Phil Merman is a regular guy.
A regular guy who just happens to be immortal, for whatever that’s worth. So far all it’s gotten him is a divorce, a lack of friends and family, and a string of soul-killing jobs with no room for advancement. Bound to a self-imposed ethical code bordering on vigilantism, Phil prowls the bowels of New York City in search of suitable sustenance—the homeless, the insane, no one who’ll be missed—all the while wondering how he became what he is. Are there others of his kind? Would he want to know them? Clues to the mystery of his existence begin to reveal themselves, luring him into spaces perhaps best left unknown.
In BOTTOMFEEDER, author B.H. Fingerman paints a down to earth portrait of no-frills vampirism and the potential pitfalls of breaking a comfortingly uncomfortable routine in the pursuit of sweeter fruit and deeper self-knowledge.
Comics scribe B.H. Fingerman's (Zombie World: Winter's Dregs) debut novel Bottomfeeder is just the kick in the guts that pasty-faced, velvet-draped vampire genre's had coming to it for two decades. His punchy, postmodern prose reads like Richard Matheson by way of Chuck Palahniuk, a first-person, stream-of-consciousness staccato liberally punctuated with pop culture pisstakes and enriched by amusingly grim, and refreshingly self-deprecating, sense of humour.
Bottomfeeder is a darkly comedic journey through the rat-infested, urine-stained trenches of modern urban vampirism. Our tour guide is a depressed, under-achieving neophyte bloodsucker named Phil Merman, who is neither a conscienceless predator nor and angst-ridden navel gazer--he's just a middle-aged New York Jew who looks half his age.
He spends his days inside his cramped, rent-controlled apartment avoiding a terminal tan and his nights at a dead-end job archiving a seemingly endless chain of gruesome crime scene photos, all while he dines out on the denizens of the city's grisly underbelly and wonders where everything went wrong.
Fingerman's portrayal of undying self-aware parasites who are just as mundane, lonely and screwed up as the humans they prey upon, is exactly what makes Bottomfeeder stand out.
Phil Merman's ennui is not the same old sighing, superficial, ceaseless angst of the immortals; he's just having a garden variety midlife crisis, but thanks to his condition; it's one that might never actually end. However, he does find respite from his night-to-night drudgery in Eddie Frye, a hard-partying vampire who teaches Phil that there's more to the afterlife than he imagined.
Fingerman's plotting is on the thin side, and he tends to stumble over his own scattershot references at times, but he packs his pages with so many amusingly offbeat angles on vampire subcultures (vampires with Down's Syndrome, vampire children with Progeria who are just starting to look their age, and god help us, a therapy group for neurotic bloodsuckers), that those flaws are easily ignored. For a subgenre that has long suffered from anemic ideas and ever-paler imitations, Bottomfeeder's the perfect antidote.
Review by Joseph O'Brien (Rue Morgue, May 2007)
*STARRED REVIEW* Fingerman, B. H. Bottomfeeder. Dec. 2006. 272p. M Press, paper, $12.95 (1-59582-097-3).
Phil Merman hasn’t looked a day over 27 for 27 years now, ever since somebody mugged him on a subway platform, after which he found he couldn’t eat, or go out in the sun without catching fire. He’s a vampire, though one whose conscience compels him to feed solely on society’s dregs. The only friend he has is pathetic old college pal Shelley, who’s never been the same since his family perished in a mysterious fire long before Phil’s mugging. He’d drop Shelley, whose aging irksomely reminds Phil of his own despised perpetual youth, but the wraithlike man positively haunts him. Then while at a bar with Shelley, Phil meets another vampire who introduces him to more, including a circle prone to orgies. Phil almost overcomes his scruples as his new friend leads him into some harrowing adventures. Finally, he starts wondering, Why now, after 27 lonely years? The answer packs a punch that cracks the novel’s exhilarating tough-guy facade. Previously a graphic novelist, Fingerman writes in a punchy, up-to-the-minute urban vernacular that, while it brims with abusive humor, squelches romanticism, provokes other-than-sexual interpretations of vampirism, and helps propel BOTTOMFEEDER to the front ranks of its genre. —Booklist
“Mr. Fingerman is a deeply talented, creative, and disturbed man.†— Max Brooks, World War Z
“When the vampire novel is in the care of a writer as witty and inventive and imaginative as B.H. Fingerman, be sure it can still rise up and bite us. A compellingly seedy revival of the undead, a story told with real pace and style. B.H. Fingerman has a sharp eye for the banality of horror and the horror of the banal.†— Ramsey Campbell, Secret Story
“If you captured, hogtied and extracted DNA from the respective brainpans of Chuck Palahniuk, Philip Roth, and Bram Stoker, the resulting, recombinant literary mutation would resemble nothing so much as Bottomfeeder. Fingerman has come up with a book that pretty much bleeds genius.†— Jerry Stahl, I, Fatty
“Fingerman catches New York with its pants down, and drags us along for a heady ride with lots of laughs and some moments of genuine pathos.†— David Wellington, Monster Island