Stephen Lloyd Jones’ second novel, “Written in the Blood,” is a blend of grace and gore, sensationalism and sentimentality, creativity and creepiness. Fans of TV’s “The Walking Dead” should love Mr. Jones’ gang of tolvajok, a horde of ancient “spirit thieves” from the Carpathian Basin.
Mulholland Books/Little Brown ($26).
Although not flesh-eating zombies, the tolvajok are just as scary when on the prowl. Their skin is the “pallor of woodland fungus,” their eyes are the “color of rotten teeth” and their arrival is preceded by the buzz of bluebottle flies.
If the tolvajok possess the bodies of humans, it’s not long before they begin to decompose again. Which is why they prefer to inhabit hosszu elet, another race that emerged, Tolkien-like, from Mr. Jones’ fevered brain.
Although the hosszu elet won’t be found on Ancestry.com, more about their extreme longevity, shape-shifting abilities and kaleidoscope eyes can be discovered in Mr. Jones’ first book, “The String Diaries.”
When that story ended, Leah, a main character in the current novel, was 9-years- old. Now a young woman, she’s determined to help her mother, Hannah, repopulate the hosszu elet, since they were nearly wiped out on the Night of Screams in 1880.
From Leah’s present-day narrative, Mr. Jones jumps to Hungary in 1873, where the Citadella stands atop a hill above the Danube. Young Izsak has snuck in to witness the execution of his father, who is killed as punishment for the crimes of his other son, Jakab, the villain from “The String Diaries.” This starts the long journey of Izsak, who is hapless yet heroic, and because he’s hosszu elet, his saga spans generations.
He’s in Budapest during the Night of Screams, the horrific genocide that eliminates most of the hosszu elet youth, and travels to New York and the frozen Yukon where he, “watched the ropey green ghosts of the aurora borealis and listened to the howling of the wolves.” Izsak is often driven by a survivor’ guilt, which adds a touching humanity to Mr. Jones’ made-up breed.
Eventually he winds his way into the contemporary story, where Leah is recruiting women to become mothers through in vitro fertilization, using Hannah’s donated eggs. Because the women are not full-blooded hosszu elet, a faction of their governors, called the tanacs, want to stop them.
War waged for blood purity brings to mind Nazism, segregation and other fundamentalist agendas, but despite this serious note, Mr. Jones’ main goal in “Written In the Blood” seems to be just to entertain, and he succeeds in numerous ways.
Some of the most pleasurable passages in the book are descriptions of places Leah visits. In Interlaken, Switzerland she stays in a strange estate near “the three towering megaliths of the Bernese Alps: the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau.” One potential mother, Soraya, can only be reached by a cable car. Another woman, in London, has a room in her home filled with empty bird cages, so many that they bump and chime in a breeze from the open windows.
A long segment of the book is set during an RV trip through Yosemite National Park – Mr. Jones seems to have a thing for mountains – and he tells of its Wawona Tunnel, ponderosa pines and Bridalveil Falls. Even the tanacs don’t meet in an ordinary office, but rather in Budapest’s Memento Park, where the gigantic statues of the totalitarian regime were put after its fall.
In his effort to either scare or charm, Mr. Jones’ prose is so colorful that it sometimes turns purple, but it’s always engaging nonetheless. His pace varies from leisurely to breathless until the last 100 pages, which simply fly.
Back in Interlaken, all the evil forces from throughout the story – the tolvajok, tanacs and the vile Jakab – conspire to destroy Leah. There’s even a wicked herd of ibex who are out to get her. Mr. Jones pulls out all the stops with a series of twists that lead to an unexpected conclusion.
Leah says: “If her mother had taught her one lesson above all others, it was to believe.” That’s good advice for any reader who enters Mr. Jones’ extraordinary world.
Margie Romero is communications manager at the Pittsburgh Public Theater.
First Published: July 19, 2015, 4:00 a.m.
