Pinocchio Vampire Slayer by Van Jensen

Title: Pinocchio Vampire Slayer
Author: Van Jensen
Publisher: Top Shelf Comix
Rating: WORTHY!

Illustrated by Dusty Higgins

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.

How can you not love a comic with a title like this? Well, I wondered exactly that as I read the opening sequence - recapping the original story of Pinocchio (with some additions). I wondered, is this necessary, and then I wondered, if it is, does it have to be drawn this scrappily? It looks like it's been Xeroxed twenty times, and it made the text harder to read than it needed to be. I thought, until I enlarged the page - something which I wouldn't have been able to do in a print book! - that they'd misspelled Miranda rights as 'Meranda' rights. They hadn't.

I don't appreciate the wasting of page space, either. There's no reason why these images couldn't have been made brighter and occupied more of the page than the 60% they do occupy (surrounded by funereal black). I saw that they were trying to achieve some sort of ebony wood-grain effect, but it didn't work and only served to highlight the fact that they seem to have sadly missed out on the very real fact that trees are precious. We're privileged to have them, and shouldn't be abusing them by wasting paper so. Also, on a point of order, too, Shrek was an ogre, not a troll!

That said, once the actual story started, the illustrations were dramatically better (although still too wasteful of the page) and the writing was excellent. This is yet another good reason not to read prologues! Just jump right to the main story: it incorporates the whole Pinocchio story, but in ways you might least expect it, as Pinocchio and some allies stalk (or is is stake?) across Europe seeking out vampires, and slaughtering them mercilessly as indeed all vampires, especially ones named Edward, should be slaughtered.

Pinocchio has a love interest, but she's nothing to be ashamed of! Quite the contrary, in fact, which made a very pleasant change for me. I likes me some strong female characters. The story is intelligent and engrossing, and it amused me and made me want to read more of this (but no more of those prologues, please!). I didn't get to read the complete story, but if the rest of it is anything at all like the first half (or whatever portion it was that was included in the volume I read!), then it's going to be good. I'm happy to rate this a worthy read.

Frostbite by Richelle Mead

Title: FrostBite
Author: Richelle Mead
Publisher: Penguin
Rating: WARTY!

This is the second volume in what is, so far, at least a six-volume series. I can’t promise I'll read that whole series, but as of reading this one, I'm committed to one more at least. That's an odd decision, I know, given my rating, but I explain it in the final paragraph. This volume was sadder than the first, which had issues but which was not bad. Mead needs to get her head out of her ass and write the vampire series she promised, not a cheesy rip-off of Twilight, with love-sick airhead kids running around having sorry bouts of high school angst when there's a far better story screaming to be told.

I started reading this series because I'd read somewhere that some school district had banned the series: that is, they were banning these books before some of them had even been written, which is the height of stupidity, so despite my antagonism towards vampire novels, I picked up the first one on audio CD from the library, but Stephanie Wolf's reading sucked majorly, so I ditched that and bought the paperback. I ended up liking it (with reservations!), hence my progression to volume 2. I was less satisfied with this one, and this was by many accounts supposed to be be better than the first!

One thing which not so much surprised me as intrigued me about volume one was when I was reading the insane negative reviews for it. The religious crowd was reduced to telling outright lies about that volume (which I refute in my review) and about the main character's conduct - that's how sad they are. In general I liked the story, although there were some YA issues with it - of the dumb kind you find in any YA novel. This second volume promised to be no different from my reading of the first hundred pages, but it did also draw me in a bit.

In this volume, Rose hasn’t changed at all, nor does she throughout. She's still dumb, still immature, and still thinks she's god's gift to men, and like Mary Poppins, thinks she's practically perfect in every way. She's also still obsessed with her blood-mate Lissa, for whom she is working her heart out, striving to become a guardian. Early in the novel, Rose is taken for testing by a disinterested guardian who happens to be a legend in their world, but when they arrive at the house to meet with him, they discover that the entire family, including the legendary guardian, has been slaughtered, evidently by a band of strigoi working together in a manner which has no precedent.

Here was a classic example of Rose completely ignoring an express instruction from her teacher, and going unpunished for it. This will not be the last time she does this in this novel. Her instructor should have failed her on her test right there for disobeying him and entering the house against his express order, but once again she gets away with insubordination. I don’t mind a rebel character, but please let’s not indulge this! There have to be consequences otherwise it’s just a fairy tale. There never are consequences for Rose, even when her stupidity gets someone killed.

This initial event does illustrate the problem with the sad addiction of all-too-many female YA authors to telling stories in first person PoV: you thereby restrict yourself to the handicap of being unable to have anything happen unless your character is there to witness it; otherwise it’s nothing but passive voice, with your main character sitting around having to listen to boring, second-hand stories about what happened in order to keep the story alive, which is never a good thing for an action novel. This is why Mead was forced to have Rose disobey and it’s so obvious that it immediately suspends the suspension of disbelief. I want my YA writers to be far more skilled than this. Apparently Mead isn’t.

The next thing she heaps upon us is the appearance of Rose's mom, Janine, who shows up at school to tell a tale of one of her guardian adventures. It seems that Rose's mom is as full of herself as Rose is, but Rose hates her mom, which immediately telegraphs to us that Rose and she will bond, and that mom might well die in this story. Only one of those things actually happened. The same kind of thing happened with character Mason, Rose's toy boy. Her interactions with him telegraphed that she would get jiggy with him and that he might well die in this story. Only one of those things happened.

When tough-guy guardian and Rose-object-of-addiction Dimitri is too tired (from a shopping trip - I am not kidding!) to teach her in his early-morning class, Rose's mom inappropriately steps-in instead. Now this is a parent who is not a teacher at the school, teaching her own child! Worse than this, Rose's mom fails to pick up where Dimitri left off, and instead makes Rose fight her in a boxing match, and ends up punching Rose with an illegal punch, giving her a black eye. Yet there are no consequences whatsoever for Janine's misconduct! Again, there goes suspension of disbelief.

This inappropriate behavior continues as Dimitri returns to teaching, and he and Rose kiss. If he was anything of a teacher, he would recuse himself from teaching her any further, but he is not and he does not, so yet again we have inappropriate behavior with zero consequences. At this point I would normally ditch a novel like this, but beyond all this amateur fanfic-level YA absurdity, there was a story and it started out intriguing me. Sadly, it fell apart and never went anywhere. The ending was truly pathetic.

Lissa is now on meds to prevent her healing power from erupting and affecting her mental health. She's by far the most interesting character in these novels so far, but she has no more than a cameo role in this novel. Subsequent events are within the context of the earlier massacre, which is suggestive that strigoi have changed their behavior: that they're now working together and working with humans to launch attacks upon the moroi royal families, which means Lissa is at risk. Unfortunately, none of this story is followed through. Not in this volume, anyway.

I don’t get this business of the vampires celebrating Xmas! It makes no sense to me, but because of the strigoi attack, they go for a week to a lodge in the mountains for a skiing holiday! Never mind battening-down the hatches and going after the strigoi, let's go on vacation! It made no sense.

It made less sense given that only Rose and her new boyfriend Mason seemed to actually do any skiing. Rose meets Adrian Ivashkov, and starts falling in love with him. He's the bad boy leg of the triangle to Mason's good guy leg, and Rose finds herself dreaming of Ivashkov when she's not mentally masturbating over Dim-itri, the inappropriate instructor who should be fired. Dim-itri is actually supposed to be Lissa's guardian, but he's never found anywhere near Lissa. Instead, he's a full-time Rose stalker.

This dream Rose has of Ivashkov was actually implanted in her mind by Ivashkov himself, although Rose isn't smart enough to figure that out. Mead tries to distract us from this revelation by revealing another strigoi attack. This upsets Lissa, but Rose fails to wake-up in response to Lissa's distressed state! So much for the supposed deepening of their psychic bond!

Eventually Mason, Mia and Eddie leave the ski resort to go to Spokane, Washington which is supposedly nearby, to seek out and kill the strigoi. This tells me that all three of them are morons and their schooling has been wasted, but none of them is as big a moron as Rose. She figures out what they have done, but instead of warning everyone, she takes off after them with Christian, Lissa's boyfriend and they, along with the other three, are captured and held prisoner. Never once does Christian think of using his fire magic against the strigoi and it takes Rose three days (while these guys are all very conveniently kept alive for no reason at all by the ruthless strigoi) to figure it out herself! Yep, it's that bad.

So why am I rating this warty and then thinking of trying volume 3? Well there were sufficient hints in this volume to make me think, rightly or (and more probably) wrongly, that things might turn around in volume 3 and this series could assume the promise if offered in volume 1, so I'm giving it a go and if it's as bad as, or worse than this one, I'm ditching the series. Life is too short, and at fifty percent through it, I think I will have given this more than a fair chance by then.

Vampire Academy by Richelle Mead

Title: Vampire Academy
Author: Richelle Mead
Publisher: Penguin
Rating: WORTHY!

Here's an interesting observation: Magic or Madness (reviewed here) was published in 2005 by Justine Larbalestier. Vampire Academy, by Richelle Mead, was published two years later and both authors curiously publish with Razor Bill. It would seem that Mead ripped-off Larbalestier's idea that magic can cause madness, but fortunately, ideas cannot be copyrighted, only a specific written expression of an idea, so it would seem that Mead is safe!

I had no interest in this until I learned that some school (or schools) had taken the unprecedented and rather bizarre step of banning this entire series: not this novel per se, but the entire series, including unwritten future volumes! I thought this was so absurd as to be a joke, but then this is what organized religion does to people - it forces them to behave like morons. As for me, I was curious as to what it was that was in this series which had provoked such an extremist reaction - maybe I could get some tips from it?!

The fact is that there's nothing in it to provoke the fundamentalists. Clearly the ones who are decrying and banning this have never actually read it. Yes, it's definitely for the older half of the young-adult age range, but other than that, there is no reason it shouldn't be in a school library.

Once I decided that I would (short of a major disaster) be reviewing this novel favorably, I went out to read some negative reviews to see if I had missed anything, and I realized from reading them that I had not. I also realized that not only were some reviewers rather rabid about this novel in their negativism, some were outright lying about it. No, there is not an 'f' word in every other paragraph. In fact, there is only two instances of 'fuck' in the entire book (p31, p115), and the word 'hell' is used 21 times. Go to Google books, where you can search for yourself to find out what a liar that particular reviewer was. Organized religion actively forces people to lie; I've personally encountered that many times.

Other reviewers showed their Christian charity by slut-shaming one of the main characters, not only referring to her as a 'slut' but also as a "hoe" [sic]. Rest assured, Rose never once behaved like a gardening tool. I can guarantee you that if the main character had been portrayed in exactly the same way, but had been a guy, he would never have been referred to as a 'slut' - and this is women doing the insulting, not men. Of the two main characters, Rose is a virgin throughout this book and Lissa doesn't have sex until she meets a guy whom she loves. Not that there's anything wrong with responsible and mature teens having safe sex, but this is yet another outright lie in pursuit of a religious agenda. I guess they missed that bit in the Bible about bearing false witness, huh?!

Just in passing, I started listening to this on audio, but the reader, Stephanie Wolf (ha! A wolf reading a vampire story! Too much!) was so bad that I couldn't stand to listen any more; however, I did like the story, so I bought a paperback copy.

This novel reads like it's volume two (or later) of a series when it's actually volume one. By that I mean that it starts in the middle of the story and Mead explains next-to-nothing of what went before except in rather annoyingly sparse and brief references which really relate very little that's of utility. I freely admit that that aspect was annoying!

As I mentioned, the two main characters are Rose and Lissa, although it's Rose who tells the story and hogs the attention. Rose is a dhampir - the offspring of a vampire and a human, but there are two species of vampire - the moroi, who are vampires, but not undead, and who are the good guys (supposedly), and the strigoi, who are traditional "undead" vampires.

Mead doesn't do a very good job of explaining this - again handing-out belated and sparsely distributed information. The dhampirs guard the moroi from the strigoi, and as such, Rose is Lissa's guard - but she's still in training, so she's not official, and she's not as powerful as she might become. So here was a weakness, in that the presentation of this novel was that of an amateur without benefit of a good book editor. Once again this goes to show that Big Publishing™ does not deliver what it claims to promise.

Two years before this novel begins, Rose and Lissa went over the wall from their academy and lived on the run. How they managed this and financed it isn't detailed, nor is why they went on the lam in the first place. They're captured by other guardians, and returned to the academy almost immediately after the story begins. Rose is very nearly expelled, but in the end she gets 'house arrest'. That is, she gets to go to classes and to church, but must remain in her room the rest of the time.

Rose is an atheist, so she has no need to go to church, but she uses this time to hang out with Lissa, to whom she is unnaturally, if not supernaturally devoted. Some people who reviewed this badly also objected to the lack of respect for religion, but guess what: atheists are under no obligation to respect religious delusion!

Both of these girls quickly get back into academic life, with Rose spending extra time training physically to be a guardian. She kicks her dedication up to a higher level when Lissa finds a fox on her bed with its throat slit - something which was apparently done right before she got back to her room. Who did it is unknown at that time.

The psychic bond they share evidently works only one way. Rose can 'tap into' Lissa's emotions, but not the other way around, and Lissa does not transmit messages or speech, only emotion. This bond is not unheard of in vampire lore, but it's viewed pretty much as a legend. The way it works is that Rose picks up on Lissa's emotions, but it seems to be only when they're heightened because she's very upset or scared for example; however, this changes as time passes at the academy.

In time, Rose discovers that she can 'share' Lissa's consciousness: she feels like she's in Lissa's body, seeing and hearing what Lissa experiences as well as feeling what she feels. This power seems to increase when Lissa begins hanging with the campus bad boy, Christian, whose family is disgraced and who therefore is largely ignored, but who has the power to make someone think he (the person, not Christian) is on fire, as we see at one point. Rose eventually discovers that she can force these 'mind melds' to happen, and thereby spy on Lissa. Stalk much?!

Mead isn't exactly the best writer in the world. Most of what she writes is fine, but there were occasions when oddly composed text jumped out at me, such as on p83, where I read: "...I didn't want Lissa to have to deal with any more stress than she had to"?!!! She could have ditched the 'to have' after 'Lissa' and made it flow better. This was optional of course, but on p91 paragraph 2 (at the start of chapter 7) she refers to Lissa without referring to Lissa, using just 'her' out of the blue. That felt a bit amateur if not confusing.

Here are some other such problems:
"He burst in the door" p119 - not good English.
p142 'describrd'! Poor copy editing.
p208 "they cold do..."
p213 start of chapter 16, "The next day. It fully hit me" - what's with the period?!
There's also a problem in continuity between page 211 and 218. On 211, the narrator says it was only two days after the incident with Mrs Karp that she and Lissa fled the academy, but on 218, she says it was a month later.

Lissa's full title and name is Princess Vasilisa Dragomir, and she's the last survivor of the Dragomir clan, and one of the five ruling families. Rosemarie Hathaway is her guardian wannabe. Lissa is moroi and these vampires have magical power over one of the four tired trope elements: air, earth, fire, and water, but we learn that there's a fifth, and Lissa has it.

So the high school jinks continue, and the vampire stuff really takes a back seat, although since the two are tied together, it can't disappear entirely. Another dead animal is found - this time accompanied by a threatening note, yet no one seems smart enough to put a guard, or at least a watch, on Lissa's door. Actually I started suspecting Natalie - Lissa's cousin - or Mason, Rose's bestie! Both of them are simply too sweet to be as they appear.

The biggest problem with Rose is not that she's a slut or a bitch - she really isn't either (although Lissa does call her the latter), she's merely unafraid and assertive (the fact that she detests a classmate who is a bitch doesn't make her a bitch either) and flirtatious; no, her biggest problem is that she seems to have the mentality of a thirteen year old, and she's just as "mature" in her precipitousness - in acting without thinking through to the consequences. Fortunately, the much more mature Lissa steps up and tells Rose she's going to be proactive from now on instead of being so retiring, and she becomes as scary as Rose is reckless.

Rose really isn't a good friend to Lissa. She's loyal and very protective, but she's also weirdly jealous of Lissa's relationships with others - with those who feed her, and with Christian, the designated bad boy. Rose outright lies to him about Lissa, claiming that her friend really despises Christian, but that she's too good-natured to tell him. She effectively orders him to leave Lissa alone. Christian believes Rose rather than Lissa, which makes him stupid in my book. Rose does apologize to Christian later, for lying, but that's only because she needs for him to do her a favor

Because of Rose's personal in-fighting with Mia, the actual school bitch, stories start spreading about Rose's disgusting (in this vamp world) habit of letting Lissa feed from her. It's okay for them to feed from designated human food supply, but for a guardian to allow this is considered a perversion - dirty! Somehow Mia has coerced Jesse and Ralf to lie that Rose allowed them to feed from her during sex. As I mentioned, and contrary to the lies spread by some negative reviewers who evidently have no problem with the Christian injunction not to bear false witness, Rose is not a slut; she's a virgin.

Rose's relationship with her guardian tutor, Dmitri, oversteps a few bounds. It's obvious that they're both attracted to each other. He's 24, and she's seventeen, which some people have depicted as obscene, but this is not a normal high school, so we don't know what the rules are since Mead has never actually iterated them. Both ages are conveniently within the young adult age range (14 - 24), and in Montana, the age of consent is 16, so there's nothing wrong there from a legal PoV. What is wrong is the relationship they have: he's her teacher and therefore an authority figure in her life, so from that perspective alone, this relationship would be unethical were it to go anywhere romantically or lustfully.

