To End the Night: Julius Caesar’s Secret War by Lluew Grey

So. First thing to know is that I love Roman history. There is something that keeps drawing me back to that particular period with its imperial madness and gladiators and innovation and war-mongering. Second thing to know is I love vampires. Probably not as much as I love Romans but still, they have a strangely alluring attraction for me.

Third thing? I do love a good cross-genre novel where the author has decided to take what we would expect and subverted this completely into something entirely different and stimulating. I mean, Julius Caesar and vampires, or actually Vampyres in the case of Lluew Grey’s book.

The book starts as Caesar is faced with the decision to cross the Rubicon and essentially bring an army into Rome. This will alter the political climate for Caesar enormously as a Roman posing a threat to the democracy of the Roman Republic. But what if he is being coerced into doing this by supernatural beings with an agenda?

And that’s what you have in this book: a man who has ambition himself but is having to do things the way that his puppeteers are forcing him to. The reason? Why, blood, of course! How else will vampires thrive?

Grey is a competent writer, of that there is no doubt and the book leads well through the different scenarios that Caesar historically found himself in with conversations with Cicero and Cleopatra written into the narrative. These are well conceived and convincing although for me, far too few.

At the risk of sounding trite, this book for me needs bite (rhyme not intended). In the bits where tension should have been ramped up, I found it barely there. I think that there is a lot of describing and not an enormous amount of showing and so the reading is less joyful skipping and more pedestrian, led as we are to where Grey wants us but not really letting us stop to watch by showing us more.

It’s a short book which with some more padding such as greater focus on the vampire threat and more showing rather than describing, could be something really special. As it stands, it’s not a bad read as it has a story and progression and a very imaginative premise but I can’t help but feel a tad disappointed: I was told the threat was there in what Grey wrote but I didn’t feel it. And that makes all the difference.

Rachel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars