Timmy Valentine 01 - Vampire Junction 1991

[Simon]

   

Vampire Junction is the title of S. P. Somtow's 1984 novel, the first in a series about Timmy Valentine, a 12-year-old rock star who is actually a 2,000-year-old vampire. Unpublished for many years and rejected by over two dozen publishers, the novel uses a novel narrative technique inspired by the rapid intercutting of MTV music videos, and elevated the gore quotient of the horror novel to an unprecedented level by importing the imagery of "splatter" films to the literary novel. When finally published by Donning, a small press, the book became immensely influential and is considered by some to be ancestral to the "splatterpunk movement" in gothic literature along with novels like Some of Your Blood by Theodore Sturgeon. Later, the book was published by Berkley/Ace and Tor Books, and has remained in print ever since.

The novel was voted one of "forty all-time greatest horror books" by the Horror Writers Association. It has currently been reissued by Diplodocus Press. It has been translated into French (three editions), German under the title Ich bin die Dunkelheit, Japanese, Thai, and Russian.

S. P. Somtow has written two sequels to Vampire Junction, Valentine and Vanitas.