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Bloody September
review...
"... Despite her fanatical quest to examine her every action, she felt the horrifying certainty that all freedom was illusory, nothing more than ignorance. Like the blood within her undead body, her soul was not her own...” (p. 158, “Sunday, 8 August 1999, 11:59 PM.”)
Bloody September is the third volume in the four part Clan Novel Saga published by White Wolf as a way of getting several new readers into their (now-defunct) Vampire: the Masquerade fiction line, as well as those readers put off by a daunting fourteen part novel series. I was one such reader, so this review reflects a “new to the course of events” reading.
The characters in Bloody September come from the various Clans that make (or is that made) up the vampiric lineage that the setting proposes. The actions of these characters continues from the previous volumes, though the way they do it is often lackluster.
It’s a personal opinion that multi-authored works lack an intrinsic coherence that solo-authored works have, some times several styles adds to the enjoyment of the work, but in this case, it was hard to enjoy in places. The chronological chapters, while engaging, didn’t always flow from one point to another. Because as with a temporal change, an author change may have happened as well, undercutting the poise of one chapter versus another. I will say that the volume, overall, was well edited, but the change in authors some times pushed me back out of the story.
Don’t mistake Bloody September for a tale of longing and contemplation, it’s a oddly staged action story. The Clans of the Camarilla and Sabbat sects are now engaging each other openly in city streets, one Prince going so far as to use his immoral influence to call out the National Guard to enforce a curfew so that the battles won’t come to close to destroying his city.
Bloody September is a nice gaming related book, has lots of ways of interpreting the way the rules interact with a story. We get to see several uses of game powers (disciplines) and in-game jargon, like Prince, Sabbat, Ravnos, diablerie, etc. Luckily for those wanting to the know what the heck is being talked about, there’s a glossary in the back appendices to refer to.
Overall, Bloody September is a good Vampire story collection, though probably not the best in vampire fiction. The book is very game-keyed, so those looking for a good, general vampire story might look elsewhere. But those already sucked into the events unfolding (as this is the third volume of the story), you will be more than passingly familiar with the inconsistencies that creep up time and again.
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