, that makes this novel so scary, and it's that fact which Wieck uses to engage us. The tone of this novel is not that of a bodice-ripper; it's that of a grown-up fantasy that shows us about what for which we, as residents of the non-fiction world, really ought to feel: fear and compassion.

Charaterization

Gods, but this novel has a lot of characters.

I'll start with Victoria Ash, since she's popped up in so many of the books so far, in so many states of mind and undress. Victoria is much-maligned by various readers with whom I've spoken, or who have reviewed these books, as being the cheerleader for Team Vampire. There's really no denying that Victoria has been little more than a device for sexual content and self-conflicting fear and confidence in this series. One minute she's paranoid about the possibility she is being manipulated in some secret way by elders she's never met, and the next she's trying to bed the representative of the Ventrue Justicar. Then she's exchanging catty one-liners and screaming her fool head off when someone gets murdered in front of her. In this novel, though, I think Wieck has finally hammered out a palatable version of Victoria: she's a vampire who likes the trappings of mortal beauty and social refinement, but whose desires to achieve her own goals will, ultimately, outweigh anything else. She is, in her own way in this novel, an embodiment of much of the point behind Vampire: life is a battle between what's Good, and what's good for getting what one wants. In her greatest moments of leisure and self-assuredness, Victoria can be gracious, generous, and every bit not a monster. But when she's in need, she'll do anything it takes. This lends her some of that grittiness I talked about above. Instead of humping the leg of a Ventrue, she does things like sleep with wealthy businessmen in return for money, guns, and protection, then idly contemplate their libidinous spoor while reviewing her progress towards the real goals she has in mind. She seduces bored housewives while their husbands repair her bullet-riddled stolen luxury car, then drinks their blood and justifies it by saying, to quote, "The world is a f---ing tradeoff." In other words, Victoria in this novel is neither the cheerleader nor the slut; she's a businesswoman who knows that there are things she needs and what she is willing to do to get them. That's just how life is. It's a casual approach to serious issues which she adopts to help herself cope with the seriousness of those issues, and this is something that gives her a depth we just haven't seen before.

Two other vital characters are Bennison, former Prince of Atlanta, and the General, a Malkavian ancient who made his haven in that city until the Sabbat showed up to start killing vampires. Together, they are used by Wieck to paint important pictures of the forms insanity can take. Both are fully aware that something is not right with their minds, and have been aware of this for decades, centuries or millennia. Prince Bennison may find his delusions distracting, but he doesn't find them disabling. He almost seems to gain a certain measure of confidence from the screaming he hears from the Confederate army he always thinks is right behind him, looking for leadership. On the other hand, while the General's obsessions bring him tremendous pleasure, he also feels tremendous guilt over how his psyche is corrupted. Rather than gaining strength, he must battle his feelings and desires in order to retain control of himself. I won't say much more, because these are the sorts of things that require a novel to explain with any sort of success. I'll simply say their similarities and differences do a wonderful job of summing up much of what it means to be a Child of Malkav.

Another absolutely fascinating character is the main narrator of events surrounding Anatole - there's no explanation of who this person is, but it is obviously a vampire and, I think, Anatole's childe. The narrator, however, shows an absolute devotion to following Anatole around while he gathers information on the Eye and pursues his visions of Gehenna, all while taking meticulous notes. Aside from being tremendously beneficial to the reader, this character's commentary is lucid, intelligent and observant. There doesn't seem to be anything crazy about her or him - except that it's their job to follow around another Malkavian writing down everything he says, and they do it without complaint. This character, about whom I wish I knew so much more, does a fabulous job of illustrating the fact that insanity doesn't have to reduce someone to gibbering or carrying a teddy bear in one hand and a meat cleaver in the other. This is slow, subtle, functional insanity that creeped the hell out of me.

