• By GREG LANGLEY
• Books editor
• Published: Dec 27, 2009 - Page: 3E

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VAMPIRE A GO-GO
By Victor Gischler
Touchstone Books,
$14.99 paperback

Despite the title, this book has little to do with discos or go-go girls. Gischler, who lives in Baton Rouge, titled his previous book Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse, and that novel did feature discos and dancing girls along with some high parody and doses of action/adventure as well as a setting in the near-future. Vampire, on the other hand, is set in the present and past, specifically the rein of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II at the tail-end of the 16th century.

First the contemporary story line: Allen Cabbot is a graduate student at Gothic State University — a “small university perched atop a rocky precipice overlooking the Pacific Ocean.” Allen gets into a jam when his grades dive following a failed relationship with a female student and he is roped into a summer assistantship with Dr. Evergreen. “Dr. Evergreen was known campuswide as a cranky hardass. He stank of bad cigars and gin. He was an unpleasant and demanding man, and most students only took his classes when forced to complete degree requirements.”

Allen is to go to Prague, Czech Republic, to help Evergreen with a project on Kafka. Not the way a redblooded young grad student prefers to spend his summer. Allen hasn’t got much choice in the matter. He has to go. He mopes about it, but finally accepts his fate and goes to a mixer at Evergreen’s house where he encounters the professor’s unusual spouse.

Gischler has lost none of his wry sense of humor and it comes out full force in this early scene.

“She was somehow light and dark at the same time, some smiling Celtic goddess, features like delicate china, skin so white it glowed, absorbing light, leaving a aura of darkness all around her. A breeze kicked up, lifted her hair, black and shining like obsidian. She seemed to float toward him, eyes flashing cold and terrible, hair streaming like black flame.

“Like some sort of terrifying shampoo commercial.”

In Europe Allen immediately encounters a vampire woman whose identity comes as no surprise to readers. Also no surprise is the fact that the devious Evergreen is not in Prague to study Kafka. He’s after some information about an experiment Rudolph II had his necromancers and alchemists conduct in Prague castle. One of those alchemists, the rakish Edward Kelly is still around in the form of a ghost who can’t escape the confines of the castle.

Kelly sure would love to go on to wherever the ghosts of alchemists have to go, but something has him stuck in geography but not in time. It’s through the memories and memoirs of the wine-soaked Kelly that the 16th-century story line develops.

Meanwhile, in the present, Allen has encounters with a werewolf, a gollum, a magiciand and “combat priests.” He has sex with a vampire and is chased by two different groups. He isn’t sure why they are chasing him. Readers soon find out, as Gischler never fails to amuse and doesn’t let a plot line get moldy. Stuff happens in this book, funny stuff and sometimes violent stuff and scary stuff.

But no go-go stuff.

Dancing vampires would have been too much, perhaps, but just about anything and everything else is included in the plot.

For once the kitchen sink approach works pretty well. That’s because Gischler never loses control of the plot or of the well-drawn characters he’s created, so the reader is never lost or confused, only amused. And that is worth the price of admission.