YMMV / Midnight Mass (2004)

• Anti-Climax Boss: All of the main antagonists are killed rather quickly and unceremoniously. Especially Franco, who Vampire!Joe is able to beat with relative ease without much of a fight, and his death is only stalled when Barrett threatens Carole.
• Ass Pull: Joe somehow surviving after killing Franco, despite being his get.
• Complete Monster:
  • Father Alberto Palmeri, the Evil Counterpart to Father Joe, is a former Pedophile Priest turned vampire. Before the events of the book, he molested numerous children—with increasing frequency towards the end of his human life— at St. Anthony's Church, and managed to get away with it because an altar boy had fingered Joe as the molester. When the plague of vampirism that had been ravaging the world hit New Jersey, his first course of action was to hide in the nuns' convent. After being found by a group of cowboys and turned by a Prime vampire named Gregor, he took up the role of Sinister Minister in a desecrated St. Anthony's, performing gruesome rituals that involve the sacrifice of humans to his undead congregation. During the assault on the purified St. Anthony's, he attempts to turn Joe, dangling his friend, the rabbi, Zev, over the church balcony and just above a wooden stake, threatening to drop him if he refuses.
  • Franco is the vampire king of New York. He oversees the blood ranches, where human women as young as fifteen are rounded up by cowboys who earned enough "brownie points" for "stud time", which involves the rape and impregnation of the women in order to replenish the vampires' depleted blood source for future generations. After his meeting with Joe, he feeds him to a mindless feral vampire named Jason Devlin who he keeps as a pet in the hopes of Joe being left with even less sapience than Devlin. This plan backfires when Joe's wounds are cauterized by the sun when Lacey and Carole go out to the beach to bury him, but he's left fighting to retain his humanity for the remainder of the novel.
  • James Barrett is a high-ranking cowboy and The Renfield to Franco. Where most other cowboys are horny, ignorant hicks who want to become vampires at worst and desperate punch clock villains trying to protect their families at best, Barrett is a cannibal who treats Franco's empire like a business. When he first sees Joe naked, he examines the flesh on his body with the hopes of getting to cook and eat it. At the climax of the book, when it looks like Joe is about to throw Franco out into the sun, Barrett comes out holding Sister Carole at knifepoint, bargaining to let her live if Joe lets go of Franco.
• Squick: After being raped by a gang of cowboys, Lacey's naked and unconscious body, bleeding from every hole, is thrown before Olivia.

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