Suckers

By Anne Billson

Anne Billson's debut novel is part horror story, part satire and has been praised by (among others) Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Carroll and Christopher Fowler, who in Time Out called it "dark, sharp, chic and very funny". It's set at the end of the "greed is good" decade, and features a gothic love triangle between a man, a woman and the 300-year-old vampire they chopped into easily disposable pieces a decade earlier. But now she's back. and this time she's building an empire...

Kevin Jackson, author of Bite, a Vampire Handbook, wrote: "This debut novel by Anne Billson, a noted film critic and frequent contributor to the Guardian, was highly praised by Salman Rushdie and others as a sharp and witty satire on the greedy 1980s. And so it was, but that was only part of the story: it is also a gripping adventure yarn, a tale of the nemesis that may lie in store for us if we have ever committed a guilty act, and a delicious character study of an unconventional young woman whose weaknesses (envy, malice, jealousy) only make her all the more charming to the reader. It contains one of the most chilling moments in all vampire literature..."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anne Billson
• Release date: Mar 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9781465952448

Anne Billson

Anne Billson is a film critic, novelist, photographer, screenwriter, film festival programmer, style icon, wicked spinster, evil feminist, and international cat-sitter. She has lived in London, Cambridge, Tokyo, Paris and Croydon, and now lives in Antwerp. She likes frites, beer and chocolate.Her books include horror novels Suckers, Stiff Lips, The Ex, The Coming Thing and The Half Man; Blood Pearl, Volume 1 of The Camillography; monographs on the films The Thing and Let the Right One In; Breast Man: A Conversation with Russ Meyer; Billson Film Database, a collection of more than 4000 film reviews; and Cats on Film, the definitive work of feline film scholarship.In 1993 she was named by Granta as one of their Best Young British Novelists. In 2012 she wrote a segment for the portmanteau play The Halloween Sessions, performed in London's West End. In 2015 she was named by the British Film Institute as one of 25 Female Film Critics Worth Celebrating.

Book preview

SUCKERS

a novel by Anne Billson

First published 1993 by Pan Books Limited

Copyright 2012 Anne Billson

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Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

PART FOUR

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Acclaim for Suckers

‘Billson honours the rules of the genre, then proceeds to have fun with them… Dark, sharp, chic and very funny’ (Christopher Fowler - Time Out)

‘very funny... what holds the book together, gives it its pace and energy, is the bright, unremitting nastiness of our narrator, one Dora Vale’ (Michael Wood - London Review of Books)

‘a superb satirist’ (Salman Rushdie)

‘Enchanting and ominous at the same time: a rare and impressive piece of literary juggling’ (Jonathan Carroll)

‘merits a post position on everybody’s reading list, even those who don’t usually like vampire stories. It isn’t splatter fiction; it’s an honest piece of literature’ (Elliott Swanson - Booklist)

‘a black and bloody celebration of wit, womanhood and slapstick, beautifully sustained to a thoroughly satisfying climax’ (Chris Gilmore - Interzone)

‘a very camp and hugely entertaining vampire novel’ (Christie Hickman - Midweek)

‘wicked and vulgar and unsettling... rollicking knockabout gore... nasty and brutishly funny’ (Patt Morrison - Los Angeles Times)

‘a distinctive, original and refreshing debut, unselfconscious about its genre furniture, but arranging it to suit a very unusual piece of literary architecture’ (Kim Newman - Starburst)

‘...highly praised by Salman Rushdie and others as a sharp and witty satire on the greedy 1980s. And so it was, but that was only part of the story: it is also a gripping adventure yarn, a tale of the nemesis that may lie in store for us if we have ever committed a guilty act, and a delicious character study of an unconventional young woman whose weaknesses (envy, malice, jealousy) only make her all the more charming to the reader. It contains one of the most chilling moments in all vampire literature...’ (Kevin Jackson - Bite, A Vampire Handbook)

Part One

Chapter 1

It wasn't murder, in my opinion. Some people might have had trouble understanding that. I might have had trouble myself if I hadn’t been there when it happened. Afterwards, Duncan sank into a depression and stayed depressed for the next five years. By the time he managed to snap out of it, he had almost succeeded in convincing himself the whole thing had been a dark trick of his imagination. Almost, but not quite. Each time he noticed my left hand, he couldn’t help remembering what had happened to the top joint of the little finger. I caught him looking sometimes, but we never talked about what he was thinking. We didn’t have to. I just knew.

