Come What May

Sam Fisher is a small-town, second-generation diner owner living his dream. He’s content in the daily grind of serving coffee, chatting with farmers, and cleaning it all up before heading home to his beautiful wife and daughter. He doesn’t believe in the supernatural, and he shrugs off the weird experience one afternoon when he finds two greasy piles of ash on his diner floor amongst an overturned table. Stacie, his wife, tells him that she’s missing over twenty minutes of memory, but he doesn’t listen. Within hours, though, Sam can’t deny it anymore. Vampires were killed in his diner and now they’ve come after his wife and his daughter in retribution. A century-and-a-half-old vampire hunter named Jack Harlan steps into the fray, and Sam demands Jack’s help.

Swaim masterfully adds layer upon layer of meaning and understanding to his story. At firstthis seems like a completely improbable and unrealistic faddish vampire story, but it is later revealed to be an interesting novel about the awakening of a man. Ultimately, this isn’t just the latest book about a blood-sucking monster, but rather it’s a meaningful story about this complacently resigned man living out the life he was dealt who undergoes sudden change after seeing and feeling horrible things at the will of entities beyond his control. He is forced to open his eyes and see the truly destructive forces around him and make a choice to stand up to and for himself and his own primal nature and needs. Like in Project Strikeforce, Swaim isn’t happy to follow a typical story arc, but rather keeps the reader guessing with what will happen next. Come What May has smoother and more even pacing and greater character development, though, and is a huge improvement upon Swaim’s previous likable novel.

Fans of the television show Supernatural may be happy to note that the novel is very reminiscent of the first few seasons and that the character Jack could easily have been inspired by a combination of Bobby Singer and John Winchester. Lastly, I just have to give another personalized comment to Swaim: from the bottom of this Iowa girl’s heart, thanks for the nod to our great Iowa beef.