Obviously, however, the real focus in terms of characters is Anatole. Wieck has done what is, I have to gladly admit, a brilliant job with Anatole. Anatole is stark raving mad - no getting around that whatsoever. But Anatole is also brilliant, and his mind shoots comfortably in a hundred different directions to paint metaphors and sift information through his insanity to draw out the most unlikely and intriguing connections. Anatole may talk in metaphors that leave the reader a little confused, to put it mildly, but this is exactly what I mentioned above: Wieck just lets the madness flow, and leaves it to the reader to discover understanding or frustrating confusion as best they can. Some of the most enjoyable moments of roleplaying I've experienced occurred when a Malkavian PC came up with something that was seemingly out of thin air, and then managed to provide a convincing if convoluted and frighteningly creative rationalization for their comment/theory/etc. This is the purpose Anatole serves in this novel, and Wieck has crafted him so that he does it extremely well. I won't begin to talk about issues of self-conflict or wild mood swings or actions that seem to have no explanation; I prefer to think I'm too sane to understand Anatole in the first place. It's Anatole's irrationality coupled with stark rationales that make him so interesting, anyway.

The Plot

I'm not even going to try to sum up this novel, or talk about whether everything is neatly arranged as cause and effect. This is not a simple laundry list of events with segues to connect them. This is a novel which takes one clan's weakness, insanity, and shows us mercilessly how that weakness, unlike almost any other clan's weakness (inability to cast a reflection, entrancement by beauty, supernatural ugliness, inability to feed on anything other than blood from a specific type of person), can affect you and me in a very real way. That, my friends, more than anything in almost any other novel, is scary.

There are other things about the plot that make it terrifying. The confusion that ensues from many of the events that go on is more than a little unsettling. I can easily see how another person's reaction to the events of this plot might be confusion and disappointment rather than fear. It would be easy to close this book and say, "You know, there's not a lick of that that makes one iota of sense," and get angry that $6 just went into the pocket of somebody else for nothing. If that's your reaction, though, I would wonder whether perhaps you're a little too sure of your own sanity. When I was done with this novel, I couldn't help but wonder if there was something I missed. I kept flipping back to the more bizarre sections in which some Malkavian or another walks us through his personal hell of the psyche, looking for whatever I'd missed. It took me a while to realize it wasn't there, and the effect had been that I doubted my own mind, in some small way - insofar as I had doubted my own ability to catch the important bits - and in that regard this novel is a total success. This is insanity, I had to keep telling myself. I'm not supposed to understand, no matter how much I want to. That's a scary feeling, looking at a novel and not being able to make heads or tails of parts of it despite a feeling I should. Wieck brought me in hook, line and sinker, and nailed me on the forehead with it. I wouldn't be surprised if he's sitting in Atlanta, laughing at me right now.

Well, not really. Of course.

I don't want to leave you thinking it will be impossible for you to enjoy this story, though; quite the opposite, if you enjoy seeing how another mind works in ways completely alien to your own. I very much enjoyed this novel for that reason. If you like clear-cut novels like the crap churned out by the majority of popular fiction writers (say, John Grisham, for example - and yes, I am a snob), you're not going to enjoy this. Steer clear of Malkavian if you aren't willing to let some rational part of yourself just shut down for the duration, and take it as it comes to you. Another thing to recommend the plot of this novel is that it contains the second best action sequence of the entire series (I have to leave the blue ribbon in the hands of Richard Dansky). For the second time, I found myself entirely able to visualize what was going on, feeling like I was missing nothing of the events unfolding on the page. Also, the conclusion to the major action sequence actually made me laugh aloud and walk into the next room to shove the book into the hands of a friend, insisting that he read that section at least.

Ultimately, though, I enjoyed this novel so much because Wieck uses such a real threat to frighten us. Like Setite used the very real aspect of corruption and broken trust we see on the news every night, and Ravnos used the very real problems of addiction and rebellion so many of us experience first-hand, and Lasombra and Assamite used ideas based on finding one's own purpose and rebelling against the plans others have for us, be they parents, friends or lovers, Malkavian uses mental illness, something which affects fully 25% of the American population. He manages not to use the mentally ill as bogeymen, though; these are three-dimensional minds of characters which simply don't work the ways our do; maybe it's good, maybe it's bad. That's very realistic, and very important when dealing with such a sensitive topic even in the realm of fantasy fiction. Rather than knife-wielding maniacs in Scream masks, these are people whose unlives must go on despite the condition of their minds. That sounds very much like the friends and family I've known who were deeply affected by mental illness.

