INTRODUCTION

If you thought ’Salem’s Lot needed more Uzis, welcome to Nightblood. Hopped up on comic books, horror, and action movies, author Chris Martindale delivers the equivalent of a late-Eighties action movie set in a world of Cherry Coke and Bon Jovi, where Fright Night plays on HBO and characters in long overcoats kill vampires with katanas and nunchakus, probably in slow motion. It’s a time capsule of a certain kind of totally disreputable, big-balled, hairy-chested book that doesn’t really exist anymore. The kind of book where the master vampire preens and struts, purring, “Have you ever come across anyone like me before?”

“Oh,” the hero deadpans. “I’ve met lots of assholes over the years.”

If this book was a movie, you’d catch it on the USA Network in the middle of the night or on TBS one lazy Saturday afternoon.

Born and raised in Indiana, Martindale grew up the youngest of three brothers, all of whom were huge comic book fans, and whose mom read John Carter of Mars and Gor stories to them out loud. Fresh out of Indiana University, Martindale saw an ad in Writer’s Digest that TSR was seeking writers for their knock-off Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book series, Endless Quest. Figuring “What the hell,” Martindale sent them Duel of the Masters, a martial-arts flavored adventure, which they bought and published in 1984. “I’d start a lot of projects and never finish anything,” Martindale remembers. “That was the first thing I started that I saw through to the end.”

Writing for a flat fee, Martindale turned in two more gamebooks for TSR (Curse of the Werewolf, 1987; Prince of Thieves, 1988) but started getting bored. “It was kind of like writing a flowchart,” he says. “By the time I got to the third book it was getting tiresome to come up with a new way to kill a character after killing them thirteen or so times.” He started writing a straight fantasy horror novel, then stumbled across buried treasure. As kids, Chris and his brothers were big fans of Marvel’s horror comics like Tomb of Dracula and Werewolf by Night, and they used to create their own characters. Martindale’s brother, Ted, had come up with “Chris Stiles, Ghost Breaker” and written a few paragraphs about Stiles waking up in his room, talking to the ghost of his dead brother. His other brother, Kevin, had drawn a sketch of the character and now, years later, “Chris Stiles, Ghost Breaker” came alive.

Writing longhand, Martindale made Stiles a Vietnam vet because at the time, “if you wanted someone who was good at killing in pop culture, they were a Vietnam vet,” and he made up the fictitious town of Isherwood, Indiana, population: 800. After two years of work he had Nightblood (originally titled Shadow War). A descendant of Robert E. Howard’s evil-hunting, witch-killing, monster-fighting Puritan, Solomon Kane, who’d enjoyed a mid-Eighties revival in Marvel’s Sword of Solomon Kane miniseries (Sept. 1985–July 1986), Chris Stiles was exactly the kind of badass who could anchor an adventure series. At the time, long-running men’s adventure series were getting increasingly baroque, full of cyborg cops (Steele, 1989), soldiers in mechanized warsuits (C.A.D.S., 1985), and lots and lots of killer mutants (Mutants Amok, 1991). But no one had a monster hunter. Chris Stiles perfectly fit a hole in the market.

Martindale sent two queries and partial manuscripts to Gold Eagle, an imprint of Harlequin and the premier publisher of men’s adventure paperbacks, but they rejected it. Once Martindale finished the manuscript, however, the first person he sent it to was agent Jay Garon, and he liked it so much he landed the young author a two-book deal at Warner Books. Chris Stiles, Ghost Breaker, was born.

A little bit Blade, Marvel’s African-American vampire hunter, and a little bit Solomon Kane, Stiles is the quintessential paperback action hero. His back and chest are a “roadmap of scars”, he wears leather gloves and a long overcoat, his “gruff yet vulnerable, like a lost child, searching for something” looks make women’s hearts melt, and his backstory sounds like the lyrics to “Born in the USA”. In addition, he’s haunted by the ghost of his brother, Alex, found dead in Central Park (“Where in the park?” “All over it!”), who guides him from one pocket of evil to another in the hope that eventually they’ll stumble across the monster that killed Alex, pump it full of hot lead, and ghost brother can finally rest in peace.

This deeply inefficient display of brotherly love leads the Stiles Bros. to Isherwood, which has a vampire problem. Sebastian Danner went vamp back in the day and his brother walled him up in the basement of the old Danner place, now abandoned and essentially Marsten House from ’Salem’s Lot. Chris arrives in town and starts romancing single mom Billie, a diner waitress with a heart of gold and two kids. Her ankle-biters, Bart and Del, are Fangoria-reading, GoreZone-loving horror nerds, cut from the same cloth as ’Salem’s Lot’s Mark Petrie, only Del gets to display his totally sweet nunchaku skills in a fight with the accidentally unleashed Sebastian Danner before Stiles shows up. It turns out these vampires are vulnerable to stakes through the heart and “stainless steel semi-autos sporting an extended twenty-two shot magazine and a miniature flashlight mounted on the frame.”

