Maybe Next Time...

Reading Blood Oath is fun, but after a bit it starts to feel familiar, as though you've read this before. That's when you start recognizing the many works that have pieces of the story Christopher Farnsworth uses for his novels about a 140-year-old vampire bound by a magic oath to protect the President of the United States and the rest of the nation from the kinds of threats the Secret Service can't handle -- because they're just as supernatural as he is.

Farnsworth works from a supposedly real-life incident in which President Andrew Johnson pardoned a man convicted of murder and accused of drinking his victim's blood. That incident seems a little over-stated, but it makes a good hook for the story. Continuing to serve those in the Oval Office through history, Nathaniel Cade has thwarted no small number of eldritch plots against the US and defeated enemies that could have endangered the entire world. His handler is retiring and the new one is taking awhile to get up to speed, but a plot to create unstoppable undead berserker assassins is moving forward and Cade doesn't have the time to coddle him.

As mentioned above, it doesn't take too long in the novel to start to recognize some of its features. Mike Mignola's Bureau of Paranormal Research and Development also features agents who battle threats beyond human existence on behalf of the U.S. government -- the best-known being Hellboy of comic book and movie fame. Fred Saberhagen offered several novels with vampires as central characters and gave them quite a bit more depth and nuance than the usual fanged horror of the movies (So did P. N. Elrod, but Saberhagen is by far the better writer), and the syndicated television show Forever Knight featured a vampire who had sworn off human blood and who tried to solve and prevent crimes as a small way of paying back for the evil he had done.

Farnsworth can keep a story humming, and he doesn't do badly at stitching these different pieces together, but he treads some well-worn trails and doesn't try very hard to spruce them up -- a female villain sells out not for greed or the lust for power, but for the fact that she doesn't want to look old. The new liaison, former presidential aide Zack Burrows, is a Callow Youth With Dreams of Power but Surprisingly Deep Resources of Grit When Needed. Cade is more interesting, as Farnsworth tries to make him speak and act like a being who looks upon humans as food might. But as interesting as a few of the tweaks of "The President's Vampire" are, there's not much reason to hunt them up outside of a used book store.

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After his debut, The Last Templar, Raymond Khoury wrote two other books before returning to that book's main couple, Sean Reilly and Tess Chaykin. The Sign, from 2009, was the second of those.

A mysterious sign appears in the air over Antarctica with no visible source or means of transmission. The television crew there to cover an ice shelf collapse captures it on film, and before too long learns of a connection to a desert-cave-dwelling priest. When the sign reappears in Greenland, people around the world begin wondering if it represents the arrival of extraterrestrial beings or maybe even a divine agent. The television crew, a man whose brother disappeared while working on a technologically advanced but secret project and the priest begin to learn not everything is as it seems. Powerful forces have an agenda for the sign's appearances, and they will guard it at the cost of the lives of anyone who gets in their way.

Khoury uses both his heroes and villains to highlight what he believes are flaws in how religious people have handled the modern world, paying particular attention to climate change issues. He does so about as subtly as a tip-toeing rhino and chokes his narrative with too many separate character threads that he does not have space to properly develop. Each lead gets his or her own chunk of personal historical background instead of the room to show us who they are, and Khoury makes the same mistake when it comes to the ideas he would like to get across.

Khoury is a good storyteller and above-average stylist with a handy way about an action scene. But he wants very much to Say Something Important, even though he is nowhere near a good enough novelist to do so. Of course authors since the dawn of papyrii have intended their work to comment somehow on the human condition. But a commentary invites reflection, engagement and perhaps even give-and-take discussion. Khoury doesn't comment in The Sign so much as he lectures, hectors and -- ironically given his presentation of religious people -- preaches. He does so with character speeches and expository passages that make an already complex narrative sludgy and slow.

Without taking the time to really novelize his ideas instead of narrating them, Khoury makes his case in The Sign a pretty much take-it-or-leave it proposition. And since that flaw also hampers the story's flow, you might be better off making the latter choice.