What it All Means

Again, I'm not going to put in any spoilers. I will simply say that the Camarilla finally gets around to putting some steam in their efforts to fight the Sabbat. It makes me look forward to Tremere and Brujah in some serious ways.

Also, there's the first pinpoint of hope, of some light at the end of the tunnel. The back of the book begins with "salvation at millennium's end," and it isn't joking. When you're done with this book, you may have no idea how what's being tried could work, but at least someone is trying something and seems to think they stand a chance of success. That's a nice feeling to have, for once, at the end of a Vampire story.

When I was done with this book, I thought:

Well, I'll be darned. I don't think I understood what just went on.
I liked it, though.
I liked it a lot. Was this really written by the author of Toreador?

If you want a good book that's going to work on a bunch of different levels, and advance the storyline, and show you madness and vampires and how they go together like hand-in-glove in a way that makes you want some assurance of your own sanity in a very immediate way, then this is for you.

If not, well...move on to Giovanni. And look forward to what's left in the series.

Style: 4 (Classy and well done)
Substance: 4 (Meaty)

Clan Novel: Malkavian
Author: Stewart Wieck Category: Novel Company/Publisher: White Wolf Games Studio Line: Vampire: the Masquerade Cost: $5.99US Page count: 267 ISBN: 1-56504-819-9 SKU: WW11108 Playtest Review by Michael G. Williams on 06/17/00. Genre tags: Fantasy Modern day Horror Espionage Conspiracy Vampire Gothic Diceless	I have my napkin tied round my neck, and my plate ready. I am prepared to eat crow. In April of 1999, White Wolf began the release of the Clan Novel series for the Vampire: the Masquerade game line. This series of novels, each focusing on one of the thirteen clans, was advertised as an epic tale to add insight and enjoyment to White Wolf's very popular World of Darkness series of games and supplements. It got off on weak footing, with Clan Novel: Toreador reading like a trashy romance novel; since then, however, the quality of novels has increased dramatically, as Gherbod Fleming, Richard Dansky and Kathleen Ryan have painted beautiful portraits of life and unlife for the reader. It's due to the overwhelming quality of some of these novels that I greeted Clan Novel: Malkavian with such trepidation. The Malkavians are the clan of insanity, in which every vampire suffers from at least one derangement that serves to disconnect them in some way from the rest of their world. Malkavians are a wonderful concept, and easily my favorite of the clans, but they're often poorly played and dismally written. To top it all off, the author of Clan Novel: Toreador is the author of Clan Novel: Malkavian. I didn't know what to expect; Toreador left me feeling sick with disappointment, but the excerpts for Malkavian, in the back of its two preceding novels, made me think it might be very, very good. And in every review for every novel, I have gleefully taken a stab at CN:Toreador along the way, so that I might further tarnish Stewart Wieck's reputation as an author. Maybe he took a writing class. Or maybe I just failed to appreciate Toreador, but regardless, I was way wrong. Malkavian proves it; it's not perfect, but it's a long way better than Toreador. As with other novels, I'll be dealing with: tone, characterization, plot and what this novel means to the rest of the series. Tone Toreador was a tragedy of tone; I don't mean it was tragic, I mean it was a total failure. It was just bad, and there's no getting around it. Malkavian, though, enjoys a much different tone. There's still a penchant for, lacking for a better word, I call "Melrose-ism." Victoria Ash, returning to make another appearance as everyone's favorite vapid manipulator (oxymoronic, I know), is still dressed in slinky outfits and high heeled boots to go into a fight. Anatole makes one of his first appearances by stripping down and diving into a river in Bosnia, washing his long, blond hair. There's still a sort of "Dynasty" sense of everyone having nice suits, nice cars, nice hair - for a Vampire novel, there's a striking lot of nice to be seen. However, all this is peripheral. Where Toreador made me think of undead high school kids playing the politics of a senior prom, Malkavian enjoys something more to its tone, a grittiness that Toreador lacked. This feels like something by one of the co-creators of the World of Darkness. But, I'm getting ahead of myself. (Perhaps a review of a novel about insanity can't help being a little fractured, itself.) The tone of novels prior to Malkavian has, overall, been mature. These are novels about a world darker than our own, in which terrible monsters come out of the night and snatch you away if you're not careful. If you're even less lucky, you become one yourself. I was afraid