Now it's time to address other negative review issues.
There isn't enough action.
I agree with this complaint - representing Rose as Lissa's bodyguard tended to offer us more than it delivered, but it was quickly explained that Rose was not actually her official bodyguard, merely a wannabe who is in training to become a bodyguard. Even so, there were several incidents where Rose's unique bond with Lissa came through and saved her from problems, and potential problems

One problem that was mentioned by more than one reviewer was to the effect that the novel is poorly written. I agree that bits of it are poorly written. A spell-checker would have helped, but in general this novel is as well-written (or as badly-written, dependent upon your perspective) as any other YA novel. YA novels in general tend to be badly written, especially the dystopian variety (not that this is in that category), and of those even more especially those written with a female main protagonist, and this is not improved upon if the author is also female. I expect better, but I rarely find it. It's sad that so many YA authors, especially female authors, have so little respect for their readers that they feel no need to work harder at their craft.

One reviewer complained that the 17 year old main character had her shirt off making out with a boy and her best friend had gone all the way. So?! The age of consent in Montana is 16. Get a life! Rose has been slut-shamed abominably by negative reviewers, but the fact is that she's a virgin at the start of the novel, and she remains so through to the end. Not that virginity is any kind of noble badge, or a particularly special quality or anything, but to outright lie about this is as pathetic as it is laughable.

Yes, Rose has flaws. No, she isn't the best character in fiction nor is she the best friend in the world, but all these traits do is make her more realistic. She's young, confused, stressed, and devoted to Lissa, her best friend since childhood. Oh, and by the way, this is fiction! Even so, there are people like this in real life. Reviewers who have problems reading about real life issues need to quit reading YA fiction, and revert to having their mommy and daddy read them the Disney princess picture books, period. Oh god, I said, "period", Now they'll be offended by that!

Some reviewers have tried to intimate that there's a lesbian relationship here, or that Rose is in the closet, but none of this is true. Whether one might develop in future volumes remains (for me, just starting this series) to be seen, but the explanation for the intensity of this relationship is made quite clear by Mead.

Some have said that Rose isn't only a slut, she's also a hypocrite by being self righteous about the sexual behavior of others. Indeed, I saw one review which shamed Rose for being a slut and then running away and crying when she was accused of the same thing, but this is dishonest. Rose did not get upset because people called her a slut. She didn't care about that. She did care that people were getting too close to the truth of what happened: that when she and Lissa were on the run, Rose, her best friend, was the one from whom Lissa fed. That was why she was so upset, because doing this was considered the lowest and dirtiest, and most shameful thing a dhampir could do amongst her community. It was not the sex, which no one cared about that much, but the feeding.

Clearly some readers were not paying anywhere near enough attention, but the real hypocrisy here is for a reviewer who claims to love 'bookie nookie' to turn around and portray Rose as a "hoe macking on every guy she crosses paths with" which is patently not true. Does this reviewer even know what 'nookie' really means?! And no, this novel isn't written for pre-teens, but aimed at older young-adult age range (16 - 24), so to blurt-out righteously that you wouldn't let a 12-year-old read it is a shameful red herring.

Here's another complaint: Rose makes out with every guy who shows her any attention? Outright lie! She makes out with one guy by choice and quickly realizes he's bad news, and she has nothing to do with him after that. As opposed to another character who sleeps with two guys purely to get them to spread lies about Rose - yet no one even mentions her behavior, not in any negative review that I read. And by making out, I mean that Rose gets her top off (not her bra) - and that's it. Nothing actually really happens beyond some kissing. The only other time she 'makes out' is when she's been deliberately put under a powerful spell for the express purpose of disabling her ability to help Lissa. She cannot control her behavior, but even so, she and her partner overcome the spell and quickly refocus on what they were supposed to be doing!

One complaint is that Lissa cuts herself when stressed! So? Mead isn't prescribing or advocating this as a viable or worthwhile activity. It's dealt with as a problem which needs attention, and it's Rose, through her bond with Lissa, who frequently detects Lissa's problems and sees threats to her, and who acts decisively to stop them. Why would it be a negative thing to depict a psychological problem in a character and depict that problem being appropriately resolved? Should YA writers not write about real world problems? LoL! Get a life, for goodness sakes!

Other complaints One was that the only character that's developed is the main one, but this is a common to nearly all YA novels. Maybe it's a problem, maybe it isn't, but it isn't unique to this novel. Some argued that Lissa had a darker side which is hinted at but never shown, but that's not true. It was shown: she was compelling all kinds of people to do her bidding. This was considered evil (if not downright impossible!) and it was frowned upon in her community.

Can you believe some people complained that the main character is defiant and troubled, and that she relates to no one but her friend? So? Even if this were true it's not a fault of the novel. There are many people like this - should YA writers not write about them? This is actually a common trait of YA novels for better or for worse: main characters in YA novels are often like this. It's not a fault of this novel per se, it's a YA trope, for better or for worse. Should women not be depicted as strong and reckless and forceful and confident and self-motivated? What an appalling thing to intimate!

One of my favorite complaints is that this is just a lame story about a really disturbed, sexually deviated young girl. Sexually deviated? Rose is a virgin. Lissa had sex with one person. Both are over the age of consent. What is sexually deviated about it? Nothing! The deviants are the ones who are slut-shaming (or more technically, non-slut-shaming since Rose isn't even a "slut") and trying to turn this into something that it isn't. In order to achieve their repressed religious agenda, they're forced bear false witness about the story, and this is truly sad.

I agree that the novel to-often goes off the rails and focuses too much on high-school drama instead of staying on the threat to Lissa. This seemed odd to me, but then a lot of the high-school drama was directly related to vampire politics, so it's not like it was so far off the rails that it was irrelevant.

