Matt Haig, The Radleys
Featured Book
A novel of an average English suburban family – who happen to be vampires
Scenes from a marriage: Helen Radley has a headache; her husband, Peter, is frisky and frustrated. She’s fantasizing about her brother-in-law and he’s flirting with a neighbor. Meanwhile, their kids struggle to fit in at school. Daughter Clara, newly vegan, is losing her lunch in the school bathrooms, and son Rowan is love-struck by the girl next door. The Radleys are an average English suburban family, except their usual cravings and urges concern bloodletting and conversion. But avid viewers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and consumers of the Twilight series know vampires are fairly terrestrial – they have the same needs and desires as the rest of us.
Matt Haig, an author of adult (The Dead Fathers Club) and YA fiction (The Runaway Troll), appeals to both camps with a novel that cleverly sidesteps genre tropes. Donning the gray flannel suit (with conspicuous stains), Peter Radley is “trapped inside a cliché that’s not meant to be his. A middle-class, middle-aged man, briefcase in hand, feeling the full weight of gravity and morality and all those other oppressive human forces.” When his daughter Clara bites in self-defense and a schoolboy goes missing, the Radleys have to guard her. Vampirism is not taken lightly in Bishopthorpe, a small town outside of Yorkshire, where the police force contains a “countervampirism” unit. In swoops Peter’s brother, Will, the consummate bachelor, currently between jobs, who enjoyed a long-ago tryst with Helen, and now gets by drinking the bottled blood of his girlfriend, which goes down like Pinot Noir. When searching for fresh blood, Will amusingly points out how easy it is to go for “easily explainable disappearances,” like runaways, homeless, and the suicidal. But that’s not what he’s looking for. “It just seems to artificial, so fundamentally unromantic, to limit your desires to safe kinds of victim.” Crisply narrated by Briton Toby Smith, The Radleys is sprinkled with excerpts from The Abstainer’s Handbook, a self-help tome for vampires looking to curb their habits. After all, they’re only human.
