These were two novellas that can be read together since The Last Train to Perdition immediately follows I Travel by Night. Robert McCammon is one of my all time favorite novelists, and he definitely delivered with these two novellas. He seems to have rediscovered himself as a historical speculative fiction writer, as compared to being a contemporary horror writer early in his career. I liked both the concept behind these stories, a post Civil War nineteenth century vampire who doesn’t want to be a vampire and is striving to undo his condition and become human again, going to war with the vampire community in the process. He takes difficult jobs as a private investigator/bounty hunter/gun for hire as his occupation while trying to find the vampire who turned him.
Of the two novellas, I preferred I Travel by Night, where Trevor Lawson takes on a job to rescue a banker’s daughter who has been kidnapped by the vampire society he hunts. He recognizes this as a trap for him but takes the job anyway. He is joined by Ann Kingsley, the kidnapped woman’s sister, who joins Lawson as his sidekick in the second novella and helps him by doing things by day that he cannot, although that isn’t really explored in either story. In The Last Train to Perdition, Lawson is hired to retrieve a politician’s son, who has fallen in with a group of bandits, where he once again is ambushed by the vampires he is trying to annihilate. I really enjoyed both novellas, but the problem with the second one is that it has a Deux Ex Machina ending that brings it down a notch.
The second novella ends with the promise of more to come in this story, and I look forward to reading more in this story world.