This is the kind of book where people don’t have “things”, they have “gear”, they don’t “search”, they “reconnoiter”, there are no knives, only “ka-bars” and “bali-songs.” There are shout-outs to Night of the Living Dead (“You never know about these vampires,” one of the kids says. “They’re dead. They’re all messed up.”), and Chris Stiles talks about killing vampires in New Orleans (Anne Rice territory), California (a reference to Robert McCammon’s They Thirst) and Maine (in honor of ’Salem’s Lot). “Hell,” he says. “When I was in Maine, they were running like cockroaches.”

What happens next is an over-the-top blast. Stiles and Danner are constantly shooting each other in the nuts, squeezing each other’s balls until they pass out, or Danner is threatening to turn Stiles into a vampire by making him drink blood from his wiener. Vampires get turned into walking bombs. Teenage vamps work their way through the school yearbook, crossing off each class picture as they drain yet another classmate. Stephen King had one vampire float outside Mark Petrie’s window, trying to lure him outside? Martindale has six.

Anne Rice can keep her fancy vampires in their lacy blouses, and King can hang onto his stinky, undead Kurt Barlow. Martindale’s Sebastian Danner wears a red Adidas track suit, can’t quite figure out television, and is a terrible driver. Confused by the modern world, he knows he must accustom himself to things like Van Halen so that he can master this planet, and yet he misses having “someone to speak to now and then . . .” Both vicious and inept, he’s like your granddad, suddenly weaponized, lashing out at the world around him because he can’t understand how to send an email.

Nightblood ends with the promise of a sequel, and that was definitely the plan. Stiles would have made his way around the country, like Bruce Banner in the Incredible Hulk television series, stumbling into supernatural, super-lethal situations (like a diner in Florida besieged by zombies working for local drug dealers), gradually developing a network of supporting characters, until he discovers that the creature which killed his brother was one of three shapeshifting monsters born of the unholy union between a long-ago Puritan witch hunter, like Solomon Kane, and a witch. This troublemaking trinity make their living as virtually immortal assassins, until Stiles hunts them down and kills them one by one and, as Martindale tells it:

“In the end, a broken Stiles waits with the last of these three dying creatures—still retaining female form—while it gives birth to his child, which hearkens back to the witch hunter’s story. Only this time the baby comes out human. Or human-ish. I figured I could either keep Stiles alive as a mentor to the child or let him die and continue the series with his grown son or daughter and their supernatural abilities.”

But even though he had a two-book deal with Warner, it was not to be. Martindale’s next book was Where the Chill Waits (1991), about four businessmen on an Ontario hunting expedition attacked by the Wendigo, then his agent secured him a contract to write two novels for Pocket Books under a pen name, but the horror boom had started dying even before before Where the Chill Waits came out, and Warner abandoned the book, stranding it on bookstore shelves with zero support. On the plus side, it allowed Martindale to publish his Pocket books under his own name. On the negative side, Pocket saddled his two books with terrible covers and threw them out on the marketplace with little distribution. Demon Dance, a horror Western, came out in 1991, and The Voice in the Basement came out in 1993.

Garon, who had sold The Firm for John Grisham, encouraged Martindale to write legal thrillers, which were all the rage at the time. “I dabbled a little with other stuff, but I was mostly interested in writing horror,” Martindale says. “Writing the last two books, knowing they put a shitty cover on the third, and knowing they would do the same with the fourth, holding a day job and writing at night, it was hard. I’d just as soon not put up with that. So I just stopped writing. I dabbled in screenwriting but that was it for novels.”

Martindale never wrote a book again.

And so Chris Stiles never made it to that Florida diner, never found out what disgusting monster killed his brother, never settled down with Billie, the waitress, never made sweet love to a sexy shapeshifting monster. Instead, he exists in a frozen state of eternal potential, striding out of the end of Nightblood into an early-­Nineties American landscape of nu metal and the Macarena, katana strapped to his back, overcoat billowing around him, ghost brother on his shoulder, always ready for more adventures. Real men don’t need closure. Just new adventures on the horizon. And that’s where new adventures will always exist for Chris Stiles, Ghost Breaker.

Grady Hendrix

September 2019

Grady Hendrix is a novelist and screenwriter whose books include Horrorstör, My Best Friend’s Exorcism, and We Sold Our Souls. His history of the paperback horror boom of the Seventies and Eighties, Paperbacks from Hell, won the Stoker Award. You can stalk him at www.gradyhendrix.com.