Chapter Summary of Blood County, by Doris Piserchia (writing as Curt Selby)
(continued)

Ch. 18. Duquieu wheels a cart of blood bottles down to the basement of the mansion (called the "pool room" because it contains a large empty swimming pool) in order to feed the starving Gilda. We learn she was once a mortal woman, and that Duquieu's father "warned him not to take a normal woman as a bride." As he is reminiscing about their early days, Gilda bolts out the door and escapes.

Ch. 19. Jared wakes up in a full-blown vampire rage. He breaks the chains with which Clint has bound him and exits the church.

Ch. 20. Duquieu stalks Portia from outside Sugie's cabin. Clint appears and tells him no. Duquieu mockingly claims droit du seigneur and scoffs at Clint's "war training." They fight; Clint surprises the old man with some unexpected moves but soon Duquieu has Clint on his back. As he leaves, Duquieu warns his son to be en garde.

Ch. 21. The next morning, Portia tries to convince Clint and Sugie to let her stay in Blood. Ugly-looking villager July West shows up and is told to escort her out of town. Sugie announces that he's the new milkman and asks Clint for a contribution; obviously he doesn't know yet that Clint has turned. ["Turned" is my post-Near Dark shorthand for vampire transformation, by the way: Piserchia never uses the word that way.] Clint says he's too "feverish" to give blood and Sugie leaves to "shop for Duquieu's dinner." Soon after, Coley arrives with the news that her father, Marsh Nagl, is a Lamprou. They find him sleeping under his house and he shrinks from the light and "mews like a cat." Clint promises he'll prepare the old man for burial after he's made "one more mark" on the body.

Ch. 22. Sugie makes the milk run up to Duquieu's mansion. Duquieu says Blood residents must "go into the havens" until he rounds up all the Lamprous. Countermanding his earlier orders, he requests that Clint, not Sugie, handle all future blood deliveries to the mansion.

Ch. 23. Wandering the hills, Gilda finds Charlie and "adopts" him. The two prowl for necks to suck, but can't find any Blood residents. Gilda realizes that Duquieu has done something he only does "every once in a while," which is put the townspeople in havens: five concrete fortresses, each stocked with provisions to sustain 100 people for a week, which Duquieu uses as lures for stray Lamprous. As Gilda is explaining this, Duquieu rides up dramatically astride the horse, Baron. Sam and Louise Steiner, who have been lurking behind the Pickhandle Hill haven, try to cut and run. Duquieu kills Louise with a flying wooden stake through the heart and strings the screaming Sam up in a net, which swings from a tree branch. Gilda shields Charlie, her "baby," from skewering, and the grumbling Duquieu marches them back to the mansion and locks them up in the poolroom. [This is getting funny--we're almost in Addams Family territory here.]

Ch. 24. Blood residents exit the havens after dawn to take care of business around town. Sam hangs in his net, burned by the daytime sun, waiting for Duquieu to kill him. Clint collects blood from the townspeople, then uses his Army-acquired lockpicking skills to enter Duquieu's sleeping cage. Perversely, he places the blood at the foot of the old Lamprou's bed. He returns home to find his surrogate Pap crying; it's finally dawned on Sugie that Clint's a Lamprou, albeit one who sleeps at night and wears a steel vest to protect his heart. Clint tells Sugie not to worry, because Blood is "home to everybody I love." He promises to "handle the situation," and then makes a mysterious promise that doesn't become clear 'til the last chapter: "You'll have your Lamprou to bless the fields and you'll have your jug and your friends."

Ch. 25. Kicked out of the village, Portia visits the hospital in nearby Morgantown. A doctor there knows something peculiar is going on in Blood, but isn't inclined to investigate: "They mind their business, we mind ours." He finds Clint's and Jared's birth certificates stapled together and Portia learns what the reader already knows about the deaths of the boys' mothers. Portia returns to Blood the next day; when she arrives at Clint's cabin at dusk, she sees Clint on the porch and a woman and child at the edge of the yard, beckoning to her. She runs to Clint, and out of her hearing Clint tells Gilda and Charlie to get lost. (How did they escape?) Portia announces she's staying in Blood "to see if the Union is cohesive as I've always assumed."

Ch. 26. Clint delivers blood to the mansion; his metal vest saves him from Duquieu's booby traps: wooden spears hurled by wall-mounted catapults. After the attack he and Duquieu debate Blood's feudal servitude. Clint says his education showed him what a leech Duquieu is: he survives on the townspeople's superstitions. Duquieu says the people would never have progressed anyway, and Clint says "Because you haven't let them!" Duquieu sidesteps the issue by railing about local families that produce "gargoyles" through incest, and brags that he built two schools that the locals burned down: "They wanted only their fields, their jugs and their isolation." Clint suggests that Duquieu and Gilda, as the last surviving Lamprous, could have saved the townspeople by killing themselves. Duquieu replies that suicide's not so simple. Before Clint leaves, he tells the old Lamprou that Jared has released Gilda, Charlie, and Sam.

Ch. 27. Outside Sugie's house the next morning, Clint discovers Portia shooting arrows at targets. Unknown to her, Sugie has his rifle trained on Sam Steiner, who is stalking her, wearing a large floppy hat and oversized clothes to protect himself from the sun. To Sugie's horror, the sharp-eyed Clint points out that Gilda and Charlie (who we learn in Chapter 33 are impervious to sunlight) are on the other side of the yard, also watching the archer. Sugie explains that Portia was on a "limpig team" and made the bow and arrows herself. [Somewhat conveniently because Portia still doesn't know about Lamprous, the arrows are pure pine.] Again out of Portia's hearing, Clint tells Sam to lay off the woman and to tell Lady Lamprou and Charlie to do the same. At first Sam is snarling, but when he realizes Clint has no blood he says "Awww. You're a Lamprou."

