The Lesser Dead
"The secret is, vampires are real and I am one. The secret is, I'm stealing from you what is most truly yours and I'm not sorry ... New York City in 1978 is a dirty, dangerous place to live. And die. Joey Peacock knows this as well as anybody--he has spent the last forty years as an adolescent vampire, perfecting the routine he now enjoys: womanizing in punk clubs and discotheques, feeding by night, and sleeping by day with others of his kind in the macabre labyrinth under the city's sidewalks. The subways are his playground and his highway, shuttling him throughout Manhattan to bleed the unsuspecting in the Sheep Meadow of Central Park or in the backseats of Checker cabs, or even those in their own apartments who are too hypnotized by sitcoms to notice him opening their windows. It's almost too easy. Until one night he sees them hunting on his beloved subway. The children with the merry eyes. Vampires, like him--or not like him. Whatever they are, whatever their appearance means, the undead in the tunnels of Manhattan are not as safe as they once were. And neither are the rest of us"--
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Joey Peacock looks fourteen, has been a vampire since the 1930s, and lives in a Manhattan subway tunnel in the summer of 1978 with a small coven that hunts riders late at night. When a group of younger-looking strangers appears in the tunnels, his family realizes something is hunting them too.
Yes. The Lesser Dead is a 2014 vampire novel by Christopher Buehlman set in 1970s New York. It won the American Library Association's Alex Award and is widely cited as a defining modern vampire novel.
Yes. The Lesser Dead builds slow dread through a deceptively casual first-person narrator. The horror lands particularly hard in the second half. Christopher Buehlman is also the author of The Suicide Motor Club and The Blacktongue Thief.
The Lesser Dead was written by Christopher Buehlman, published in 2014 by Penguin Publishing Group.
The Lesser Dead is 365 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Lesser Dead takes most readers 5 to 8 hours to finish.
The Lesser Dead is a standalone novel by Christopher Buehlman, not part of a series.
The Lesser Dead is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