The real issue in this department for me was: how there can be royal families and princesses and queens when none of these families seems ever to have been part of a monarchy! I don't get this with vampire stories (not just this one): this hierarchy of princes and queens and so on. It makes no sense at all to me. What would it even mean to say that a vampire is a princess? What gives them their rank and authority? Why would any other vampire respect it? This is such a strongly established trope, yet none of this is ever explored in these stories to my knowledge. That's the problem here.

Mead seems to be all over the place with her mythology, too. She does create a unique and interesting world, but while the overall setting has a strong Russian flavor, despite it being set in Montana, dhampir (what Rose is: a vampire-human hybrid) is a Balkan term according to wikipedia, not Russian per se. Both moroi and strigoi are Romanian terms. How Mead came to tie these up with Russia is a bit of a mystery.

Having said all of that, I still rate this novel as a worthy read, because it had an interesting story to tell and something new to offer. Whether the rest of the series is worthy remains (for me) to be seen, but I am definitely committed to reading the second volume in this series at least, and I'm not even a series kind of person!

The Cowboy and the Vampire by Clark Hays and Kathleen McFall

Title: The Cowboy and the Vampire
Author: Clark Hays and Kathleen McFall
Publisher: Pumpjack Press
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.

This novel didn’t work for me at all. There were multiple issues with it, which I go into below, and I could only finish it by skimming the last hundred pages or so. This isn’t a YA novel but it's still told in an annoying first person PoV, and what's worse, it's more than one person's PoV, plus there is some third person dumped in there, too, from at least two different perspectives. In short, it’s a mess.

Why authors seem to think that it’s no longer legal to write in the third person is a mystery to me. Worse, why they hobble and hog-tie their own writing by obsessively-compulsively clinging to first person when it doesn’t work, and then find themselves having to perform painful contortions to get to a third person PoV show-horned (or boot-strapped in this case) in, is a source of boundless wonder and merriment to me. In this example, it rendered what could potentially have been an engrossing read into a chore because it kept on unceremoniously dumping me out of any hope of suspension of disbelief.

Rightly or wrongly, I have the impression that Hays wrote the 'Tucker' chapters and McFall wrote the 'Lizzie' chapters. I have no idea if this is true, and I can see how a pair of collaborating authors might think it's cute to write chapters for their own gender character. It’s been done before, but in the end, it’s what you're doing (or failing to do) to and for your readers that really counts, not how clever you think you're being, and this just seemed strained to me to the point where it materially interfered with the credibility and readability of the story.

As I just indicated, the main characters are a 'cowboy' named Tucker, and a journalist called Lizzie, and neither is at all appealing, but to present the cowboy the way he's presented and then try to make me believe the fiction that he could write or narrate his part of the story is stretching credibility too far for me. He doesn't present to me as though he has the motivation to write this, let alone the ability or the smarts, and the 'humor' falls sadly flat. One example of this is that after Tucker has come to the round-about conclusion that he loves Lizzie, he later considers the relationship of his friend Lenny to his wife, and dismissively ascribes her putting-up with Lenny to love, like he doesn’t understand it at all. This cheapens his earlier assessment of his own feelings for Lizzie!

The problem with ebooks is that you can't stroll through the bookstore or the library and peruse, reading a bit from books that catch your eye, so that you can get an idea of the appeal of the voice or the person, and the of opening chapter. With ebooks, you're buying blind and you're stuck with your choice for better or for worse. It’s like an arranged marriage. That's how we end up being glamored by novels that seemed like they were worth taking a chance on, but in the end are not.

This one sounded amusing and appealing from the title, but even the title is rather misleading. I'd thought that this was going to be a bit like Cowboys vs. Aliens, whereas this guy really isn’t a cowboy - not if you think of cowboys as a primarily a nineteenth-century phenomenon. Yes, he's technically a cowboy, and he rides a horse and he actually tends cows, but he's not even very diligent or competent in his work, so he's not much of a cowboy, and he's certainly not the one I thought I was getting. You can blame that on my deluded expectations, but Tucker is a modern 'cowboy' not a traditional one, who drives a truck and lives in a trailer, and he's not even a likable character. He has no motivation until one is forced upon him. He's a borderline (if not all the way over) alcoholic, and he has nothing to recommend him.

The female main character is equally unappealing. We're repeatedly told that she's a nicotine addict, yet we’re expected to believe that her breath smells sweet at one point? No, it doesn’t. They supposedly fall in love, but they've spent nowhere near enough time together to be in love, especially not given the lassitude they both exhibit and the serious doubts they express, so this "love" felt juvenile, and it fell completely flat for me, because it was lust, not love, and that's all it was. I could see how Tucker would go after her when she's abducted by vampires, and while that does speak to his decency and integrity, it has nothing to do with chemistry, or with love. If he had really cared about her, he would have called the cops.

So the basic plot at the beginning is that "Lizzie" is writing an article about vampires, and ends up running into a real one who, in a ritual initiation to which Lizzie's been invited, slits the throats of 20 volunteers; then he dribbles blood from his cut fingers into their throats and fondles their genitals, whereupon they’re supposed to be reborn. What's really born of this event is multiple issues. The first is the trope that vampires are a different species. The problem with this is that if they're converted from humans, as we've been shown here, then they're the same species - until and unless the writer shows us that there's been sufficient genetic change that they can no longer interbreed with humans. Here's where a little scientific knowledge will help even if your story isn’t scientific by its very nature, so this just struck me as confused at best, and it only goes downhill from here.

Trope doesn’t end there, either. Lizzie is evidently a vampire queen, but this vampiric monarchy has never made any sense to me. Queen of what, exactly? And if she is, how come she doesn’t even have an inkling? How are vampires "carrying royal blood"? What does that even mean? No attempt is made to explain any of this. If they're a different species (as we're told), then how can she - an "Adamite woman", be their queen? How could she have been born to a human - a species even less related to humans, so we're supposed to understand, than humans are to cyano-bacteria? Why did the vampires take so long to recognize and/or recruit her? Humans are referred to as "Adamites" by the vampires in this story. I've seen this done before: the intimation is that vampires have long been different, and have roots going back beyond the first humans, but since there never was an Adam, this "Adamite" claim is pure nonsense - unless of course you're laboring under the debilitating delusion that Earth is only 6,000 years old.