Malkavian would go soft on this aspect, perhaps hold up vampires as too much the heroes, too human, too...fluffy. I was wrong. Wieck uses a very grown-up voice in telling his tale, an effort complicated by the fact that his main character and occasional narrator is utterly, irrevocably, incurably insane. Anatole is the Mad Prophet of Gehenna, plagued and blessed with visions of the end times when Caine, or the Antedeluvians, or someone will come back to wakefulness and destroy as many of their offspring as they can. So how do you let the reader see with ostensibly sane eyes through the visions of a madman? You don't hold back. You just let it go, and trust the reader to be intelligent enough to work it out on their own. This is what Wieck does in Malkavian and it works, beautifully. The novel's first page is a monologue by Anatole - I say monologue rather than narration because it left me with the sense that Anatole was not talking to me (thank some Divinity, somewhere), but talking to himself. Not nattering on in nonsense about something that doesn't exist, but going through his own thoughts with the fine-toothed comb of lucid self-examination surrounded by the darkness of dementia. Rather than the hokey, comical Malkavians of so many tabletop and live-action Vampire games, content to run around playing pranks and giggling at each other, these first few pages describe a confusing trek through a labyrinth of images and metaphors for the roots of Anatole's thoughts. They set an important precedent for the rest of the novel. We the reader are going to see madness, full-blown schizophrenia, delusions, manic depressions, fractured minds, all built on a concept so few people seem to understand about real-world insanity. "Crazy" people are not jokes or cheap tricks. Insanity isn't about someone being a freak to laugh at. Insanity is simply the name we attach to a mind that might have once been much like any other, but now it works, or interprets or classifies information, differently. So differently is this done, in fact, that some majority of people whose minds all more or less work the same can, with some degree of certainty, label the insane mind as being "broken." Insanity is not to be laughed at; insanity is something that can happen to one's self. This is a vitally important point which Wieck makes so very well. It's also absolutely necessary to keep in mind if one is to enjoy this novel; it's this basic premise that sets CN:Malkavian apart from all the other books, and which makes me want to apologize, to some degree, for trashing Toreador so mercilessly. So what does this have to do with the tone? The tone of this book is pure, unadulterated horror. This isn't a book about becoming a monster, that assumes all normal mortal humans are somehow inherently better. This isn't a story about the supernatural inflicting itself on innocents. This is a novel about how precious one's own mind, and the influences over it, should be. It's the fact that while vampirism is the stuff of fantasy, insanity is very real to you and me here in the real world, that makes this novel so scary, and it's that fact which Wieck uses to engage us. The tone of this novel is not that of a bodice-ripper; it's that of a grown-up fantasy that shows us about what for which we, as residents of the non-fiction world, really ought to feel: fear and compassion. Charaterization Gods, but this novel has a lot of characters. I'll start with Victoria Ash, since she's popped up in so many of the books so far, in so many states of mind and undress. Victoria is much-maligned by various readers with whom I've spoken, or who have reviewed these books, as being the cheerleader for Team Vampire. There's really no denying that Victoria has been little more than a device for sexual content and self-conflicting fear and confidence in this series. One minute she's paranoid about the possibility she is being manipulated in some secret way by elders she's never met, and the next she's trying to bed the representative of the Ventrue Justicar. Then she's exchanging catty one-liners and screaming her fool head off when someone gets murdered in front of her. In this novel, though, I think Wieck has finally hammered out a palatable version of Victoria: she's a vampire who likes the trappings of mortal beauty and social refinement, but whose desires to achieve her own goals will, ultimately, outweigh anything else. She is, in her own way in this novel, an embodiment of much of the point behind Vampire: life is a battle between what's Good, and what's good for getting what one wants. In her greatest moments of leisure and self-assuredness, Victoria can be gracious, generous, and every bit not a monster. But when she's in need, she'll do anything it takes. This lends her some of that grittiness I talked about above. Instead of humping the leg of a Ventrue, she does things like sleep with wealthy businessmen in return for money, guns, and