Dark

In Alice’s world – a world of the future, where London is a ghost city and the daylight is poisoned by a mysterious Cloud – vampires are real. They are not some paranormal species that has prowled the earth for millennia, but escapees from a military project gone disastrously wrong. These creatures, only twenty-seven in number, reproduce and garner the name ‘vampires’ for their strength, speed, super-human senses . . . and their taste for human blood.

Most of the inhabitants have fled. Those that stay know better than to go into the empty districts, the vampire districts . . . but Alice is a journalist. She’s stubborn that way. Walking home from work one night she discovers a vampire corpse in an alleyway, its head cut in two, and from that moment her life is irretrievably changed.

She wakes, two nights later, in a strange bed with a strange man. She has no memory of how she got there, of where she is or who he is. He tells her his name is Dark, and he is a vampire hunter – or ‘agent’, as they call themselves. Their institute is the Temple, a converted hospital buried in its own grounds and unknown, even, to the authorities. And Alice, it seems, is their newest member.