Fiction

Chloe Lauter, The Flayed Man (Soft Skull), 240 pp. Paperback, $16.95.

New York has been called “the city that never sleeps” for well over a hundred years now, but, as we all know, that epithet really belongs to Las Vegas, which takes the 24/7 work ethic far more seriously. This also means that Vegas is a great place for vampires.

Ellis, the 31-year-old narrator/protagonist of Chloe Lauter’s novel The Flayed Man, is a Vegas vampire who works night shifts as a front-desk receptionist at a hospital’s emergency room. To be fair, though, Lauter never actually uses the word vampire (except for an epigraph from the musician Jenn Champion). Ellis is simply “hungry”—for blood.

In Lauter’s mythology, you can only be born a vampire; it’s a genetic identity with a long, fraught history and complicated family relationships. You appear human, and you can tolerate sunlight. In fact, the only thing an unsuspecting friend might notice is your ability to recover rapidly from flesh wounds. But you need about an ounce of fresh blood every week to stay normal. Otherwise the ravenous beast chained within you will break out; your knees will bend backward, your mouth will stretch into a fang-filled snout, and you’ll transform into “a mutant creature primed for violence,” a transformation likely permanent. That is, until you’re hunted down and killed for the monster you are. You can heal quickly, but you’re not immortal.

Ellis lives in an apartment with her mother, also a vampire, who is struggling with early-onset dementia. Their lives are precarious. They depend upon Ellis’s Uncle Bill, a custodian in the UNLV phlebotomy lab, who provides them with a steady supply of human blood. The small vials are perfect because modern vampires prefer an efficient intravenous injection to sloppy sucking and swallowing. (The only neck-nibbling in this novel is romantic in nature.) When Uncle Bill suddenly disappears, Ellis and her mother are screwed. They have no backup plan for securing the blood they need to survive.

At her uncle’s empty house, Ellis finds and clings to a clue—a contact for a man in northern Nevada, who tells her over the phone that he can help her. The trouble is, Ellis’s car is busted. Enter Veer (“Vera Zawadski”), a tough, abrasive young paramedic who often brings patients to Ellis’s ER. Ellis and Veer have just gone out on a date and might be starting something. Veer explains that she also has to head up toward Reno to visit her brother, and Ellis decides to accelerate things by asking for a ride, turning her quest for fresh blood into a road trip with a new lover.

Vampire fiction has always been connected to eroticism, so it makes sense that Lauter’s novel would be more of a love story than a horror tale. In fact, the pure horror elements tend to derail the narrative. As The Flayed Man lurches toward its conclusion, the title-figure—a mysterious, mythical, demonic spirit that preys on vampires in the desert—becomes a more potent force, an archvillain that Ellis must face. It all becomes rather hallucinatory. Much more affecting are the interactions between Ellis and Veer, as each hesitantly and uncertainly falls into the other’s embrace.

Come for the vampires, stay for the smells.

Perhaps most amusing about the novel is Ellis’s heightened sense of smell. As a narrator, she frequently describes scents, odors, aromas: “I catch the faint scent of particle board and a scabbing cut.” Like a sommelier describing tasting notes, Ellis tries to expand her readers’ perceptions by dwelling on these details. A bar “smells like Pine-Sol and maraschino cherries,” another paramedic at the hospital “like drive-through hash-browns and whitening strips.” A Nevada motel room “smells like vanilla body spray and bleach smeared over vomit and cigarette smoke.” Out in the desert, she picks up “quartz fragments and creosote and days-old carrion.” But the most overwhelming scent comes from Veer: “I suffocate on the smell of her curiosity, like anise and black pepper cracked between her molars.”

These descriptions are an integral element of Lauter’s style, and they help to elevate the novel above the level of basic genre fiction. The language on the back cover of the book suggests that The Flayed Man is “a sexy and gritty addition to the pantheon of bloodsucker lit,” but this feels wrong. It would better be labeled “olfactory lit.” (There’s much more sniffing than bloodsucking.) Come for the vampires, stay for the smells.

And, while the aromatic qualities of the text are compelling, Ellis appeals because she’s compellingly appetitive—both as a vampire and as a lover. Superficially, she might seem like a quiet young woman who keeps to herself and lives with her mother. (She’s certainly not out partying in the kind of blood-rain raves you might see in a vampire film like Blade.) But inside, she’s wracked with “the torture of appetite,” driven by intense hunger and desire. “I want, I want, I want,” she tells us—and we believe her. “The desert and I aren’t so different,” she muses, “both hiding brutality, both survivable at best.”

When she finally gets an overdue injection of blood in her veins, she could be mistaken for a junkie: “There’s the usual uncomfortable pinch of metal, the strain of keeping the arm still and getting the angle right, but once the blood’s loose inside me it’s like sitting down to ice cream after weeks of water and wafers, like jolting awake after an impossibly good night’s sleep, no grit in your eyes or sand in your mouth, just euphoria and energy and life, life, life.”

And her attraction to Veer is nearly indistinguishable. “I want to know how each of her vertebrae taste[s],” she admits. But in this case, it’s a two-way street. Ellis equally desires to be vampire and victim: “I wish she’d eat me alive.” This hunger, this thirst, is what really propels The Flayed Man and keeps the action interesting.