protection, then idly contemplate their libidinous spoor while reviewing her progress towards the real goals she has in mind. She seduces bored housewives while their husbands repair her bullet-riddled stolen luxury car, then drinks their blood and justifies it by saying, to quote, "The world is a f---ing tradeoff." In other words, Victoria in this novel is neither the cheerleader nor the slut; she's a businesswoman who knows that there are things she needs and what she is willing to do to get them. That's just how life is. It's a casual approach to serious issues which she adopts to help herself cope with the seriousness of those issues, and this is something that gives her a depth we just haven't seen before. Two other vital characters are Bennison, former Prince of Atlanta, and the General, a Malkavian ancient who made his haven in that city until the Sabbat showed up to start killing vampires. Together, they are used by Wieck to paint important pictures of the forms insanity can take. Both are fully aware that something is not right with their minds, and have been aware of this for decades, centuries or millennia. Prince Bennison may find his delusions distracting, but he doesn't find them disabling. He almost seems to gain a certain measure of confidence from the screaming he hears from the Confederate army he always thinks is right behind him, looking for leadership. On the other hand, while the General's obsessions bring him tremendous pleasure, he also feels tremendous guilt over how his psyche is corrupted. Rather than gaining strength, he must battle his feelings and desires in order to retain control of himself. I won't say much more, because these are the sorts of things that require a novel to explain with any sort of success. I'll simply say their similarities and differences do a wonderful job of summing up much of what it means to be a Child of Malkav. Another absolutely fascinating character is the main narrator of events surrounding Anatole - there's no explanation of who this person is, but it is obviously a vampire and, I think, Anatole's childe. The narrator, however, shows an absolute devotion to following Anatole around while he gathers information on the Eye and pursues his visions of Gehenna, all while taking meticulous notes. Aside from being tremendously beneficial to the reader, this character's commentary is lucid, intelligent and observant. There doesn't seem to be anything crazy about her or him - except that it's their job to follow around another Malkavian writing down everything he says, and they do it without complaint. This character, about whom I wish I knew so much more, does a fabulous job of illustrating the fact that insanity doesn't have to reduce someone to gibbering or carrying a teddy bear in one hand and a meat cleaver in the other. This is slow, subtle, functional insanity that creeped the hell out of me. Obviously, however, the real focus in terms of characters is Anatole. Wieck has done what is, I have to gladly admit, a brilliant job with Anatole. Anatole is stark raving mad - no getting around that whatsoever. But Anatole is also brilliant, and his mind shoots comfortably in a hundred different directions to paint metaphors and sift information through his insanity to draw out the most unlikely and intriguing connections. Anatole may talk in metaphors that leave the reader a little confused, to put it mildly, but this is exactly what I mentioned above: Wieck just lets the madness flow, and leaves it to the reader to discover understanding or frustrating confusion as best they can. Some of the most enjoyable moments of roleplaying I've experienced occurred when a Malkavian PC came up with something that was seemingly out of thin air, and then managed to provide a convincing if convoluted and frighteningly creative rationalization for their comment/theory/etc. This is the purpose Anatole serves in this novel, and Wieck has crafted him so that he does it extremely well. I won't begin to talk about issues of self-conflict or wild mood swings or actions that seem to have no explanation; I prefer to think I'm too sane to understand Anatole in the first place. It's Anatole's irrationality coupled with stark rationales that make him so interesting, anyway. The Plot I'm not even going to try to sum up this novel, or talk about whether everything is neatly arranged as cause and effect. This is not a simple laundry list of events with segues to connect them. This is a novel which takes one clan's weakness, insanity, and shows us mercilessly how that weakness, unlike almost any other clan's weakness (inability to cast a reflection, entrancement by beauty, supernatural ugliness, inability to feed on anything other than blood from a specific type of person), can affect you and me in a very real way. That, my friends, more than anything in almost any other novel, is scary. There are other things about the plot that make it terrifying. The