After thirteen years we were different people, leading different lives. Duncan had turned into a non-smoking teetotal vegetarian. And he had gone right off horror movies; he would turn the television off as soon as it threatened to broadcast anything with old dark houses, or women in black, or ooh-whee-ooh music, and no-one thought this odd, least of all Lulu. She was squeamish too, and naturally assumed he was switching off on her account.

But the main difference was that we were both making money now, and lots of it. Duncan made more than me, but then he worked harder than I did. I’d gone for the soft option, starting out as a Stylist, then altering my job description to Creative Consultant, which sounded more impressive and pretentious - more in tune with the times.

There was no shortage of work, because there was a flash new magazine title on the newsstands every couple of weeks - all style and no content, packed with features dealing with ‘image’ and ‘lifestyle’. It was down to people like me to keep publishers informed about their target market of upwardly mobile young adults with disposable incomes. I took the ‘Creative’ part of my job description literally. Most of the information I provided was completely fictitious.

Duncan and I weren’t the only ones on a roll. Pubs and clubs were jam-packed full of people with too much money to spend, all standing elbow to elbow and jogging each other’s drinks. You had to queue to get to the bar, and you had to queue to get to the Ladies Room as well. If you strained your ears to hear beyond the sound of flushing cisterns you could sometimes pick up the discreet chip-chop of credit cards against porcelain, followed by gentle snuffling as fine white lines were hoovered up into hovering nostrils.

These people took their pleasures seriously. In pubs, clubs, or restaurants, they talked about money and work, work and money, all the time. And they dressed like guests at a funeral. It made me uneasy sometimes, so it must have made Duncan uneasy too. Everywhere you looked, there would be women dressed in black - white faces, black hair, mouths painted scarlet. It was The Look. You saw it on the street. You saw it on the covers of magazines. You saw it presenting arts programmes on TV.

And some of us saw it in our nightmares. I made sure I didn’t look like that. It was thirteen years since I had gone out dressed in nothing but black. And I made sure there was more to my life than money and work, work and money. I had a wide range of interesting hobbies. Gardening, for instance. I didn’t do much digging - you could only dig so far on a balcony - but there was plenty of honeysuckle, most of it covered in aphids. Aphid-hunting was another of my hobbies. The black ones were easiest to spot, but the green ones were juicier, more fun to pop. At the end of a serious aphid-squishing session my fingers would be stained the colour of lime juice.

I collected plastic construction kits as well, though not the aeroplane ones. I had a pterodactyl with a battle-scarred wing, a life-size skull which glowed in the dark, and a Visible Woman with a detachable foetus. I watched videos, and I did crosswords, and sometimes, just to keep my hand in, I dressed up and went out and socialized, like everyone else.

But my favourite hobby was persecuting Patricia Rice. I knew her name because she had written it on a small piece of card and slid it into the little slot next to her doorbell. She had no idea who I was, of course, but I knew her. She lived in a ground-floor flat in a Victorian terrace just south of Waterloo Station. She was a lucky girl; she had gas-fired central heating, new wiring, and a freshly-injected damp-proof course. I knew all this because I had seen it for myself. The estate agents had shown me round. They had even given me a set of keys and later, when my offer had been accepted, I had gone back on my own to wander from room to room, deciding where to put the furniture. I had paid my surveyors. I had run up a tab with my lawyers. I was all set to exchange contracts when Patricia Rice came along out of nowhere and gazumped me.

It wasn’t as though I’d had trouble finding somewhere else. I took out a mortgage on a first-floor flat across town. The main drawback was the lack of soundproofing; it was a cowboy conversion, and the people upstairs drove me nuts with their noise. Besides, one of them was German. Up until then, I had properly encountered only one German in my life, but he had been more than enough to leave me with a distinct anti-German bias.

