Vampire Plagues: London, 1850 by Sebastian Rook Date of Publication: 2005 ISBN: 0-439-63392-3 Number of Pages: 240

REQUIRED READING ABILITY: Junior: Average Intermediate: Low
GENRES: Fantasy/Horror/Adventure
THEMES : Good versus Evil - Life versus Death - Appearance versus Reality - Coming of Age - Survival - Family

SUMMARY:
The year is 1850, and twelve-year-old pick pocket and orphan Jack Harkett has always lived on his own on the London docks. He has no memories of a home or a family. When a ship pulls into port one dark night, Jack hopes to steal some money from the rich passengers. The ship’s only inhabitants, however, are a swarm of bats that emerge and fly off into the night…or at least that’s what Jack thinks, until he notices a lone boy slinking off the ship as well. The young boy, Benedict Cole, is around Jack's age, but from a wealthy family. Ben is in desperate need of help, and explains that he has just returned from an ill-fated expedition to Mexico. He and his father went to the jungle to study Mayan ruins on an archeological dig, but Ben is the only member of the trip to survive. While on the journey, the leader of this expedition, Sir Donald Finlay, became possessed by the Mayan vampire bat god, Camazotz. Now Sir Donald has returned to England with Camazotz's army of vampire bats, and plans to unleash them upon unsuspecting London.

The vampires are not your traditional, nocturnal vampires. They are able to transform from bat to human form and can travel during the day wearing heavy clothes and by staying in the shadows. Jack, Ben, and Ben's twin sister Emily, who managed to avoid the initial trip because of illness, decide they are the only ones who can stop the vampires. They unite to beat Sir Donald and the evil Camazotz before time runs out…but will they succeed before the task costs them their lives?

WHO WOULD LOVE THIS BOOK? A kid who...
- enjoys vampire stories
- is interested in Victorian England
- enjoys the occasional gory scene
- wants lots of action
- loves historical fiction
- appreciates classic adventure stories
- isn’t thrown by the odd reference to dialect and/or obsolete language
- is interested in England and especially London
- likes ghost stories and legends, plot twists, and danger

WHAT ELSE?
There is a Blood Rose Ritual, which involves a strange incantation. This may spark some concerns regarding black magic or pagan worship.

The main antagonist, Camazotz, is based on an actual mythological figure from the Mayan people. The cult of Camazotz began around 100 B.C. among the Zapotec Indians of Oaxaca, Mexico. The cult of Camazotz worshipped an anthropomorphic monster with the body of a human, and the head of a bat (though the exact proportioning varies with account). The bat was associated with night, death, and sacrifice. The bat god is a prime antagonist in Kenneth Oppel's Silverwing trilogy--especially Firewing, which tells the story of a young bat in the underworld. (The name there is spelled Cama Zotz.) In Madeleine L'Engle's novel A Wrinkle in Time, winner of the 1963 Newbery Medal for children's literature, Camazotz is the name of a planet enslaved by the evil power of IT, from whom the protagonists Meg and Charles Wallace must rescue their physicist father.