Only two good books emerged from the recent epidemic of literary bloodsucking: The Radleys, Matt Haig's brilliant reimagining of the vampire myth as suburban soap opera, and Marcus Sedgwick's very different version, an attempt to return the undead to their central European peasant roots, My Swordhand Is Singing. Sedgwick is one of our finest writers, specialising in a kind of dark intensity which, if not always gothic, is usually gothish. Even his humorous writing for younger children is in the Addams Family mould.
There's a vampire in Sedgwick's new book, and lashings of dark intensity. Midwinterblood consists of seven interlinked stories on the theme of love and sacrifice. The first, set in 2073, concerns a journalist called Eric, sent to uncover the truth about the mysterious Blessed Island, the childless inhabitants of which neither age nor die. Among the locals he meets a beautiful young woman, Merle, with whom he feels a powerful connection. We are very soon in Wicker Man territory, with our hero doped up on the local narcotic orchid, vaguely aware that something creepy is going on around him. Inevitably, he ends up on a stone altar, the local knife-wielding high priest poised above him, ready to strike.
In the subsequent sections, each one dragging us further back in time, the characters of Eric, Merle and the priest recombine in various ways, playing out a story of Nietzschean eternal recurrence centred on the island. An archaeologist discovers the bones of an adult and a child in a Viking grave; an allied airman is shot down and parachutes on to the island during the war; an early 20th-century artist paints a huge, darkly symbolic mural; an undead Viking returns to claim his children from his cuckolded brother. Finally we end up in the dark ages, with a chieftain reluctantly offering up his blood to save the island from famine. Not quite finally  an epilogue returns us to 2073, and the fate of the last incarnations of Eric and Merle.
The novel has Sedgwick's characteristically brilliant structural complexity: as the story moves backward through time, the individual narratives march forward through the seasons, marked by the names of the full moons  from the Flower Moon of midsummer, to the Blood Moon of midwinter. This serves to unify what might otherwise seem simply a collection of short stories.
Although Sedgwick, a master of chiaroscuro effects, never fails to deliver up an atmosphere of veiled dread, some of the sections work better than others. The ghost story told in "The Hunter's Moon" is sweet and sad, and has a lovely, shivery twist. The "Viking" and "Dark Age" sections have the grim authenticity of My Swordhand.
Others are less successful. The story of the pilot shot down and sheltered by the islanders never really gets going, and the first story, which should propel the novel's backward momentum, stutters and falters.
I did at times wonder if Sedgwick was playing too much to his core audience of long-fingered, spindly-legged goths and self-harming emos, for whom love is always eternal and doomed. But perhaps that shouldn't matter. Midwinterblood contains much that is riveting, strange and darkly enchanting. I read it in a single feverish sitting, late one evening, and drifted to sleep haunted by its vision of love and fate and history.
Anthony McGowan's books include Henry Tumour (Definitions).