The Suicide Motor Club (Christopher Buehlman)

The Suicide Motor Club
Christopher Buehlman
Berkley
Fiction, Horror
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: It was an ordinary night on the road in late 1960's America, and the Lamb family was driving home under the light of a golden-orange rising moon... until a horror beyond imagining shattered their happiness and left only young wife and mother Judith alive. In the moments before the crash that would end her husband's life, she got a good look at the people in the other car - the man with the cat-bright eyes and long fangs who pulled her young son from his seat through the open window, a memory seared into her brain even when nobody else believes her. But even as she is told, again and again, how only a miracle could have spared her, she knows that she has looked into the eyes of pure evil.
Years later, dedicating herself to the service of God as a nun, she is contacted by a stranger who actually believes her - a man who offers her a chance to hunt down and end the monsters who took her son and her happiness, a pack of vampires known as the Suicide Motor Club who use roadside "accidents" as cover for their kills. But is this secretive group, the Bereaved, truly a path to peace and salvation... and, if so, what is she to make of the unusual vampire who offers to help her in her quest?

REVIEW: Tangentially connected to Buehlman's The Lesser Dead through shared vampire lore and references to one character in particular, The Suicide Motor Club largely stands on its own, a story of inhuman predators and flawed people and the now-faded heyday of American muscle cars on the open roads.
Judith Lamb starts out, if not entirely happy with her lot - her marriage is best described as "complicated" - then reasonably content, enough that the loss of her pre-crash life cuts deep into her soul in a wound that will never truly heal. She turns eventually to faith, leaning into a belief she has carried since childhood as she struggles to make sense of not only her survival but of the horrific things she saw snatch her boy literally from her grasp, and even if she ultimately must walk her own path and find her own way to redemption outside the convent, she carries the strength of her belief into the coming battle. It is not a simplistic thing, her faith in her God, a faith tested not only by what she sees among the Bereaved and in her prophetic visions but also by her interactions with Clayton, a vampire who defies most everything she thought she knew about the undead. Clayton himself is a complicated figure, a vampire who struggles to retain some restraint even as he is surrounded by those who gleefully embrace their monstrous natures and the liberty it gives them to be the worst abominations they can be. (As with Buehlman's other titles, punches are not pulled and quarter is not given; these are bloodthirsty, depraved vampires to whom humans are not just prey of necessity but the most deliciously fragile toys to torment and smash and discard at leisure.) The story moves between Judith's struggles and the depredation of the Suicide Motor Club as they crisscross the country, racking up a small mountain's worth of collateral damage, before the inevitable confrontation... one that doesn't play out as anyone expects, in a climax that threatens to overplay its tension before finally coming to an ending that leaves some ambiguous threads dangling. I preferred this book's wrapup to the one in The Lesser Dead, even with that ambiguity and sense that there is more to tell.
The whole makes for a nicely twisted story of monsters and humans, belief and disbelief, and the often twisted, ever-shifting lines between good and evil, even within the same individual.

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