Ch. 28. Clint and Coley stand on the old rope bridge they played on as children and talk about the stray Lamprous haunting Blood, and their feelings. Coley asks about Portia, mentioning that the newcomer gave her some rouge to replace the "cheek color" she normally gets by soaking pieces of red wallpaper. [Another interesting detail of life--and poverty--in the hills.] Suddenly, Jared appears on the shore and cuts the rope bridge. Clint and Coley dive fifty or sixty feet into Slate Lake. Clint guesses that Jared wasn't trying to kill them but wanted to sever the childhood ties the three of them had. Coley points out (not for the first time or the last) that Clint has "never been right" about Jared.

Ch. 29. At noon two days later, Clint finds a hollow place in a treetop where he used to hide as a boy and climbs in it to sleep; his body clock is changing and he's becoming more nocturnal. We learn that Portia has hiked to Grafton to swim in the town's new pool and Sugie and Coley are safe in the havens. This chapter gives a science fiction-ish account of Lamprou physiology, reminiscent of Richard Matheson's great I Am Legend: cells that divide more slowly during periods of food-deprivation, an unusual part of the brain that awakens after death and repairs injuries, and a new mechanism in the heart that secretes "Lamprou substances" used by the brain.

Ch. 30. Duquieu awakens before dusk to discover Gilda hanging by the neck in the hallway of the mansion with a stake rammed through her heart. He falls into a chair in shock: "A sob racked Lamprou's body, brought him stiffly upright in the chair. His last link with hope and sanity lay in the form of this addle-brained woman who loved him far more than he deserved. Now she dangled like a puffy-faced, bulgy-eyed fish, strung up like a trophy by one of the hayseeds living in these wretched hills, her life's fluid leaking onto the floor at his feet." While he ponders who the culprit might be, Clint and Sugie show up with the nightly blood run. He hides, and listens as they find the body and immediately peg Jared as the killer.

Ch. 31. Duquieu throws a rock into haven number one with a message demanding that the townspeople produce Jared by nightfall of the next day. To work off his rage, he rides Baron around the hills: we learn that the horse is infected by the Lamprou substance, but, according to a later chapter, not a blood drinker. Coincidentally Duquieu's ride takes him to Grafton, where Portia is swimming after practicing her archery all day. He sees her diving in the pool by herself, wearing a white bikini.

Ch. 32. Duquieu attacks Portia and r4pes her. He leaves her lying on the grass, but she recovers quickly, grabs her bow and arrow, and heads him off on the footpath leading out of the park. She shoots him through the heart, but then can't find his body: only a bloody pile of clothing. [This chapter is one of the novel's biggest surprises; we've been expecting the big, manly, Fisher King confrontation between father and son, and suddenly, two-thirds of the way through the book, the love interest takes out Dad just like that.]

Ch. 33. Little Charlie acquires his second adult guardian since becoming a Lamprou: in place of the late Gilda and her "kisses and protecting arms," he gets Jared Brewster and the "promise of drama and mayhem." Jared coaches him in the stalking of elderly villager Senior Ricco: a humiliating attack that begins when the old man is relieving his bowels in the woods. Charlie fails to drain Ricco of blood and retreats to the safety of the river; as the old man is preparing to wade into the water and brain him with a rock, Jared comes up behind Ricco and shoves him into the stream (where he disappears over the falls). Jared then takes Charlie to the mansion to be his "lookout boy."

Ch. 34. Senior's son Junior Ricco comes to Clint's house to file a complaint to be transmitted to "Jared Lamprou," the "new master." (From this scene we infer that the "civilized" Duquieu, when he was alive, gave villagers some means for redress of grievances.) Junior alleges that his father Senior has been turned into a Lamprou, has killed Junior's wife Mary, and has left eight children without a mother. He demands compensation for the transformation and its consequences. Clint says he doubts Jared will listen. Junior says he hopes Clint can "settle Jared down" so the town will have a master and crops will continue to grow, but avows that the townspeople will kill Jared and "open up his heart with a wood sword" if he doesn't behave. [Blood has a weird form of democracy: a bloodthirsty leader serves at the sufferance of the people; the townspeople won't administer but will happily kill the administrator. Or is this just bluster?] Another interesting detail: Junior has the "Hopemont yodel," which means "he has TB and will probably end up in the clinic in Hopemont."

Ch. 35. At Clint's request, Portia takes her bow and arrows with her as she travels around Blood. "No one bothered her, not the ordinary folks and not the mutants who could be recognized by their pale skin, dark-ringed eyes and their way of slinking about so furtively and in so distressing a manner. That was what she called them: mutants." Portia theorizes (to Sugie, with whom she's developed an affectionate sparring relationship) that they're the result of incest, but she still wonders where Duquieu's body went. Sugie asks her why she didn't cry about his death. She says "He had it coming. I guess he never heard of women's lib, otherwise he might not have tried such a thing with me." Smart and tough as she is, though, Portia is awfully thick when it comes to figuring out Blood's secrets.

Ch. 36. Sweck Brewster, in a drunken stupor, hitches a ride on a wagon. The driver (Sam Steiner?) takes him up to the mansion. Jared locks him in the poolroom for the night with Charlie, who sucks blood from his legs whenever he tries to sleep. At the end of the chapter Sweck is fading.