Even so, I liked my flat, because it was only a brisk ten-minute walk away from Duncan’s. So in a way, Patricia Rice had done me a favour. But that didn’t mean I was going to let her get away with it. For three years after the gazumping, I was too busy to care, but then I found myself with time on my hands. I thought about Patricia and how she had made a fool of me, and every so often I would nip down to SE1 to see how she was getting on. The lifts at Lambeth North tube station always seemed to be out of order, and it warmed my heart just to think of her toiling up and down that grimy staircase every day. I thought long and hard about how I could make things worse. As soon as the Channel Tunnel opened, I’d decided, I would send her address to a selection of Belgian youth groups, with the message Cheap rates, towels provided, backpacks welcome.

I also liked to dial her telephone number and, once she’d answered, leave my handset lying on the table; that way, her phone was all tied up so that no-one could call her, nor could she ring out until I hung up again. I couldn’t be bothered with any of that heavy breathing nonsense, though I would occasionally pipe Def Leppard down the line. I didn’t particularly care for Def Leppard; I’d bought the tape especially for Patricia.

But the most rewarding part of this particular hobby was the correspondence. It was one-way, but I didn’t mind. I had hours of fun cutting up magazines, and Cow-gumming letters on to blank sheets of Basildon Bond. Having to wear rubber gloves made it even more of a challenge. Once or twice, I got up early so I could loiter outside Patty’s flat and watch her mail being delivered bang on eight, just before she left for her boring job in an employment agency - I knew where she worked because I’d followed her there. Opposite her front door was a small construction site; the workmen never showed up before ten, and the cement mixers provided excellent cover. That way I could enjoy the spectacle as Patricia emerged, tense and nervous after opening the latest in the YOU ARE A SLUT AND YOU WILL DIE HORRIBLY series, or the slightly more colourful variations on BURN IN HELL YOU VILE NAZI BITCH.

The subject of Patricia Rice came up one afternoon while I was hanging around in Duncan and Lulu’s kitchen. Lulu had been making it obvious she didn’t want me there. She was fussing over her chickpeas, never passing up an opportunity to remind me that she and Duncan were expecting people for dinner, and that I wasn’t on the guest list. Everyone else I knew bought their hummus ready-made from the supermarket, but Lulu liked to make things difficult for herself.

She kept asking, ‘What do you think, Dora? Do you reckon this’ll be enough?’ until I felt like ramming the ruddy chickpeas down her throat. ‘You know Jack’s a real Bunter,’ she said in that little-girl way of speaking which got on my nerves. ‘If he doesn’t get enough, he’ll just start scoffing everyone else’s.’

‘Crumbs,’ I said, rocking back on my chair. ‘You’d jolly well better make lashings of it, then.’ Even Jack, I thought, might lose his appetite once confronted by this khaki-coloured mush, but I stopped myself from saying so out loud. Lulu might have been a pain in the neck, but Duncan, for some reason best known to himself, was fond of her. And I didn’t want to upset Duncan.

As usual when Lulu was being obnoxious he was keeping a low profile. He was sitting at the far end of the kitchen table, retouching a print he’d promised Jack as a belated birthday present. It was a photo of Alicia draped in a black veil, standing among the tombstones in Kensal Rise cemetery. Duncan might have gone off horror movies, but he had never quite managed to kick the cemetery habit. It was a striking photograph - made even more striking by his signature, which automatically added a bob or two to its market value.

Duncan had once stepped out with Alicia, and he had the photos to prove it. He made a habit of keeping in touch with his ex-girlfriends, even when they insisted on marrying jerk-offs like Jack. Duncan and Jack seemed to get on quite well - they were always discussing manly topics such as fast cars and football. You had to know Duncan as well as I did to realize that fast cars and football didn’t interest him at all. He was just trying to keep up appearances.

Alicia was usefully photogenic, so long as you overlooked her weak chin, and Duncan still used her as a model in some of the arty, non-commercial work he liked to turn out occasionally. He had photographed her in the nude when she’d been pregnant, and then he’d done some more nude studies of her with the new baby; the baby had been nude, as well. Alicia had framed one of the pictures and hung it over her dining table. Jack and Alicia were a thoroughly modern couple, and to look at them you would never have guessed that he had bribed her to give up her career so she could concentrate on breeding.

