"Kim Newman - Andy Warhol's Dracula" - читать интересную книгу автора (Newman Kim)

Since arriving in America, he'd been careful to take only those who asked
for it, who were already living like ghosts. They had few vampires here.
Drained corpses attracted attention. Already, he knew, he'd been noticed.
To prosper, he must practice the skills of his father-in-darkness. First,
to hide; then, to master.
The Father was always with him, first among the ghosts. He watched over
Johnny and kept him from real harm.
Sid, Belsen-thin but for his Biafra-bloat belly, was slumped in a ratty
chair in front of blurry early early television. He looked at Johnny and
at Nancy, incapable of focusing. Earlier, he'd shot up through his
eyeball. Colors slid and flashed across his bare, scarred-and-scabbed
chest and arms. His head was a skull in a spiky fright wig, huge eyes
swarming as Josie and the Pussycats reflected on the screen of his face.
The boy tried to laugh but could only shake. A silly little knife, not
even silver, was loosely held in his left hand.
Johnny pressed the heels of his fists to his forehead, and jammed his eyes
shut. Blood-red light shone through the skin curtains of his eyelids. He
had felt this before. It wouldn't last more than a few seconds. Hell raged
in his brain. Then, as if a black fist had struck him in the gullet,
peristaltic movement forced fluid up through his throat. He opened his
mouth, and a thin squirt of black liquid spattered across the carpet and
against the wall.
"Magic spew," said Sid, in amazement.
The impurities were gone. Johnny was on a pure blood-high now. He
contained all of Nancy's short life. She had been an all-American girl.
She had given him everything.
He considered the boy in the chair and the girl on the bed, the punks.
Their tribes were at war, his and theirs. Clothes were their colors,
Italian suits versus safety-pinned PVC pants. This session at the Chelsea
had been a truce that turned into a betrayal, a rout, a massacre. The
Father was proud of Johnny's strategy.
Sid looked at Nancy's face. Her eyes were open, showing only veined white.
He gestured with his knife, realizing something had happened. At some
point in the evening, Sid had stuck his knife into himself a few times.
The tang of his rotten blood filled the room. Johnny's fangs slid from
their gum-sheaths, but he had no more hunger yet. He was too full.
He thought of the punks as Americans, but Sid was English. A musician,
though he couldn't really play his guitar. A singer, though he could only
shout.
America was a strange new land. Stranger than Johnny had imagined in the
Old Country, stranger than he could have imagined. If he drank more blood,
he would soon be an American. Then he would be beyond fear, untouchable.
It was what the Father wanted for him.
He rolled the corpse off his shins, and cleaned himself like a cat,
contorting his supple back and neck, extending his foot-long tongue to
lick off the last of the bloodstains. He unglued triangles of vinyl from
his body and threw them away. Satisfied, he got off the bed and pulled on
crusader white pants, immodestly tight around crotch and rump, loose as a
sailor's below the knee. The dark purple shirt settled on his back and
chest, sticking to him where his saliva was still wet. He rattled the