They Thirst

Death smiled a boyish smile through an old man s eyes Welcome, he said When you live in those Middle European countries like Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Serbia, you grow up hearing stories of monsters The very air, the darkness, the looming mountains, and the shrieks at the very heart of the night that stirs people from a sound sleep with terror blooming in the midst of their waking nightmares, convinces even the most cynical of minds to believe that evil beings lurk in the shadows [...]

Tonight there were demons in the hearth.The prose in this novel is electrifying McCammon has a way of capturing his reader s attention from the very first After all, who can forget the opening lines of Gone South Night had filled up the barrio like black rainwater in a bomb crater, and what stirred in its depths was unnameable.So Vampires Before they were the laughing stock of the literary world they were actually pretty damn scary Don t believe me Then read this book.Scattered in the dirt at th [...]

Last time I negatively reviewed a McCammon book, I lost a long time acquaintance due to my opinion, so I thought long and hard about something today, and I realized thatI m willing to put money on the fact cole slaw is a type of salad, and that hotdogs are, indeed, sandwiches That s my final answer.It would seem that, for the first few years of his career, Robert McCammon was doing everything he could to be the best mimic in the horror business Perhaps this is why he, for a while there, didn t l [...]

This is copy 123 of 500 editions signed by Robert McCammon.

Best vampire book ever I am so sick and tired of soulful, guilt ridden vampires Whatever happened to evil vampires The ones who want to rid the earth of humanity The ones that make you wake up in the middle of the night scared that you might not live to see the sun rise Don t get me wrong, I am a huge Anne Rice fan Lestat is one of the all time best characters and Buffy although that is a movie tv show , but vampires are suppose to strike fear into people s hearts not make you want them as a boy [...]

I didn t think I would like this book as much as I didn t Omg, it was awesome Think swan song but with vampires

I read this one long ago and frankly had forgotten it It s a not bad read that approaches really good at times Every vampire book these days seems to have it s own version of the vampire myth and this while it s not all that recent does to, slightly It stays pretty close to the traditional vampire persona, but as in some other books it owes to the movie tradition than the actual folklore or Stoker esk or Dracula esk vampire Here the author, using the everyone who gets bitten becomes a vampire m [...]

I could barely make it through this book, and found myself skimming large amounts of text just to get to the end of the thing I almost gave up on it numerous times, and still don t know why I finished it No new twist on the vampire legend here even for a book from the late 80 s The writing was weak, with metaphors that were groan inducing The end view spoiler literally had the hand of god defeating the vampires hide spoiler

I m not sure how this one slipped through my fingers I could ve sworn that I d read They Thirst many, many years ago, but for some odd reason I couldn t remember much at all about it So, I figured it was time for a re read Well, now I know why I don t remember much about it I never read the damn thing, in the first place And oh what a treat this has been Imagine discovering a new book by your favorite author written smack dab in the time period of when they did their best writing That s what The [...]

I m both excited and appalled excited because I picked such a good McCammon to read and appalled that it took me this long to finally read one of his books I m a huge horror fan but even I get side tracked by the myriad of available new reads pouring out all the time from beneath gifted pens, but this is 80 s horror which is one of my favorites and it didn t fail to be as good as it should have The story reads almost like a movie because it s so colorful, crazy and picturesque, it starts off ver [...]

Another well written, apocaplyptic horror fest by a true master McCammon assembles a huge cast of diverse and mostly interesting characters and throws them into a gathering hellstorm of vampires There was nothing terribly original here, but it made for exciting, pure eighties horror joy for this reader It did take a long time for me to get into this one, but after about 40%, it took off and didn t slow down Fojr solid stars.

Because I was under the impression this novel is little than a riff on Stephen King s Salem s Lot, I avoided it for a long time However, in the last year or two I ve really become a major Robert McCammon fan and decided to finally give this 1981 epic horror novel a chance Was I impressed Let s address the elephant in the room yes, this novel has a few slight similarities to King s vampire novel Amongst this novel s wide and varied cast of characters is a Catholic priest and an eleven year old b [...]

3.5 stars I wanted to make this a four star read, and believe me, I TRIED to like this a lot than I did if that makes sense I was too excited to start reading this, and I wanted to love it, but the first than half of the book, I felt like I was only forcing myself to read it, and I kept thinking of other books that I d rather be reading Oh, I was bummed out, wondering why don t I like this It s an early Robert McCammon novel, it s a horror, I began reading it the day before Halloween, and it s [...]

brief synopsis The story begins in Hungary, where a boy s father has gone off on a dangerous mission He tells the son to take care of his mother in case anything happens to him But shortly after he leaves, he returns, and he has changed The mother runs off with the boy and heads for sanctuary Years later, that boy Andre Palatazin is now a police detective in Los Angeles, his mother now dead One morning he is awakened by what appears to be his mother, sitting in her favorite rocking chair From th [...]

This book started off pretty well and I really enjoyed two previous books from this author so I thought I was going to love it Sadly that wasn t the case, the first 200 pages or so we re good, but from then I found it a struggle It became a bit slow moving at times and there seemed to be chapters here and there that didn t really need to be in the story at all.I ll definit be checking out by McCammon because like I said I enjoyed the previous two I read boys life and swan song so it s highly li [...]