Lulu started chopping up parsley with a wicked-looking knife - rather closer to me than was necessary. ‘Watch out, Dora,’ she said. ‘Better move back, or you’ll lose another finger.’ Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Duncan glance up sharply. Lulu was being spiteful, but he refrained from giving her the ticking off she deserved. Once again, it was left to me to show her up.

‘It’s only the last joint,’ I said. ‘All the best villains have the top joint of their little finger missing.’

Lulu paused in her chopping and said ‘Huh?’ I adored making her look stupid in front of Duncan. Every so often, he had to be reminded that he had more in common with me than with her.

‘The 39 Steps,’ he said without bothering to look up again. ‘Or is it The Yakuza?’

Lulu repeated ‘Huh?’ and, pretending not to care, went back to her parsley. When she’d reduced it to a sloppy green mulch, she forced me to move even further away from the table so she could reach the blender. I’d been rocking my chair so much that one of the legs had worked itself loose. Now when I scraped it back across the floor, there was a faint but ominous splintering sound. The chair didn’t give way, not quite, but I sat quietly for a while, not wanting to push my luck.

To my face, and especially in front of Duncan, Lulu was all intimacy, but I knew she disliked me almost as much as I despised her. On her side, at least, it was nothing personal; she was the sort of woman who regards all other women as rivals. She hated leaving me alone with Duncan, even for a short while, imagining I was ready to jump on him the minute her back was turned. If she’d been at all perceptive, she would have realized it wasn’t his body that interested me. He was too thin and pale and neurotic-looking to qualify as beefcake. But she sensed there was something between us, and she was envious of that. Duncan and I had been through something she could never be a part of.

Like Duncan, Lulu didn’t talk much about her past. Unlike Duncan, this was not because she had something to hide, nor was it because she wanted to forget - it was because she realized her past just wasn’t terribly interesting. Her real name was Lorraine. Once, as a joke - because I knew she wouldn’t have the faintest idea what I was talking about - I asked her if she’d called herself Lulu after the heroine of the Frank Wedekind plays. She looked blank and said no, as a little girl she’d been rather partial to a pop song called 'I’m a Tiger’, and had named herself after the singer.

It had been easy for her to get modelling work, but she had never had the luck or drive to make it into the top ranks - only as far as one or two of the middlebrow women’s magazines, the sort you find on sale next to supermarket checkouts. I always reckoned she could have had a successful career posing topless for some of the cheesier tabloids, but she was too much of a snob. She had masses of streaky blonde hair and enormous breasts, and liked to pretend she was even more dimwitted than she really was. She was convinced that all men fancied her, and equally convinced that all women hated her because they were jealous of her face and figure. She was right about women not liking her, but wrong about the reasons. Women didn’t like her because she was a complete bonehead.

She’d latched on to Duncan because he was famous. Not a household name, exactly, but he was getting there; he’d already appeared on one or two TV chat shows, moaning about how tedious it was to be constantly jetting off to the Seychelles to take pictures of fifteen-year-old cuties in string bikinis. At twenty-five, Lulu was too old for this sort of lark, but she was still offered work when occasion demanded the sort of dollybird who could fill out a bodice. I suspected it wouldn’t be long now before she decided to pack in the career altogether in order to concentrate on family life. She was already pouncing on the flimsiest of pretexts to steer the conversation round to babies. Come to think of it, this was probably why Jack and Alicia had been invited over. Lulu would be able to display her maternal tendencies by cooing over Abigail.

When I had first caught up with Duncan again, eight years or so after all the unpleasantness, I found him living in the same building, but the place had been transformed. Previously, it had been a gloomy warren of rooms painted in bright peeling colours left over from the sixties: red and black, or purple, with gold stars stencilled on to the bathroom ceiling. The communal hallway, with its crumbling cornices and soggy carpet, had always been packed with bicycles and stacks of junk mail. Than an uncle had died and Duncan had inherited the leasehold, and he had started to do the place up. It was partly the physical effort of that which had hauled him up out of the slough of self-pity.