There's also this arrogant superiority thing going on: the trope that vampires are superior in every way, and humans merely their prey - yet they fall in love with their food? They need their food to rule over them? It's like having a cow be the queen of the cougars. And you know that whilst cougars can be admired as superior in many ways, you can’t go to the supermarket and get cougar milk, let’s face it. For that you need cows. So this superiority thing is risible.

It would have been truly nice to have had something different, something which makes sense within its own framework, but this novel wasn't it. My question as I learned all of this in the first dozen chapters or so was: why would I want to read a story that's been told so many times before? Just sticking a modern cowboy into the mix and stirring in some creationist mumbo-jumbo does nothing to perk up a tired story. Why would I want to go the road most traveled, when there are other, much more interesting and potentially rewarding roads to follow?

Lizzie does go to the police about the slaughter than she initially witnesses, which is good. The police don’t believe her because there's no evidence (I guess 20 people disappearing at once doesn't count for much in NYC). So far so good, but the problem here is that this initial rebuff is then used as a passé partout to avoid ever calling the cops again, even when Lizzie is forcibly abducted from Wyoming, where she fled after the mass slitting o' the throats. This made zero sense. I don’t have a problem in fiction with people finding themselves forced to act sans law-enforcement, but please give us a good reason why we can’t call in the law, otherwise it’s just bad writing. Tucker could have reported Lizzie's abduction without having to say it was perpetrated by vampires!

I thought it odd that the authors claim the Casull .454 handgun makes the Magnum .44 look like a pop-gun. That struck me as amateur. I'm by no means a handgun expert, but the Casull round is just 0.6 of a millimeter greater in diameter than the magnum round, and even though the muzzle velocity is higher in the Casull, it’s not going to make that much difference to the end result, especially since we don't know exactly what kind of bullet is being fired from either one. To pretend that there's such a huge difference struck me, if I can make a pun here, as a cheap-shot aimed at the heart of ignorant readers which, when you think about it, is insulting to readers, just as referring to a flight attendant as a "stewardess" is insulting to flight attendants. It’s certainly not going to vaporize anything. It’ll leave a noticeable hole at the entry point and take gobs of flesh out at the exit point, but you need a shotgun if you want to pretend you're vaporising stuff.

But you can argue guns all you want; what you can't argue is human physiology! At one point, when trying to fight off the vampire abductors, Tucker gets punched "in the stomach" so hard that he feels ribs crack, and that's all he's worried about from then onwards. The fact is that he was hit in the stomach, not the ribs. If you were hit in the stomach so hard that your ribs crack, then you have far more to worry about than a cracked rib or two: things such as ruptured organs and internal bleeding, yet after this, Tucker is essentially fine. Again, there's no credibility here, but that's not even the worst part. Why would a vampire who has been ordered to kill Tucker, hit him rather than simply bite him? It makes no sense. Yes, we have to have Tucker free to rescue the imperiled maiden from the dragon vampire (gag), but please let’s make his escape credible.

The writing is sometimes wooden and made me go "Duhh!". One classic example was in chapter 15 narrated by Lizzie, where she's waking up after her abduction, and she says that her body felt heavy, "..as if the earth was pulling me towards its center." Well duhh! That's exactly what gravity does! That struck me as unintentionally hilarious. Either that or Lizzie is as dumb as Tucker. The vampires are great chefs though. Lizzie orders a really specific and elaborate meal and it’s served within about five minutes of her ordering it! Credible? Not really. There was another duhh moment when I read: "enshrouded by shadows and barely illuminated" - that struck me as a tautology if not an impossibility. At the very least it could have been worded better.

Things go from bad to worse when Julius, the head vamp, tries to give Lizzie some back-story, much in the manner of a Bond villain monologue-ing before failing to dispatch Bond. Indeed, chapter eighteen is one long chapter of drivel and nonsense. Julius tries to claim that god - that is Yahweh, the god of the three major monotheistic religions - created good and evil, which is nonsensical. Yes, the Bible does actually say that god created evil (Isaiah 45:7), but if you take a step back and ask what it means to make such a claim, you can see that the whole 'god is good' thing collapses under its own weight.

To say that god is good is to also say that he isn’t the definition of good - it's to say that there is some definition of good and evil that exists above and beyond god, otherwise how can he be defined as good? If this is the case, then this god cannot have created good and evil - some power higher than this god did it. If this god did, in fact, create good and evil, then it's patent nonsense to claim that that this god is good, because there;s clearly no differentiation between good and evil for this god. So what we’re given here is this latter sense, where god isn't good, and this god creates good (humanity), and evil (vampires), which in itself makes no sense since humans can be evil, too! To make a long drivel short, I quit reading this chapter, and pretty much skipped both 18 and a subsequent chapter that rambled on in the same manner.

In short, we're told that humans were created to rule the day, and we're expected to believe that vampires are reptilian, and that they were created to rule the night and the shadows? Nonsense! Reptiles love the heat from the sun! They thrive in it, but we’re expected to swallow that vampires were created from serpents? More importantly, this begs the question: how can Julius be Lizzie's father in any meaningful sense since we are explicitly told that humans and vampires are genetically incompatible?

So yes, far too much of this novel makes no sense. For example, the wannabe queen vampire, Elita (cool name, I'll grant you, and for me by far the most interesting character) smokes! Having the vampires smoke makes absolutely no sense. These are supposedly undead creatures. They do not breathe. Their lungs do not function, so whence the impetus to draw tobacco smoke inside their non-existent (or at least non-functional) lungs? In other news, the vampires, including Elita, are cold-blooded. We're told this repeatedly in one way or another, until Elita tries to seduce Tucker, and then suddenly her body is burning with heat? Again, this makes no sense. It's like traits vanish and arise on a whim, pulled out of the author's aspirations at will. There is no vampire lore here. Instead it appears that what we get is a jumbled and random assortment of whatever went through the author's mind at the time they wrote a particular paragraph.