confusion that ensues from many of the events that go on is more than a little unsettling. I can easily see how another person's reaction to the events of this plot might be confusion and disappointment rather than fear. It would be easy to close this book and say, "You know, there's not a lick of that that makes one iota of sense," and get angry that $6 just went into the pocket of somebody else for nothing. If that's your reaction, though, I would wonder whether perhaps you're a little too sure of your own sanity. When I was done with this novel, I couldn't help but wonder if there was something I missed. I kept flipping back to the more bizarre sections in which some Malkavian or another walks us through his personal hell of the psyche, looking for whatever I'd missed. It took me a while to realize it wasn't there, and the effect had been that I doubted my own mind, in some small way - insofar as I had doubted my own ability to catch the important bits - and in that regard this novel is a total success. This is insanity, I had to keep telling myself. I'm not supposed to understand, no matter how much I want to. That's a scary feeling, looking at a novel and not being able to make heads or tails of parts of it despite a feeling I should. Wieck brought me in hook, line and sinker, and nailed me on the forehead with it. I wouldn't be surprised if he's sitting in Atlanta, laughing at me right now. Well, not really. Of course. I don't want to leave you thinking it will be impossible for you to enjoy this story, though; quite the opposite, if you enjoy seeing how another mind works in ways completely alien to your own. I very much enjoyed this novel for that reason. If you like clear-cut novels like the crap churned out by the majority of popular fiction writers (say, John Grisham, for example - and yes, I am a snob), you're not going to enjoy this. Steer clear of Malkavian if you aren't willing to let some rational part of yourself just shut down for the duration, and take it as it comes to you. Another thing to recommend the plot of this novel is that it contains the second best action sequence of the entire series (I have to leave the blue ribbon in the hands of Richard Dansky). For the second time, I found myself entirely able to visualize what was going on, feeling like I was missing nothing of the events unfolding on the page. Also, the conclusion to the major action sequence actually made me laugh aloud and walk into the next room to shove the book into the hands of a friend, insisting that he read that section at least. Ultimately, though, I enjoyed this novel so much because Wieck uses such a real threat to frighten us. Like Setite used the very real aspect of corruption and broken trust we see on the news every night, and Ravnos used the very real problems of addiction and rebellion so many of us experience first-hand, and Lasombra and Assamite used ideas based on finding one's own purpose and rebelling against the plans others have for us, be they parents, friends or lovers, Malkavian uses mental illness, something which affects fully 25% of the American population. He manages not to use the mentally ill as bogeymen, though; these are three-dimensional minds of characters which simply don't work the ways our do; maybe it's good, maybe it's bad. That's very realistic, and very important when dealing with such a sensitive topic even in the realm of fantasy fiction. Rather than knife-wielding maniacs in Scream masks, these are people whose unlives must go on despite the condition of their minds. That sounds very much like the friends and family I've known who were deeply affected by mental illness. What it All Means Again, I'm not going to put in any spoilers. I will simply say that the Camarilla finally gets around to putting some steam in their efforts to fight the Sabbat. It makes me look forward to Tremere and Brujah in some serious ways. Also, there's the first pinpoint of hope, of some light at the end of the tunnel. The back of the book begins with "salvation at millennium's end," and it isn't joking. When you're done with this book, you may have no idea how what's being tried could work, but at least someone is trying something and seems to think they stand a chance of success. That's a nice feeling to have, for once, at the end of a Vampire story. When I was done with this book, I thought: Well, I'll be darned. I don't think I understood what just went on. I liked it, though. I liked it a lot. Was this really written by the author of Toreador? If you want a good book that's going to work on a bunch of different levels, and advance the storyline, and show you madness and vampires and how they go together like hand-in-glove in a way that makes you want some assurance of your own sanity in a very immediate way, then this is for you. If not, well...move on to Giovanni. And look forward to what's left in the series. Style: 4 (Classy and well done) Substance: 4 (Meaty)