A Review of Less than Human By Gary Raisor

This is not your normal vampire novel in the vein of Anne Rice. No sexy vampires pouting or making bedroom eyes at their victims. No glittery vampires like in Twilight. The horror is real, the characters are not attractive as much as they are feral, and very, very hungry.  As a matter of fact, all the characters in this book are hungry for something. Whether it’s sex, blood, alcohol, drugs, or others to believe their truths—and lies.

Make no bones about it, the gore in Raisor’s book is more disgusting than the pop-art romance vampire books that have been published in the past decade, but the screams are more convincing.

Remember the way they used to write horror stories?

Less than Human by Gary Raisor is most definitely better written, faster- paced and more realistic than the aforementioned. 

There’s a small town called Carruthers, Texas, and if you want to live, you better be inside your house by dusk and not roaming the streets.

Steve and Earl are drifters, hustling pool. That’s their hobby. Their survival is hunting humans. 

Native American Billy T (Billy Two Hats) hunts women, meets his match with Exotic Dancer Julianna. She loves killing as much as Billy T does, yet she isn’t human like Billy T. And then there’s John, caught in the middle of all this, who can’t stop the psychic fever dreams. After John steals Steve’s pool stick, there’s a rush of images of a teenage boy being murdered. Bar proprietor Leon is tortured by Steve and Earl. He eventually relents, telling them where John is.

Then there’s the Native American characters of Jesse and Amos, grandson and grandfather, struggling to make it in life. Amos had already given up, and Jesse, a college dropout working in a strip mine, with dreams of leaving town. This is where Raisor’s novel shines. Compassion for his characters ring true, but for Amos and Jesse, they ring truer, as if Raisor had already lived those lives.

All in all, this vampire tale, shifting between 1919 and modern day, is a hybrid western and horror story, a subgenre called the Weird Western. Writers such as Robert E. Howard and Joe Lansdale, Stephen King, have entries in this category. The term originated with DC’s Weird Western Tales published in 1972, and includes the genres fantasy Western, horror Western and science fiction Western. 

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The subgenre is older, having been amalgamated since the 1930s, and possibly earlier. With B-movie Westerns, comic books, movie serials and pulp magazines, writers find ways to integrate Ghosts, Fairies, vampires, Aliens, Werewolves, cursed objects, and Witches, among cattle rustling, Gunfights, and Gold mining. Individually, the hybrid genres combine elements of the Western genre with those of fantasy, horror and science fiction respectively. 

During the passages featuring Earl as a snake oil salesman, he becomes a vengeful man, looking for those who killed a man, his Native American wife, and gutted his little girl, making the reader ponder if Raisor was influenced by Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, with gory scenes of torture, knife skinning, etc.

The dialogue cracks with humor, the interactions between characters are poignant. Raisor’s sparse prose drives its fangs deep into the reader’s jugular and never let’s go.