A red dark night -- reviewer Lee Pletzers

A red dark night By A.P. Fuchs 

214 pages

Coscom entertainment 

 ISBN: 0-9734848-0-2 

© 2004 Adam Fuchs 

$12.95 USD. 

Adam P. Fuchs set out to write a B-Grade horror flick in book form. He failed. Instead, A.P. Fuchs produced a book that is an A-Grade page turner. 

It starts off in 1982 at Camp Silverway, where we are introduced to the Bloodans and Tarek, a man from a future darker than we could imagine. There is a battle between The Bloodans and Humans. They are from the future and somehow have found a way to cause a rip in time, so they can seep into the past. They have two weaknesses only, one just recently discovered. 

Camp Silverway seems to be a focal point for the Bloodans, they all enter the past at the same location. Bloodans don’t just kill, they sink into a body and drain it of blood. They need blood to survive, and shortly after, the dead becomes one of them. 

 A.P. Fuchs shows us a future controlled by the Bloodans. A place where the sky is red with patches of charcoal black and thick gray smoke hangs in the air. All in all, this book is a great read. The start is a bit slow as everything is laid into place. After that, it takes off at a quick pace and never lets up, building momentum with every turn of page. 

 Unfortunately, A.P. Fuchs doesn’t spent enough time building characters the reader would care for. The warriors were well built and believable (apart from some of the dialogue), but the female leads, Mary and Sarah, come across as just names on a page. 

 There are a few scenes when the “Un-believability Factor” is broken – that fine line crossed – that momentarily destroys the world we have entered. The most important being in chapter two where Mary is racing to the camp after her lover is killed, while being chased by a Bloodan -- and no one seems concerned. Also there is the lack of emotion from every character (except Tarek and Salch) in the book. Some of the characters that were portrayed well, died quickly. Was this the B-Grade effect A.P. Fuchs was looking for, which is mentioned in the introduction? 

 Get past the above (I’m a picky reader/reviewer) and this book will seem like an action packed movie. 

The story flows from page to page. All you need is popcorn and a coke. This book would make an excellent movie.  

Over all rating out of 5: 3.5 (due to the above mentioned lack of characterization) 

 Content, action, description: 4.5 (reads like a movie - great visual scenes) 

Writing - style and prose: 4 

I’ll leave you with A.P. Fuchs’s description, told via Tarek, of what the Bloodans are: “Bloodans,” he began, “are made of blood. They come from a place where more blood has been shed than on any other ground on earth. The evil which caused the bloodshed’s very real. It is the embodiment of darkness, the essence of death and murder, and that…evil…gives them life. Death fuels them. Unfortunately, as long as there is death, there will be Bloodans.”