A great narrator can perform a bad book well. And the one thing that can make or break my ability to get immersed is the narrator. I work at home and spend long hours staring at screens doing repetetive tasks so during lockdown in particular Audiobooks have been a godsend for me. Add to that the fact that it's all delivered to you by the velvet tones of Joshua Saxon? And what you have is an extremely satisfying experience. There is a real sense of a master genre writer in full command of his craft flexing his own unique authorial voice.
But for my money this is where Lumley sounds more like himself and less like an imitation of writers who's style he clearly loves. An epic battle with multiple supernatural armies and a huge ensemble cast. I've heard Lumley do something similar in the conclusion to his Titus Crow series. No space is wasted, Lumley just patiently lays out these incredible events and walks you through them. It's an enormous story with almost 4 decades of plot behind it at this point, but it's never unwieldy or rambling. Brian Lumley is on peak form and has a total grasp of his style, his world, it's lore and what he wants to do. There is memorable horror and gore aplenty but there is a lot more here. There are giant monsters, a final war for dominance between distinct and memorable vampire characters, brother pitted against brother, romance, family legacy, betrayal, portals in time and space and a psychically endowed british spy group. The most truly Epic of the Necroscope series, Bloodwars is a climactic showdown between multiple factions in a high fantasy but well grounded setting.
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