Dead Collections: A Novel

A friend of mine suggested I read this book quite a while ago. They know me and my taste well and I dutifully added this to my "bookmark to buy later" list and then forgot about it. Someone gave me a book about a book binder and an archivist working in a cthullian museum archive and I mentioned it to that friend along with the comment that it wasn't a great book and felt like someone trying to tug on the coat tails of "Magnus Archives." Said friend asked if I'd read "Dead Collections" yet, which is about a vampire archivist. It's about so much more than that. Sol is a vampire (and yes vampirism both is and is not a metaphor for other stigmatized stuff) and is a nerd who wrote fan fiction and is a former concert pianist and piano teacher and is a trans man and is Jewish and is... just... so deeply fundamentally human. And unlike a lot of books about archivists this feels at its core like it was written by someone with archival experience - Fellman is, in fact, an archivist. So. Sol is a trans man, and was purposely infected with vampirism in an attempt to avoid dying of tetanus. He isn't coping SUPER well. He's camped out in his basement office of the archive he works at, no work friends and no social friends either. He works and... he works. That's about it. Then a woman arrives with a bequest for the archive - the writings etc. of the fictional writer of several Star Trek and other SF shows who also helmed her own (fictional) queer space show. It's a show that had a…

It's hard to like a character like Sol during the narrative of the story- although the sol who is narrating is far more likeable. Sol in the beginning is trapped by circumstances both beyond his control and of his own making, and it was frustrating and scary to see his whole life just disintegrate around him, because of his inaction and the actions of one very unpleasant coworker. But as it falls apart you see and feel sol literally rebuild himself. And you see the man he was at his core arise. Some of the alternative formats- like the text messages, and screenplays, were hard for me to read, but I just increased the size and that helped.

This book is phenomenal. I think the author has a really cool take on vampires that I haven't seen in other works before. I also think he does a great job with all the characters in the cast -- they're nuanced and complicated and interesting. I saw myself in them, I saw people I love in them, I saw people I didn't care for but maybe should've seen more of their humanity in them. If you like vampire stories, get this book. If you like books about queer people figuring out life, get this book. If you like books about archives (or libraries or museums or any other place with lots of old documents and items wrapped up in mystery), get this book. Isaac Fellman is a wonderful author and I can't wait to read whatever he writes next.