The Vampires of Juarez

An eccentric English journalist is in El Paso. One morning at dawn he wades across the Rio Grande while filming a white Siberian tiger that has come to the river to drink. He is kidnapped in Juarez by the tiger's owner, a drug lord who forces him to impersonate a mysterious go-between in exchange for his life. "The First World and the Third World are the bread in this sandwich and we are the baloney!" So a character describes the sprawling industrial war zone on the U.S./Mexico border that is Ciudad Juarez, the epicenter of the drug trade where the Third World comes to make what the First World wants. Hundreds of young women have been abducted, raped and murdered here, yet the ongoing tragedy of 'las desaparecidas' remains unsolved. Into this smoldering devil's stew steps an eccentric English journalist, the sometime employee of an occult magazine in London that attempts 'the rational examination of irrational phenomena', on his way from Miami to Los Angeles by bus. The book is NOT a typical genre 'vampire' novel but a satire that exposes the hypocrisy of the War on Drugs and examines the cause of the horror that has been perpetrated on the women of Juarez. It owes a great deal to the brilliant collaboration of Charles Bowden and Julian Cardona. The Italian reviewer Susanna Raule called the novel "fast-moving, eloquent an funny and at the same time profoundly violent and distressing" but added that "irony saves it from insupportable sadness and instead creates a fresh and captivating story." The Vampires of Juarez is the first book of Alan Scarfe's 'Carnivore' Trilogy and is followed by The Demons of 9/11 and The Mask of the Holy Spirit.