9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A great twist on an old genre, July 19, 2000
This is one of the best vampire books I've read. What makes it so great is that there is a very original twist to it. The relationship between church and the vampires in this book is very original. The writing style is very easy to follow and the story is very good. It really made me want to get the other books in the series.
The characters in this book are very interesting as well. They are rather well developed and aren't your standard, cookie cutter characters that you find in a lot of novels.
Briefly, this book is about a vampire who realizes that all of the restrictions that vampires face are only there because the church has brainwashed them into believing them. By focusing on believing, for example, that sunlight is not dangerous, the vampires can be in the sun with no ill effects. The church, on the other hand, wants the vampires destroyed and has squads of assassins to work towards this end. This has the potential to be an excellent series. I very strongly recommend this book to any lover of vampire lore.
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the best vampire books ever!, April 20, 2004
I found this book quite by accident and immediately fell in love. This is a completely different take on vampires and is actually my favorite novel - beating out Tanya Huff's series and even the Anita Blake series.
If you like vampire or horror novels you will love this book.
Our hero is Peter Octavian, a vampire called a "defiant one", and definitely one of the good guys. He is a private investigator investigating a missing persons case for a friend of his.
What makes Peter so likeable is that he is a great guy, but he is also all alone. He left his fellow vampires because he did not believe in their beliefs, and struck out on his own. He knows secrets about vampires that could help his vampire family, but no one believes him. They think of him as an outcast.
When you read about Peter, and realize what a good person he is, and how caring he is of humans, his fellow vampires and even the world in general, you really grow to like him. Also he is such a good strong guy, and you empathize with him because he is all alone without anyone to call family or friend.
Peter gets pulled into a missing persons case that will lead him to a conspiracy involving his "family" of vampires, the church, other "evil" vampire clans and a variety of very interesting characters.
This is an excellent excellent story. I highly recommend to all. You will not be disappointed. If you want to read the entire series, it is called the Shadow Saga and book 1 is Of Saints and Shadows (2) Angel Souls and Devil Hearts (3) Of Masques and Martyrs and (4) The Gathering Dark. I enjoyed this series as much as I enjoyed the first four anita blake novels and more than the tanya huff series. I highly highly recommend.
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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An interesting yet unfulfilling retelling of vampire history, November 2, 2003
Christopher Golden is probably best known as the author of several Buffy the Vampire Slayer novels, but he has also earned recognition for The Shadow Saga, a series of books built around vampirism. I enjoyed Of Saints and Shadows, the first book in the saga, and it offers one particularly nifty reconstruction of the vampire legend, but this novel failed to bowl me over for a number of reasons. This is a novel of good and evil, only it is difficult to consider either of the two opposing sides good in the traditional sense. On the one hand, you have the world's vampires, hiding out from mankind yet taking their sustenance from the veins of human beings; on the other hand, you have a sect of heretical Roman Catholic sorcerer priests going way beyond their necessary duties. I should point out that this novel is in no way critical of the Roman Catholic Church or of the pope, for the work done by priest sorcerers such as Liam Mulkerrin is unsanctioned and secret, just as it has been, we learn, since the time of Christ.
The novel's hero, Peter Octavian, is no ordinary vampire, having left his coven a century earlier. This outcast from his own kind now works as a private investigator, and the case of a missing young lady leads him into the biggest investigation of his life; he uncovers nothing less than a sinister plot by the religious army of the church to destroy all of the Defiant Ones (vampires) left on earth. At the center of events stands an ancient book called The Gospel of Shadows; held secretly inside the Vatican, this book offers much in the way of explaining the nature of vampires in the world. When the book is stolen, Father Liam Mulkerrin is sent to retrieve it; the high degree of sorcery he already knows cannot be imparted completely among his acolytes and students without the book on hand to guide him. Mulkerrin enjoys his vampire extermination work far too much, caring nothing about who gets hurt in the process, and his true motive for finding the book is to gain control over demons, destroy the only creatures left that he and the church cannot fully control, and basically take over and reform the Roman Catholic Church himself. Peter and his fellow vampires just want to live in peace and secrecy, yet Peter quickly realizes that his band of brothers and sisters must soon fight for their very survival.
Peter has figured some things out on his own, such as the fact that the sun cannot kill a vampire unless that vampire believes it will do so. The big twist to this saga can be found here, as the vampires of old were somehow brainwashed by the church into believing a number of myths throughout the years; it's never crystal clear how this was accomplished, although it did reportedly require sorcery of such a powerful sort as to change the very fabric of Hell. Convincing his fellow vampires that many of their beliefs are false is no easy task, but Octavian goes to Venice in order to warn his old brethren of the danger afoot and to enlist their help in fighting the renegade Vatican emissaries here and now.
Peter's most persistent question concerning the true nature of vampires is never answered in these pages, but the novel explanation for the existence of long-established yet patently false beliefs among vampire kind is quite interesting. The problems I have with the novel basically have to do with characterization and the ending. All vampires drink blood, of course (although Octavian refused to take his nourishment from live human beings after leaving his coven), and the vast majority of Peter's comrades, once he meets up with them again, see humans as little more than their personal blood supply pumps. A similarly ambiguous evil lurks in the hearts of the renegade priests of Rome, however, as Mulkerrin pursues his goals with a lust for power, giving little more than lip service to the religion he practices and serves. Going further, there is one important character in the novel, Meaghan, whom I could never really like, especially as she bore an undue influence on the culminating events of the story. That ending, as I have alluded to, is rather disappointing to me, conjuring up images in my head of semi-ludicrous Japanese monster movie conclusions. The epilogue does nothing to help bring the novel to a close, either, as much of the information detailed in those pages strikes me as extreme, unnecessary overkill of very unlikely proportions.
In the final analysis, though, Of Saints and Shadows does offer a tellingly new version of the vampire's history and future, and Golden keeps one's interests held quite firmly in his grip up until the beginning of the end. One must hope for and expect a better construction of the vampiric landscape in the succeeding novels in The Shadow Saga, for there are many unanswered questions left at the end of this first novel in the series. Those with a preternatural fondness for vampires would almost certainly enjoy Golden's handiwork though, even if one feels - as I do - that his quest for originality in a tried and true genre leads him slightly too far outside the beaten path.
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