Tempter

About Nancy A. Collins's Tempter

As Collins explains in her introduction to this deluxe edition voodoo hair-raiser, first published in 1991 as a paperback original, her editor demanded that she recast it as a vampire novel to follow up on her Stoker-winning debut, Sunglasses After Dark (1989). She was living in San Francisco, about to wed her first husband, and when the 1989 earthquake struck, it proved "an apt omen for the fate of both my marriage and my book." Dissatisfied with the mediocre result, Collins has now wholly rewritten her troublesome offspring, excising every last trace of vampirism and restoring the voodoo magic. Despite a few signs of age (e.g., "Bush/Noriega" bumper stickers), this is the far superior version, with a compelling cast of New Orleans characters: Alex Rossiter, a burnt-out rock star; Ti-Alice, a beautiful witch who possesses an ancient book of runes, The Aegrisomnia; "mad" Aggie, a likable potion-peddling crone, who refers to the aforementioned tome as "some weird-ass Lovecraft-like shit"; and the evil Il-Qui-Tente (aka "He-Who-Tempts"), who has apparently been dead for more than a century within his decaying and abandoned antebellum mansion, but awaits a suitable living victim to revive him. Particularly engrossing is the historical background of Il-Qui-Tente's origin as Donatien Legendre, a dissolute, wealthy French-Creole planter, in the Civil War era. The book doesn't overdo the Big Easy's steamy ambience, though the fastidious should beware that it contains a lot of sex, much of it graphic.