Theodore Sturgeon's brilliantly chilling twist on the vampire novel. He sheds most of the vampire genre tropes, often thumbing his nose at them in the process: the protagonist's real name is "Bela," his parents are from "Eastern Europe," the novel has a large epistolary content like Dracula, and the army psychiatrist stands in for Dr. Van Helsing, even as he gives us a vampire that requires almost no suspension of disbelief. Its almost as if Sturgeon bet that he could write a better vampire novel without using any of that hackneyed crap.

Hillbilly Army chump "George Smith" gets himself in trouble by punching an army officer when questioned about something the military censors found in a letter to his sweetheart back home in Podunk. Through a bunch of typically Kafkaesque Army mix-ups ol' George gets himself shipped back home to isolation in a rubber room and a straitjacket for three months. When the Army figures out it has made a huge mistake and may have taken a guy who was already having some problems and put him completely off the rails by shoving him in a padded cell, they decide to just do whatever they can to get the guy discharged and sent home. The overworked psychiatrist in charge of tying up these loose ends and getting rid of the guy makes the big mistake of actually caring about his job and starts to dig into George's case. He just can't figure out what made a classic "do what you're told and never volunteer" kind of Army guy punch that officer unprovoked. The censored letter is lost and the offended officer is dead. It just keeps bothering him. He can't just shovel this guy out the door like he is told to.

We can tell George is a weirdo from the get go, but Sturgeon brilliantly layers on details through letters, anecdotes, therapy notes, interviews, statements that gradually lead us to begin to believe that the padded cell is exactly the right place for George.

Ultimately Sturgeon even manages to make us feel empathy for a guy that we wouldn't want to be in the same room with.

Sturgeon also plays with the reader by intentionally breaking the fourth wall and telling us that, after all, this is just a piece of fiction, even as he knows he is drawing us a vampire we can all REALLY believe is waiting outside once the lights are back on. He ultimately even invites us to write our own happy ending, if that is what we want...

A little page turner that just keeps on giving as we gradually suspect and then know. ( )

Wow! I loved this book! Let me tell you why.

I always have had a respect and love for older horror stories. I find it fun to read them and then speculate on what modern tales might be based upon these older works. In this case, I can see an even older story (Dracula) within. But what this book does is turn that classic tale upside down. In fact, I don't even consider this to be a true horror story.

This short book, originally written in 1956, is told mostly through letters back and forth between an overworked Army psychiatrist, (Doctor Phil!), and his superior. The letters discuss one "George Smith" who was arrested and thrown into the psych ward for punching an Army officer in the face after the officer questioned him about a letter he mailed. No one knows exactly why because that officer is now dead and no one knows what happened to the letter. Unfortunately, George is forgotten for about three months and now Dr. Phil's boss wants him to be released before anyone finds out about the Army's neglect.

Doctor Phil needs to find out a little something about the patient before releasing him, so he begins by having him write out a bio in the third person. This is where things get very interesting. The patient uses the name George Smith in his bio which consists of not only horrible grammar, but also horrible tales from George's past. From there this story takes off in a completely different direction.

That's all I'm going to say about the plot. However, I will make a few observations here, that you can take or leave at will. First off, there is a lot of humor in the letters between Dr. Phil and his superior. I think their discussions were very subtle, but added a lot to the tale. Some readers might get bored with their exchanges; I did not.

Second -A lot of readers call this a vampire story. I don't believe it is. I think it's a story of a sociopath in the making. There are several clues to which I could point to support my theory. Of course, there are lots of clues pointing to the vampire theory as well. (George's real name is Bela, for one.) Which theory do you support? I would love to find out after you've read this fantastic story. Look me up and we'll talk about it. :)

Highly recommended!
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Thoroughly engrossing and disturbing, this story is partly a third-person narrative written about himself by an Army psychiatric patient who attacked an officer, and partly a series of letters exchanged by the doctor who is determined to get to the bottom of the patient's motivation and his superior officer (though not superior in the field of psychology.) Sturgeon reveals things little by little until the whole picture adds up--and it is a memorable one, though to try to describe the plot more would spoil the pleasure of discovering it for yourself. I found this to be an altogether better written and more memorable work than his more celebrated MORE THAN HUMAN. ( )

Wow. I finished this book in all of 36 hours. Though it's widely considered a "horror" novel, it really isn't. In fact, it has much more in common with something like "Sybil." I wouldn't even call it a thriller, so much as a psychological (or psychiatric) drama. It does, however, deliberately mirror "Dracula" in structure, and it is disturbing--although not as much, I would argue, as your average episode of "Criminal Minds." It's also very, very good. Well worth the read. ( )

Interesting but dated, as it's pretty much a straight ahead fictional case history of mental deviance as if one were reading the contents of a file. Kraft-Ebbing and Havelock Ellis are even name checked in the book. The ending might have had some shock power in 1961, but I'm not sure why people find it that now -it's almost anticlimactic. There are more quietly disturbing elements in the body of the story than in the conclusion.
The edition I have contains an additional short story "Bright Segment"-a gruesome, twisty, gritty nugget of hard boiled fiction that features a pathetic, monstrous outsider similar to the one in the novel.
Problems aside, anything by Sturgeon is always worth a read. ( )