This is hands down the deepest, most compelling, most twisted and most suspenseful vampire story I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a lot of them. I happen to have some up-close experience of the author and will say this: He is brilliant on many many levels. Fiercely creative, in this particular endeavor, he manages to make a thrilling vampire novel also a complexly intellectual and spiritual experience. – Amazon Review
Vampire Junction:
The Iconic Masterpiece of High-Intensity Horror
(Timmy Valentine Series Book 1)
Now acknowledged as one of the most important classics of twentieth-century gothic literarture, S.P. Somtow’s tale of a twelve-year-old rock star vampire, his Jungian analyst, and the Wagnerian conductor who is his nemesis turned the entire genre upside down in the 1980s and is considered the ancestor of the “splatterpunk” movement.
Vampire Junction has been voted one of the top forty horror books of all time. Timmy Valentine: “He’ll steal your heart – and have it for breakfast!” 21st anniversary edition of this unforgettable classic of high-intensity horror.
“Perhaps the closest thing to a nightmare ever put on paper–Somtow skillfully combines the styles of William Burroughs, Stephen King, and the author of the Revelation to John–the Marquis de Sade would love this book!”
– Robert Bloch, author of PSYCHO
“The closest thing to a nightmare ever put on paper.” – Robert Bloch
“S P Somtow doesn’t write like anyone else – when he wants to spook you, he can drive the chill bone deep!” – Dean Koontz
“Terrible things happen in this book. It’s about rock music, about mass hysteria, about vampires, about horror. One comes out knowing, and caring about a panoply of new friends and acquaintances, living and dead and unalive.” – Theodore Sturgeon
It has been 38 years since Vampire Junction was first published and it is still going strong. The original book in the series has two followups, and Somtow has continued his Vampire theme with a top ranked Vella Series.
Be Sure ToGet The
VAMPIRE JUNCTION SERIES
And check out Somtow’s
Vella Serials: Club X: Vampire in the Closet (S1) – Zombie in the Fridge (S2)
About the Author
Once referred to by the International Herald Tribune as ‘the most well-known expatriate Thai in the world,’ Somtow Sucharitkul is no longer an expatriate, since he has returned to Thailand after five decades of wandering the world. He is best known as an award-winning novelist and a composer of operas.
Born in Bangkok, Somtow grew up in Europe and was educated at Eton and Cambridge. His first career was in music and in the 1970s, his first return to Asia, he acquired a reputation as a revolutionary composer, the first to combine Thai and Western instruments in radical new sonorities. Conditions in the arts in the region at the time proved so traumatic for the young composer that he suffered a major burnout, emigrated to the United States, and reinvented himself as a novelist.
His earliest novels were in the science fiction field and he soon won the John W. Campbell for Best New Writer as well as being nominated for and winning numerous other awards in the field. But science fiction was not able to contain him and he began to cross into other genres. In his 1984 novel Vampire Junction, he injected a new literary inventiveness into the horror genre, in the words of Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, ‘skillfully combining the styles of Stephen King, William Burroughs, and the author of the Revelation to John.’ Vampire Junction was voted one of the forty all-time greatest horror books by the Horror Writers’ Association, joining established classics like Frankenstein and Dracula. He has also published children’s books, a historical novel, and about a hundred works of short fiction.
In the 1990s Somtow became increasingly identified as a uniquely Asian writer with novels such as the semi-autobiographical Jasmine Nights and a series of stories noted for a peculiarly Asian brand of magic realism, such as Dragon’s Fin Soup, which is currently being made into a film directed by Takashi Miike. He recently won the World Fantasy Award, the highest accolade given in the world of fantastic literature, for his novella The Bird Catcher. His seventy-plus books have sold about two million copies world-wide. He has been nominated for or won over forty awards in the fields of science fiction, fantasy, and horror.
After becoming a Buddhist monk for a period in 2001, Somtow decided to refocus his attention on the country of his birth, founding Bangkok’s first international opera company and returning to music, where he again reinvented himself, this time as a neo-Asian neo-Romantic composer. The Norwegian government commissioned his song cycle Songs Before Dawn for the 100th Anniversary of the Nobel Peace Prize, and he composed at the request of the government of Thailand his Requiem: In Memoriam 9/11 which was dedicated to the victims of the 9/11 tragedy.
According to London’s Opera magazine, ‘in just five years, Somtow has made Bangkok into the operatic hub of Southeast Asia.’ His operas on Thai themes, Madana and Mae Naak, have been well received by international critics.
Somtow has recently been awarded the 2017 Europa Cultural Achievement Award for his work in bridging eastern and western cultures. In 2020 he returned to science fiction after a twenty-year absence with “Homeworld of the Heart”, a fifth novel in the Inquestor series.
To support S.P. Somtow’s work, visit his patreon account at patreon.com/spsomtow.
Somtow’s website: somtow.com
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