Elisa Hansen (1)

In The Company of Death (The Immortal Journey Book One), vampire expert Elisa Hansen, the Maven of the Eventide from Vampire Reviews on YouTube, launches her first solo novel. She incorporates both vampires and zombies as well as Death himself. The story follows Emily, a member of an LPI (Life Preservation Initiative) team tasked with clearing zombies out of the remnants of towns following the Ecuador Explosion while most of the country holds out hope that civilization survives on the fortress island of Manhattan. When a mission goes wrong, Death tries to claim her, but his touch comes at the same time as a zombie bite, rendering her somewhere between death and undeath. For this, Time takes Death’s horse and makes him walk east to his next appointment while Emily accompanies him, hoping that he can help her get to Manhattan and find a cure for her condition. Meanwhile, Scott and a gyndroid named Carol are making their own way toward Manhattan, but need to conserve power. Finally, the centuries-old vampire Leif works to avoid the vampire communes that dot the landscape while setting out toward Manhattan in the hope that he can find a place there without offending the leader of the vampire communes. As the story unfolds, Hansen reveals further cosmic forces, including the personifications of Time and Space and even featuring a confrontation with War, Famine, and Pestilence.

Hansen successfully crafts a layered narrative, weaving her different elements together in a way that holds the readers’ interest while creating the sense of a larger world that she slowly unveils as the story progresses. For example, the Ecuador Explosion has something to do with the creation of the zombies, but Hansen never fully defines it, thereby maintaining some mystery and avoiding explaining the zombies in such a way that readers might not be able to suspend disbelief. Similarly, she gives hints at how the cosmic order works in the world of her book, but wisely avoids the kind of details that could detract from the story. The only preexisting work I could compare Hansen’s novel to is Terry Pratchett’s Mort or Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens. These comparisons oversimplify to a great deal, however, as Hansen builds a world all her own that touches on two different horror genres as well as science-fiction and fantasy tropes with occasional references to the work of John of Patmos adding a sense of the epic.… (más)