The Night Inside: A Vampire Thriller

Alexander Dick teaches English at McMaster University in Hamilton.

This book calls itself “A Vampire Thriller,” and for the most part
remains true to that epithet. The oozing sentimentality of Anne Rice’s
Vampire Chronicles and its pseudo-gothic ilk is, thankfully, absent from
this compact and well-paced novel. However, it still has enough
cobwebbed crypts and creaking doors, enough manic mansions and haunted
warehouses, enough thrills, chills, and spills (of blood, of course) to
make any long winter night’s read nicely masochistic. Add the
mandatory guns, high-tech laboratories, corrupt movie types, black
leather, and the ever-present Mafia angle and you’ve got the makings
of a potent, action-packed witches’ brew.

At the same time, The Night Inside is no mindless, Hollywood
shoot-’em-up. At the heart of this novel lies a search for personal
discovery. The heroine, with the aptly gothic name of Ardeth Alexander,
comes to terms not just with the vampire myth, but with the myths
governing her own identity. The traditional meaning of vampirism, human
bloodlust, is justly treated in the context of the modern issues with
which it would inevitably come into contact: youth culture, science,
bureaucracy, AIDS, pornography, abduction. Dracula shapes up for the
1990s.

And yet, in bringing an old and complex story into a modern setting and
maintaining its “thriller” edge, the novel cannot help but collapse
into stereotypes. As in all Toronto novels, the city’s neighborhoods
play a prominent part, but contrary to the stratified urban picture
Baker draws, not everyone on Queen street is a musician, fashion
designer, or vampire wannabe, and not everyone in Yorkville is either an
Armani sleazebag or a gullible tourist. Baker is obviously opposed to
the objectifying machinations of pornographers, but the seduction scenes
are too systematic to be completely believable. If the complex meeting
of mythic and urban anxieties is the subject of this novel, then the
circumstances of that meeting are simply too contrived for its
complexity to maintain its integrity.