The story really went downhill when Tucker finally arrived in New York City. Not only do we get the other side of the sadly tortured clichés ("city slicker" vs. "country bumpkin"), we have him visit the vampire HQ, and sit down for a cozy little chat with Julius, shaking hands and accepting a glass of whisky from him. Seriously? Whence Tucker's anger? Whence the mayhem this "cowboy" was threatening to unleash? It’s far too civilized and nonsensical. He accepts the vampire's offer of hospitality and takes a room, accepting a meal from them and nodding off to sleep. SERIOUSLY? That was it for me, from that point onwards.

Tucker's trip was wasted because Lizzie isn't even there. Not that she was 'there' when she was there: she had Julius at her mercy and failed to dispatch him. Tucker also fails in this regard. He has the chance to kill both Julius and Elita and he fails to even think about it, let alone take it. Instead, he was willing to let Elita seduce him until his dog intervened! Both of these characters are truly pathetic.

Okay, last spoiler. The central premise operating here is that Julius needs to drink Lizzie's menstrual blood in order to become the greatest vampire ever. Gag. There's no explanation given for why this is necessary. Neither is it explained why this opportunity only comes along every 700 years (or if it is given, I missed it somewhere along the way - maybe when I skimmed and skipped). This begs two questions. The first is: why wasn't Lizzie sought out as soon as she hit puberty? There is neither explanation given, nor reason apparent for why Julius waited another dozen or more years. The second is more critical: if the vampires are reptilian, they aren't mammals, so how on Earth do they ever menstruate? Why does Elita have such perky breasts?! Reptiles do not have breasts! I don't ask why they don’t lay eggs because this novel laid one for them!

So in short, this novel is so messed up that I can’t even remotely recommend it. It makes no sense at all, and is full of holes, and neither of the two main characters is worth reading about.

The Quick by Lauren Owen

Title: The Quick
Author: Lauren Owen
Publisher: Random House
Rating: worthy

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.

When I first began reading this, I thought that I would not be able to complete the novel. For the first couple of pages it seemed too dense - the text too tightly packed both visually and intelligibly, but after that, I got into it and changed my mind about it completely. Instead of feeling discomfort, I felt charmed by it. The author really seems to have captured the feel of the era, although I confess some surprise at seeing 'surprize' spelled with a 'z', and crêpe spelled with an 'a', as 'crape'. I've never seen crêpe spelled that way before, although it is perfectly permissible; however with regard to the misspelled 'surprise', there is no excuse. It appears about a dozen times, but everywhere else, it’s spelled correctly. I have no idea what the deal is with that!

This novel is set in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Most of the action takes place in 1892 (as judged by the performance of Oscar Wilde's play, Lady Windermere's Fan). We're briefly introduced to the childhood years of Charlotte and James Norbury, children raised in the declining sprawl of Aiskew Hall in Yorkshire, from whence my own parents hailed. These two children are largely unsupervised, but they fail to grow as wild as they might have done. On the contrary, both of them tend towards reserve as they mature.

As a young child, James suffers the discomfort of being confined in a faux priest hole at the very moment his father dies. The two children loved to undergo what they termed 'ordeals'. These were just simple, silly, childhood dares and adventures, one of which was to be confined in the tiny and dark hole, from which there was no escape from the inside. They were not even supposed to be playing in the library, much less locking each other away. When James went in the hole, Charlotte was supposed to count to one hundred and then let him out, but she was forced, because of her father's illness, from attending on him and it was some time before she was free to return and release her younger brother. Given that these childhood incidents appear to play no part in the rest of the story, I'm confused as to why they were included.

James was more angry than traumatized by this incarceration, and for some reason withdrew into writing at that point. Later he attended Oxford and moved to London to pursue writing poetry, while his sister remained at Aiskew, now confined to living in the lodge rather than in the increasingly decrepit hall itself. James, who initially lived alone and led a very retiring life, finds himself forced to seek new lodgings and begins rooming with a distant acquaintance from Oxford, the charming and enigmatic Christopher Paige.

The two of them are not alike; whereas James is reserved, slightly shy, and contemplative, Christopher is lively, outgoing, and also a borderline alcoholic, so it would seem that their paring was ill-fated, yet they manage to get along reasonably well, and within the space of a year, they're getting along rather more famously than is considered proper or even legal for the period. The way the author handles these early scenes is remarkable and appreciated.

I ran into problems thrice in continuing to read this: the first of these was when the excellent narrative of James's activities was rudely interrupted by the diary of Augustus Mould. When I first typed that just now, it came out as 'Augustic mould', which pretty much describes how it felt to read. Owen tried to create a "realistic" diary which contained mistakes and crossings out, but the effect - in a galley copy described as an 'uncorrected proof' - was to make me think that the author had screwed up. It took me some little while to figure out that this was intentional. However, even had I not fell into this misunderstanding, I still would have found this diary to be uninteresting, populated as it was with the mundane and the trivial. From that point on I skipped everything associated with his name, and by doing so, I didn't miss anything, it seems.

The second problem was of a similar nature, where once again we departed the main story (which to me is that of James and Charlotte) and side-tracked into some minor character running into problems one deserted night. I found both of these departures to be unappealing, and they slowed down the story and larded it up with unnecessary distraction.

The third issue was when Charlotte hooks up with two people: Adeline, a French girl living in London, and Shadwell, the father of Adeline's fiancé. Here Owen yet again drops into a side-story - of how Adeline got into the Vampire business. This slowed the story down unnecessarily. As it happens, this particular detour was interesting, so it wasn't as bad as the other two, but I would still have liked the novel better without this string of interruptions.