One by one the tenants had moved out, mostly because they were fed up with the constant hammering and drilling. Duncan sold the other flats at a vast profit and used the money to refit his own. Some of the interior walls had been removed to make one enormous living room with floor-to-ceiling windows and stripped-pine floorboards. When I first saw the changes, the place was barely recognizable. Which was probably the whole idea; he was trying to obliterate all trace of what had happened there.

Lulu didn’t bring much with her when she moved in - just a couple of Swiss Cheese plants and a trunkful of clothes and makeup. She insisted that Duncan sell two-thirds of his book collection so the remainder fitted neatly into a couple of alcoves instead of cluttering up the entire room. Each month she bought Vogue and the rest of the glossies and arranged them in neat stacks on the coffee table. She also bought a lot of imported Italian fashion magazines, though her knowledge of the language was limited to words such as l’uomo, donna and lei.

Now she was bustling round the kitchen, dressed in her customary leisure wear of pink Lycra leggings, oversized pink T-shirt, and pink towelling headband. There wasn’t much in Lulu’s wardrobe that wasn’t pink or red. She never wore black. As far as I was concerned, this was her one redeeming feature. She thought it made her look sallow.

She finished messing with the blender and started peeling the paper from a big slab of ricotta. I told her about Patricia Rice because I knew it would upset her. To my delight, she made little tutting noises of disapproval. ‘Dora, that’s awful,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure that you realize how awful that is. It’s really mean. You wouldn’t like it if I did that sort of thing to you.’

‘But you wouldn’t do that sort of thing,’ I said. ‘You’re much too nice. Besides, you and I know each other, and the whole point is that Patricia and I have never met. This way, even if she called the police in - even if they could be bothered to launch an investigation into a couple of harmless anonymous notes - they’d never know where to start looking.’

‘Not unless someone tipped them off,’ Lulu muttered, just loud enough for me to hear.

Duncan looked up from his retouching. ‘Dora, you’re wicked,’ he said. ‘We’d better ask her to dinner, Lu, or we’ll start getting poison-pen letters.’

Lulu shot him a look of exasperation. ‘Duncan! I’m not sure there’s enough food as it is.’

‘That’s OK,’ I said brightly. ‘I don’t eat much.’

Lulu gritted her teeth and pretended not to sulk.

‘That’s settled, then,’ said Duncan, like a referee.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That seems to be that.’ She ploughed her fork through the cheese so vehemently that a large clod of it flew out of the bowl and landed on the table, just missing the edge of his photograph.

‘Jesus, Lu!’ he snapped. ‘For Christ’s sake watch what you’re doing. That was nearly half a day’s work down the tubes.’ His expression was thunderous, and for a minute I thought he was going to scrunch up the photo and chuck it at her. On the whole, he managed to keep his temper, like a lot of other things, under wraps, but sometimes it got away from him. These days, though, he was better at controlling it, and now I could see him taking a deep breath and staring hard into the middle distance until the storm clouds dispersed. He wiped the cheese up with his finger and ate it, then looked pointedly in my direction, as if to punish Lulu by deliberately excluding her from the conversation. I tried not to smile as I saw her lower lip quivering.

‘Dora,’ he said, ‘I really need your advice.’

‘About what?’

For a moment, he was lost for words, as though my response had thrown him off balance. ‘Work,’ he said at last. ‘Photos and stuff.’

I hadn’t expected this. I’d done a short stint in the photographic department at college, but Duncan was aware I didn’t know anything like as much about photography as he did.

Lulu muscled in. ‘Maybe I could help.’

‘I doubt it, love,’ Duncan said. He only called her ‘love’ when he was being patronizing. ‘It’s technical.’

‘What do you want to know?’ I asked, hoping for another chance to get Lulu to demonstrate her stupidity.

‘Show you later,’ he said.

Lulu turned to face the stove, still looking as though she was about to burst into tears. As soon as she’d turned her back he gave me a look, a glance so naked in its desperation that it knocked me for six. It was just for a moment, and then it was gone. Then he bent his head back down over the print and continued to dab away at the shadows with his fine-pointed brush, filling in all the flaws with tiny black dots. Years of point-blank brushwork had taken their toll on his eyesight. Sometimes, for watching television and so on, he was having to wear spectacles.

