The Evil Seed - Joanne Harris

This is, technically, Joanne Harris' first book. It's been reissued since it was first published, and has been tidied up, as the author explains in the foreword because what you write first is never as good as you would like it to be later. It's a departure from the novels that made Harris famous, including Chocolat and Five Quarters of the Orange. It is instead something that should be far more popular in the current climate, a vampire novel, set in Cambridge. It's similar in feel to her other ghost story Sleep, Pale Sister. Darker than Blackberry Wine or The Lollipop Shoes (which I preferred to it's predecessor), but with that familiar feel of being drawn into something a little unusual, Harris' novels have a tingle of the occult and magic to them, often in her novels (and short stories) characters have unusual gifts or strange things happen. The Evil Seed is quite gothic, and has an interesting structure, slipping back and forth in time as the story (or should that be stories) unravel. If you've been reading any of the recent flurry of vampiric books or are a fan of the gothic, I'd recommend this.