This is the kind of book where people don’t have “things”, they have “gear”, they don’t “search”, they “reconnoiter”, there are no knives, only “ka-bars” and “bali-songs.” There are shout-outs to Night of the Living Dead (“You never know about these vampires,” one of the kids says. “They’re dead. They’re all messed up.”), and Chris Stiles talks about killing vampires in New Orleans (Anne Rice territory), California (a reference to Robert McCammon’s They Thirst) and Maine (in honor of ’Salem’s Lot). “Hell,” he says. “When I was in Maine, they were running like cockroaches.”

What happens next is an over-the-top blast. Stiles and Danner are constantly shooting each other in the nuts, squeezing each other’s balls until they pass out, or Danner is threatening to turn Stiles into a vampire by making him drink blood from his wiener. Vampires get turned into walking bombs. Teenage vamps work their way through the school yearbook, crossing off each class picture as they drain yet another classmate. Stephen King had one vampire float outside Mark Petrie’s window, trying to lure him outside? Martindale has six.

Anne Rice can keep her fancy vampires in their lacy blouses, and King can hang onto his stinky, undead Kurt Barlow. Martindale’s Sebastian Danner wears a red Adidas track suit, can’t quite figure out television, and is a terrible driver. Confused by the modern world, he knows he must accustom himself to things like Van Halen so that he can master this planet, and yet he misses having “someone to speak to now and then . . .” Both vicious and inept, he’s like your granddad, suddenly weaponized, lashing out at the world around him because he can’t understand how to send an email.

Nightblood ends with the promise of a sequel, and that was definitely the plan. Stiles would have made his way around the country, like Bruce Banner in the Incredible Hulk television series, stumbling into supernatural, super-lethal situations (like a diner in Florida besieged by zombies working for local drug dealers), gradually developing a network of supporting characters, until he discovers that the creature which killed his brother was one of three shapeshifting monsters born of the unholy union between a long-ago Puritan witch hunter, like Solomon Kane, and a witch. This troublemaking trinity make their living as virtually immortal assassins, until Stiles hunts them down and kills them one by one and, as Martindale tells it:

“In the end, a broken Stiles waits with the last of these three dying creatures—still retaining female form—while it gives birth to his child, which hearkens back to the witch hunter’s story. Only this time the baby comes out human. Or human-ish. I figured I could either keep Stiles alive as a mentor to the child or let him die and continue the series with his grown son or daughter and their supernatural abilities.”