For a while there was silence. Lulu continued to pout, and Duncan continued to dab. I sat without moving, trying to resist the temptation to start rocking my chair again. I had a feeling deep inside which at first I had trouble identifying, because it had been years since I’d last felt it - thirteen years, to be exact. It took me some time to recognize it as excitement.

Chapter 2

Lulu had swapped her pink leisure wear for pink formal wear. She swayed from side to side to the music, if you could call it music.

‘What is this noise?’ I asked.

‘It’s New Vague music, Dora. Recommended by my yoga teacher. It’s supposed to relax you.’

‘Sounds like whales,’ said Alicia.

‘I think it’s got whales in it somewhere,’ Lulu said.

I picked up the cassette case and scanned the notes. ‘Nope, no whales here. Ethereal flutes, yes. Haunting pan-pipes. yes, not to mention the gentle ebb and flow of celestial oceans. Oh, and we mustn’t forget the cosmic tinkle of intergalactic glockenspiels.’

Lulu snatched the cassette case from me and read out loud, ‘This music creates the perfect ambience for those precious contemplative moments.’

I yawned, which probably convinced Lulu the New Vague was working. I’d already had my fill of precious contemplative moments. Over on the other side of the room Duncan was listening intently to Jack. I wished he would get to the point and tell me what was on his mind.

Alicia was flicking through magazines. You couldn’t blame her; the repartee, so far, had not been sparkling. Over pre-dinner drinks, Jack and Duncan had talked about Ferraris and Grand Prix racing, while Alicia had listed the pros and cons of Pampers versus Peau Douce. Then, while Lulu was slopping out the hummus, Jack launched into a monologue about office politics on the weekly magazine where he was Features Editor. He worked with a load

Reviews for Suckers

[altheaann · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I got this book based on the author's short story in Granta's 'Best British Novelists.' (And I was like, 'what? A vampire novel I've never heard of?') It was interesting, but I don't think I'd place it in a best-of-the-best list.
It was extremely 90's, to the point of feeling a bit dated sometimes. It reminded me a slight bit of Bret Easton Ellis in tone and attitude.
The narrator, Dora, a 'creative consultant,' discovers that her sometime-lover's girlfriend is a vampire, and proceeds to uncover a massive plot by vampires to take over society through a business conglomerate.
The really notable thing about the book is what a horrible, nasty person the narrator is. She's not even slightly sympathetic, nor is she supposed to be. Sometimes the sharply satiric tone of the book works, at other times, for me, it fell flat.

[isabelx_21 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Dora & Duncan thought they had foiled the vampire menace 15 years earlier, but now there are worrying signs that Violet might be back and that London could be facing an even greater vampire menace than before. A vampire yuppie conspiracy set in late 1980's London and with a truly unsympathetic and borderline sociopathic protagonist (and I'm not talking about a vampire here!). I borrowed this from the library a long time ago, but recently found a copy for a quid in a local bookshop and decided to read it again.

[dagon12 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I love reading books by Strand! I've been reading his books for a while and I love them. And now that I read this one, I started buying books by J.A. Konrath, aka Jack Kilborn, with the expectation that I'll like his books too. So far I've only read AFRAID; that was real good but it was also a true thriller/horror novel, not the same humor type story that are included here. SUCKERS has a lot of humor. Much of it tasteless and gross but still funny if you have a bent sense of humor.Originally SUCKERS was sold as a limited hardcover edition by Delirium Books; this ebook contains not only the novella SUCKERS but it also contains three short stories by Konrath (all Harry McGlade mysteries) and three short stories by Strand (all Andrew Mayhem thrillers). In total it's a good collection by two guys that know how to be funny. And horrific. I'm not sure which of the stories was my favorite. Konrath's were a bit more hardcore while Strand's followed a crazy progression that made them funnier. Konrath's "The Necro File" was definitely the most tasteless but at the same time had me smiling the whole way through. If you are a fan of either author, get this book and enjoy. If you are unsure, buy it anyway. If you are really unsure, read the sample from Amazon; it includes an introduction from both of them and Konrath's first story. That will give you more than you need to decide if you will like the rest of the book or not.