As soon as I saw Jeff Miller’s mention of Tim Power’s latest, Hide Me Among The Graves, a sequel to his 1989 book The Stress of Her Regard, I went out (metaphorically) and snagged an e-copy. I’ve been a Powers fan since the ’80’s, and pick up anything new whenever I happen to run across it.

Jeff describes it as a “vampire” story, which is not incorrect, but it’s also pretty much entirely misleading. Powers’ vampires are identified with the Nephilim of the book of Genesis; there’s more of stone than of flesh about them, and they have a tendency to get fixated on individual human beings. The thing is, they don’t usually kill their immediate victims, the ones they fixate on; but they are jealous and tend to kill anyone loved by their victims. This makes them hard to live with.

As is usual with Powers, there’s a historical angle. In this case the light shines on poet Christina Rosetti and her siblings, especially her brother Dante Gabriel Rosetti, one of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, and their friends, including poet Algernon Swinburne. The Rosettis, it develops, were the nieces and nephews of John Polidori, who was the author of Varney the Vampyre, a friend of Shelley, Byron, and company, one of the party at which Mary Shelley began to write Frankenstein, and a significant character in The Stress of Her Regard. As Polidori died under the influence of one of the Nephilim, one might say that he’s a signficant character in this book as well. See, here’s the thing: the Nephilim are like a kind of fatal muse, ultimately destructive but inspiring in the short term.

So anyway, I grabbed the book, and alas! it did not reciprocate. I don’t know whether it was the book, or whether it’s me—The Stress of Her Regard is probably my least favorite of Powers’ books—or whether I just wasn’t in the right mood, but I never really got into it. I finished it, mind you, but I read it in dribs and drabs instead of getting caught up in it and staying up too late.

Bottom line: if you’ve not read Powers, he’s worth reading; I’d start with The Anubis Gates, Last Call, or Declare. If you already know you like Powers, read The Stress of Her Regard first, and move on to this one if you like it.

In I Left My Brains in San Francisco, Karina Fabian’s new novel, zombie exterminator Neeta Lyffe is travelling to San Francisco’s Moscone Center for ZomZeitgeber, the international zombie exterminator’s trade show. Yes, it’s a sequel to Neeta Lyffe, Zombie Exterminator, which somehow I unaccountably failed to review when I read it last year. This is frustrating, because I was all set to point at my old review and say “As before, so now.” Alas!

OK, here’s the shtick. In Neeta Lyffe’s world, zombies are a fact of life. Anyone who dies and is buried without a whole spine is at risk of coming back as a zombie; and anyone bitten by a zombie is likely to die and come back PDQ. In general folks have learned to live with this, calling in a professional zombie exterminator when they get out of hand. And zombie exterminators, needless to say, rely on a variety of weaponry up to and including hazmat suits and spray bottles of cleaning supplies…because zombies really hate cleaning supplies.

Did I say that Fabian’s playing this for laughs? She is. Horror, too, but mostly laughs.

In Neeta Lyffe, Zombie Exterminator, Neeta is tapped to be the host of a new reality show, Zombie Death Extreme, in which she trains a bunch of novices to be real zombie exterminators. Thing is, some of the zombies are real, and death is a real possibility. The producer’s a jerk (if I recall correctly), and Neeta hates the whole thing—she’s only doing because one of her customers (another jerk) sued her for property damage after she saved him from being zombified, and she needs the money. But she and her crew sure come in handy when there’s a massive zombie outbreak in Burbank, California. (Right across the freeway from Ikea and the Media City Center mall…Fabian described the geography so well that I could take you to the exact spot.)

In the new book, Neeta’s off to the trade show with her boyfriend; and of course, the course of true love does not Run Smooth. Plus, there’s another zombie exterminator hitting on her, and the zombie outbreak from the offshore eco-freak reef burial site. (Turns out that environmentalist zombies moan “Green!” as they attack you.)

I found this one to be more uneven than its predecessor; the romance subplot was occasionally tedious, and since the plot involves a new Government Motors vehicle that runs on fuel produced from human waste, the potty humor gets a little, um, ripe. But I enjoyed it; it’s a good, light read, and made me laugh. If Fabian produces another Neeta Lyffe book, I plan to buy it.