Todd Grimson's STAINLESS begins with an interesting one-two punch: Chapter One is all curt poetry, a sensually entropic present tense blur-dream of L.A. minutaie which plays like a lost page from LESS THAN ZERO. A man--his name is Keith--is sitting in the garden, waiting for someone--her name is Justine. Wondering if she'll go out tonight. Vaguely remembering his hands, which are wrapped in bandages. Really, he doesn't want to do anything, but if there's some reason to go somewhere that's okay too. He'll live. That's the stupid part.

Here, as a contrast, are the first paragraphs of Chapter Two:

Justine is a vampire, and Keith is the human she keeps around to take care of things during the day. It's more complicated, but that's the general outline. A little over a year ago, she bit him on the neck. At that time, he was a junkie. He had, before the "accident" to his hands, been in a band that had a successful album. They were called SMX. Keith's girlfriend committed suicide, his hands were grievously injured, he dropped out of sight and became addicted to painkillers, ultimately to heroin.
When Justine put him into a trance, prior to biting him, he sensed what was happening and he was terrified, sure. but he was also somehow exhilarated--at least he would die knowing that there were wonders and surprises in this life on earth, even if he only had a few moments to marvel, it was all right, he accepted the surprise. But vampires possess a highly evolved faculty of taste, and Justine would never take more than a small sample of blood from a drug addict...So she spared him, but something in the telepathic bond moved her, interested her, and she kept him...But she did not enslave him, as she might have, as she has done at other times.
Maybe because he loved a dead girl, or because he has known suffering, or simply because he was handsome, and she was lonely. She likes him.

That simple. That--deceptively--simple.

First published by HarperPrism in 1996, Todd Grimson's STAINLESS surfed in on the crest of a wave that began with Dell's Abyss line...not quite Splatterpunk, but definitely New Dark; horror with as much in common with Marvel's Vertigo graphic novel imprint and extremely old-school experiemental/poetic grue-masters like Poe or Lovecraft as it did with Stephen King or Anne Rice. (I'd argue that Peter Straub has fallen under this category from the very start, but that would be best covered in an entirely different essay.)

What Grimson added to the mix, however, was a jolt of indie-lit garage band rock 'n' roll fatalism--slacker nightlife crossed with post-punk style. His characters eddy back and forth, drawn by tidal impulses they don't understand well enough to resist, or refuse to even engage with enough to escape. They drift into bad habits they know will eventually kill them, and follow them all the way down; Keith and Justine, for example, who break the biggest Renfield/Dracula rule of them all by first getting sexually involved, then actually coming to care for each other more than they ever will for themselves. But equally so the torrent of lost souls sucked into Keith and Justine's black hole orbit: Tamara, one of Keith's doctors after the "accident", who ends up the fulcrum of the world's worst threesome...Michelle, a bored former SMX fan who starts stalking Keith, along with her posse of fellow pseudo-intellectual wannabe artists...David, a silent movie star Justine once accidentally made into a vampire and now barely remembers, whose perverse cruelty more than makes up for his complete and total lack of imagination.

Throughout, we return again and again to the innately bankrupt nature of immortality--especially for someone like Justine, first turned as a Medieval peasant, who's spent the entirety of her time in between careening from appetite to satiation to fresh occasion of hunger, without ever even taking the time to learn how to read. Grimson renders her nighttime existence with viciously exact strokes, showing simultaneously how full it can seem in the micro-second, yet how empty it is overall. The interstitial sections in which he tracks various kills Justine's made (from 1830s Richmond, Virginia to 1950s Hollywood, and beyond) are brilliant little sketches, linguistically true to their eras, yet just as stream-of-consciousness immediate/accessible as the rest of the book...which has, of course, since become a complete period-piece, in itself. Funny how these things work out.

Writing like this, however, will (hopefully) always be in style--

Justine's fangs are fully out now. In the bedroom, lit by the bedside lamp, she has Tamara undress. Keith leaves, or at least begins to, lingering in the living room, torn...in lacy rose-beige bra and underpants, Tamara lies on her side on the bed. Justine pushes her gently onto her stomach, and bites into the good blue vein behind the right knee. it is excellent, hot blood. speeding, secret blood.
...Tamara groans. Justine, leaning back against the wall, viewing the room in a kind of strobe effect, shudders, oh she feels it, as Keith sadly, mercilessly, slashes with a knife to connect the bite-marks into one cut. He dabs at the blood. The sugar-syrup venom has a clotting effect. The purple wound-mouth swells. Tamara pulls away, turns more fully onto her side, knees coming up into fetal position, warm body, intimate, revealed. Eyes shut, she says, "Ow. Ow." Justine drools blood. Keith rises, turns, comes to her. He wipes her mouth on his sleeve. She breathes.

Cinematic and hard-R Romantic at once, STAINLESS remains incrementally fascinating, but never less than disturbing. At moments, its undertone of constant depair approaches a dreadful rejection of the whole natural world at once, offering no soft place to fall: Not into death, and not into undeath, either. Time, it seems, is the ultimate monster here; things just go, never slowing far enough for a do-over, until they stop short, like a wall stops a car.

Hardly comfort-food, even for horror: Still, I like it. And if you can still manage to find a copy of it anywhere (it's long out of print, like most of my recommendations), you just might, too.

THE END