Blood Oath News & Reviews

Christopher Farnsworth’s taut thriller Blood Oath (Putnam, $24.95, forthcoming next month) is an irresistible page-turner that makes one realize that, no matter how tough the War on Terror may be, at least it’s not the War on Horror. Farnsworth summons his talents as a scriptwriter and journalist to spin a complex and unnervingly realistic tale in which vampire Nathaniel Cade, a Secret Service agent sworn to protect the president, is far less of a monster than his human colleagues at the CIA and FBI. The supernatural elements here are dazzlingly clever. With its labyrinthine plot and byzantine layers of government deceit, “Blood Oath” is a 21st-century riff on themes explored in such classics from America’s first Paranoid Age as “The Manchurian Candidate” and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Cade is a wonderfully idiosyncratic character: a Christian renegade from the Vampire Nation who attends AA meetings to help him resist the lure of human blood. And as an added bonus, readers finally learn the truth behind the failed assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan and that mysterious 18 1/2 -minute gap in the Watergate tapes.

“BLOOD OATH is exactly how I like my Presidential thrillers. With vampires.”

“As someone who thinks Stoker’s DRACULA has never been bettered, and who would happily stick a stake through the heart of most modern vampire fiction, it almost pains me to say how much I enjoyed BLOOD OATH. Witty, exciting, and compulsively readable, with a central character who seems destined to become a favorite of both skeptics and true blood believers, this may just be the best debut vampire novel in many years. Chris Farnsworth has made me break my own blood oath when it comes to the literature of the undead, and I hate him for it...”

“BLOOD OATH is the vampire novel that finally gets it right. Christopher Farnsworth has done his homework in places where most writers wouldn’t even know to look — and the result is a rollicking tale of the supernatural grounded in some of the true oddities of American history. If Dan Brown wrote a vampire thriller, this would be it.”