I always enjoy McCammon s writing but this story was incredibly ordinary for vampire fiction I almost hated it.

This is the kind of vampire novel I really like The vamps are bad, really bad And nasty Nothing romantic about these undead Probably one of my favorite vampire novels of all time.

This is epic horror that you don t see so much of any It s 1981, L.A the land of eternal youth, where, as McCammon writes in his afterward, just off the Sunset Strip there is a dark basement where men do terrible things I really enjoyed reading this novel It s the kind of book that reinforces my love for the genre McCammon throws together a wide cast of characters, both good and bad, and puts them through hell The vampires are as evil as they re supposed to be, and the early 1980 s setting is r [...]

A very strong 3 stars here.I can honestly say that in my life i have read three vampire novels This, Salems lot which i can hardly remember now, and let the right one in which is one of my all time favourites The fact that i have read so little about them perhaps made me enjoy this book a lot than i should have I was buddy reading this with one of my good friends and numerous times he pointed out how unoriginal this novel is Even when we finally both thought we had come across something origina [...]

I decided to try this as an audiobook, and I feel it was a really good choice The narrator is excellent, and I think he had excellent material to work with The vampires are wonderfully evil, with nary a sparkly emo bloodsucker in sight There s also a serial killer with mommy issues, lots of 80 s style partying, leather clad biker gangs, sassy barrio kids, and a genuine old world vampire slayer in the form of a Hungarian police detective I was immediately drawn into the story, and it never let up [...]

I listened to this one on audio and the narration was very good and the story was paced evenly throughout It s not fair to say that the character Palatazin reminded me of the guy in the Strain, but he really did Ok, I get it that They Thirst was written almost 30 years before The Strain, but I couldn t help it, especially with the heavy accent on the narration.They Thirst is a good time 80 s horror romp, as the King of Vampires plots to take over the entire city of Los Angeles and then the rest [...]

This is probably one of the best vampire books of all time Though not well known to many readers Robert McCammon has taken fear to a whole new level in this novel The vampires are the best part of the story and are no longer the regal vampires we grew up with They are frightening and evil which is refreshing to read about.

I feel a bit bad when my reaction to THEY THIRST is indifference, even impatience, same as to the other McCammon works I ve read This novel is lots of telling, telling, telling over 500 pages of telling and no showing On a line to line basis McCammon s not a bad writer, he s just bland and pedestrian, with little snap, wit, or insight in his prose It s a sprawling vampire epic set in the glittering midnight environs of the City of Angels, Hollywood USA Characters, while plentiful, are stock folk [...]

It s cliche and very much a b horror story It s certainly fine in many regards and not boring But I found the villain cartoonish and the heroes very plain It s not scary but it is sometimes fun I dunno I didn t hate my entire time with this book, but this is the first time I ve read a McCammon book that was just kindah Tension doesn t land Character s are bland for the most part He turns the cliches up to 11 It s justrgettable I guess.I definitely understand why this is a book he let fall out of [...]

So this is the first book that McCammon was confident enough to not have pulled And it s his first epic novel, that is, one with a very large cast and a reasonably complex pacing to it.Does it work Yeah, most of the time, it s an excellent ride There s occasionally some apparent waffling on the part of McCammon to get some supernatural stuff in there Spirits Ghosts Mediums Don t really know if it s needed, because his vampires were very well done And bonus points for the line, I fang fucked her [...]

A mediocre book about vicious vampires and the struggling souls bent on defending themselves and loved ones against the onslaught of the dead There were a few problems with this novel 1 It takes 200 pages to actually get interesting 2 Too much detail given towards the setting Easilly, 100 pages or could have been edited out 3 Perhaps the largest problem Every character is completely forgettable I didn t care about any of the characters and found them all very cliche and dull I always search for [...]

This book might be a little harder to find because it is out of print but don t let that keep you from reading it because it is a GREAT book This is definitely one of my favourite vampire books These are not wimpy vampires that sparkle and fall in love, they are the good old evil blood thirsty horror vampires The reason I gave this book 4 stars instead of 5 stars is because I thought the end was a bit silly and disappointing The book was impossible to put down Another great McCammon book

I really enjoyed this book, enough to put it up there in the ranking of top 5 vampire books I have read I thought the plot was interesting though not new the characters were very real, the vampires monstrous, and the outlook bleak Short Summary LA is having a rough time hoodlums are coming in from all over, a serial killer named The Roach is on the loose, someone has been robbing cemeteries of their caskets, and people are disappearing left and right Some are muttering under their breaths the un [...]

They Thirst is the tale of an already tarnished city being marked and tarnished by the forces of darkness Life in LA is already brutal enough as it is, now things are about to get a lot worse McCammon builds up tension and expectations through a series of otherworldly incidents the ransacking of a cemetery and mass disappearances amongst others and it s anyone s guess as to whether something will happen or if the anticipation will be agonisingly dragged out just that little bit .When the hammer [...]

I have the audiobook format with superb performance by Ray Porter one of my favorite narrators I enjoyed the writing style and the way the story is told from many characters point of views, and everything ties nicely towards the ending And, it make sense why this story has to take place in Los Angeles As many reviewers had mentioned, this is the old school vampire format, like the one in Dracula by Bram Stoker which is another great book, especially in audiobook format Definitely a must read for [...]