Vampires have always lived in Eastern Europe. But with the fall of the Soviet Union, they began to spread across the continent, then the world, turning whole populations into vampires--or human cattle. Having overrun India, the far East, and the great cities of North and South America, the forces of Night are now spreading into the countryside to consolidate their conquest.
In a town on the New Jersey shore, the vampires have just arrived, along with their human henchmen, the cowboys, who round up human cattle for the overlords in return for the promise of eternal life---later. For the vampires wish only a few of their own kind to rule, and feed. The rest of humanity are to be helpless herds, the source of the blood of life.
Falsely accused of abuse, Father Dan is drunk in a basement waiting for the end. His superior has betrayed the local Catholic congregation and become a vampire. Sister Carolyn has become a formidable killer of cowboys and vampires. Dan's niece, escaped from the conquest of New York, has made her way south to find him. Brought together by Rabbi Zev Wolpin, who is shaken by the vampires' fear of the cross and holy water, they plan their resistance. Against all odds, they discover that there just might be a way for humanity to really fight back. But first they will have to kill the vampire king of New York.

**

From Publishers Weekly

Professing (in a brief author's note) his fondness for thegenuinely evil Nosferatu of classic vampire fiction, Wilson( Gateways ) concocts a garish B-movie scenario, an expansion ofa 1990 novella with the same title, in which armies of the un-deaddecimate Europe and later make the New York metropolitan area theirprivate feeding trough. An organized human insurgency begins whenFather Joe Cahill, a recovering alcoholic, reclaims his desecrated NewJersey parish and joins forces with his activist niece, Lacey, andCarole Hanarty, a nun who makes explosives for her own vendetta withthe "Vichy" (i.e., human collaborators). When vampires chomp FatherJoe to suppress the revolt, he knows he has only two weeks before hisfull vampire conversion to launch a counterattack. All the novel'scharacters are as outsized and engaging as comic book heroes andvillains. Though Wilson intentionally invokes well-known vampireclichésâ€"the repellant power of the cross, grisly death by sunexposure, etc.â€"he also works crafty new angles on his theme,among them vampire bloodlust paralleling the selfish excesses of humanMe-Generation types. Still, but for a few twists, there's little herethat hasn't already been attempted in novels ranging from RichardMatheson's I Am Legend (an acknowledged influence) to YvonneNavarro's Afterage (1993).
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From Booklist

Starred Review In Wilson's creepy, terrifying thriller, vampires are rapidly taking over the planet. They've got Europe, and now they're encroaching on the East Coast of the U.S. In New Jersey, Carole, a nun, witnesses the death and transformation into a vampire of her best friend. After killing the vampire who used to be her friend, Carole becomes a vigilante, killing vampires and "cowboys," the humans who have aligned themselves with the vampires. She saves a rabbi, Zev, who is seeking Father Joe, hoping to enlist him in the fight against the vampires. Joe's niece Lacey has turned up with the same idea, but Joe himself is trying to drink away his problems. Zev and Lacey, however, succeed in drawing him into the fight, and all three head to St. Anthony's Church to retake it from vampires led by Father Palmeri, a corrupt priest-turned-vampire. But when the vampires capture Joe, the stakes are raised in ways neither side could have imagined. Wilson makes his vampires truly frightening and the eerie atmosphere of the book not unlike that of the movie 28 Days Later. The undead might have every advantage, but the likable, compelling mortals in this gripping read aren't giving up easily. Kristine Huntley
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