Underland

By Mick Farren

Book Overview

Victor Renquist, centuries-old master of a small colony of Nosferatu, has been "recruited"-forcibly-by an undercover branch of the National Security Agency, Paranormal Operations and Research. They need his help. It seems that certain members of Hitler's Third Reich escaped to a secret world below Antarctica, taking with them some very advanced technology. Human teams have failed to infiltrate the base, and Renquist is the NSA's last chance.The team is small: Renquist; his right-hand man, Lupo; an extremely unorthodox hardline NSA operative named Jack Coulson; and Thyme Bridewell, a failed NSA brain-control experiment originally intended as Renquist's lunch. What they find in Underland taxes even Renquist's supernormal powers. The quondam Nazis have some very powerful allies - the Dhrakuh, a race of sentient reptiles from the dawn of time. Their goal is nothing less than the conquest of the entire world.To make matters worse, Renquist is hampered by some throwbacks from his own race and by the unexpected arrival of one of his own colony members, Julia, together with Philipa, a darklost whom Julia has led through the Change into Nosferatu.The future of civilization hangs in the balance.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0765303213
• ISBN13: 9780765303219
• Release Date: November 2002
• Publisher: Tor Books
• Length: 496 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 5.9" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Genre Confusion

It used to be that vampire stores were, first and foremost, horror stories. In the dark ages, long before Buffy, audiences read stories of evil creatures that lived forever, shunned sunlight, and looked at humans as self-delivering meals. Now years later, the Buffy vampire is truest to form, and every new author has to find a new variation on an old theme. Mick Farren's vampires, in his fourth novel in the Victor Renquist series, as of the 'there is a barely believable explanation for all this' school.Of course, this depends on whether the average vampire junkie will swallow the idea that countless millennia ago aliens landed creating several biological species to keep our forbearers in check. Naturally, one such species were the Nosferatu, who outlasted their masters, and haunt the night to this day.For most of the first three volumes of this series, vampire history wasn't all that important. Farren's habit being to play nest politics against an action plot. But, gradually, his vampires have become more enmeshed in the modern, occult world around them. In 'Underland,' with its strange mélange of vampire, alien, Nazi, and prehistoric themes, the vampires are completely believable, but the plot stretches ones ability to willingly suspend disbelief.If you don't mind a stirring story of a master vampire forcibly recruited by a top secret government agency to descend into an underworld culture run by the Nazi fugitives of World War II you will discover that Farren's writing talent is considerable. Indeed, this is far from the 250 page pot-boiler that vampire lovers have come to expect. The writer takes the time to build character and indulge in scene building. I thing those readers who are ready to spend some time with the characters and their somewhat outlandish story will find much to enjoy