The biggest problem overall was that there were too many parts with little or no interest or relevance to the main story, and the ending was dragged out way beyond what was required. Having said that, there was, as I indicated to begin with, much to like about this novel and the way it was written. Owen is talented and brave; she has, for example, no problem killing off heroes which is commendable because it's daring and unexpected. I do resent that she killed off one of my favorites!

In reading this I wavered between not feeling it was worthy of a recommendation, and feeling that it was, so I'm going to err on the side of generosity and rate this as a worthy read in the hope that with some encouragement, Lauren Owen will turn out increasingly engrossing novels as time goes by. Her talent is too good to be stifled, but she does need some editing! So in short, I rate this a worthy read bearing in mind the caveats as I've mentioned.

Undead And Unemployed by MaryJanice Davidson

Title: Undead And Unemployed
Author: MaryJanice Davidson
Publisher: Penguin
Rating: WARTY!

Why the second novel (or any novel) in a series would need a twelve-page prologue is as much as mystery as it is missed with glee by me; been there, skipped that, moving on to chapter one! I started out Liking volume one of this series. It wasn't spectacular but it was an ok read and it was a fast read. This one I started out pretty much the same way, but it went downhill faster than the first one did, to the point where it went beyond my ability to stay with it!

This series has run to some ten novels, so it can hardly be described as a failure. I liked the first one in the series well enough to want to see the follow-up, but in reading this follow-up now, I can’t say I have an interest in pursuing this series any further. I just didn’t like this sequel well enough - or at all after the first half of it. I started out thinking the story was OK, but after reading to about half-way through, it seemed to me it wasn't really going anywhere or showing me anything new or interesting.

It’s a really fast read, but I don’t feel involved with any of the characters and I don’t feel engaged in the stories which are being told. They're ok, and that's the problem, they're only ok, nothing special. They do beat the pants off the god-awful Charlaine Harris Southern Vampire series! I love the TV show, but the novels sucked worse than the vampires did. These novels are significantly better than that, but they're just not really my idea of a truly enthralling read, and the simplistic PoV in this novel finally started getting to me.

In this volume, Betsy Taylor, vampire queen, moves into a new home - which is a mansion - meets a little girl named Marie who, it's patently obvious, is a ghost, and Betsy is beseeched by her vampire acquaintances to take on the Blade Warriors, a church youth organization which is murdering vampires at the behest of some anonymous benefactor - or rather, malefactor. Betsy at first refuses to step up to her vampire queen responsibilities; that is until they attack her personally, and also attack a vampire friend she likes. In the end, there is no war: she makes friends with the vampire killers, overpowering their antagonism with tea and biscuits. This was amusing, but not really that funny and not really very entertaining - like I said, it was ok, but nothing special.

It was at that point, and in the next few pages that I found I couldn't engage with the material. It didn’t draw me in or make me want to find out what would happen next. The problem with this story, I think, in a nutshell is that Betsy is never in any danger, never has any real problem, and there is never any real conflict, no problems to solve, nothing to worry about. It’s more like a child's story ("Betsy the Happy Vampire") than a story for the age group Betsy is actually in, but the graphic depictions of adult life, and vampire life, of course mean it isn't a child's story at all, and that unholy combination simply doesn’t work. It’s very childlike in its simplicity and fruity goodness, and it inevitably becomes sickly, like eating too much of a rich desert. If you put a cream filling in a cake and eat a slice, its wonderful, but if you remove the cake and try eating only the cream filling, after the first taste, it’s nasty. That's how this novel is - all cream filling and no cake! I have no choice but to rate this one warty!

Dracula by Bram Stoker

Title: Dracula
Author: Bram Stoker
Publisher: Recorded Books
Rating: TBD

This is a movie/novel tie-in. The Francis Ford Coppola movie based on this novel is reviewed here. Also for those interested, the Movie: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is reviewed here. The Frankenstein novel is reviewed here.

Narrated by Susan Adams and Alexander Spencer. These two do a lot better job than that abomination perpetrated by Ralph Cosham on Mary Shelley's novel, but their narration still leaves a heck of a lot to be desired. Adams's voice is far too breathy and "projected". That might work well on stage, but that's precisely why I don't like theater because it is all theater and no reality. Spencer's voice has too much treble to the point where it's harsh, sharp, tinny, and grating on the nerves, and whereas Cosham in Frankenstein was tedious to the point of somnabulance, Spencer is the diametric opposite. He injects way-the-HELL too much melodrama into his "performance" turning it into a joke. Its sad, because this novel is, for the most part, well written and enjoyable, but Spencer all-but ruins it with his insane theatrics.

This one begins in a similar fashion to Shelley's Frankenstein, but instead of letters, we have diary entries, which renders the story a bit unrealistic, but it's passable. Jonathan Harker, a junior "solicitor" travels to Transylvania to the Castle Dracula, where Count Dracula seeks to have someone take care of what business he has tied up with his planned move to London. Note that a solicitor in Britain is a lawyer who handles legal affairs which don't need to be aired in court. A lawyer who does practice in the courtroom is called a barrister. It's possible for a lawyer to be both.

Harker is at first excited to travel, and fills his diary with all sorts of warm observations about the people, the countryside, and the food, but after he settles in at Castle Dracula, he slowly discovers that he's a prisoner there, and Dracula has no intention of letting him leave. He discovers to his increasing dismay that Dracula is controlling the letters he can send, and eventually, Harker discovers that Dracula has impounded his outdoor clothing so Harker cannot leave.

Dracula warns Harker about exploring the castle: he must never fall asleep outside of his own rooms, but of course he rebels against this and discovers that Dracula has three female familiars to whom he feeds a baby one night. Harker is horrified and starts plotting an escape, realizing that if he does not flee he will die at the teeth of Dracula and his blood-sucking frenzied fiendish female familiars.

Once Harker escapes the castle, we move quickly to England where Dracula arrives in dramatic fashion (and in disguise) in Whitby (I've been there done that, but go no T-shirt!). It's at this point that the narrative transfers heavily to the diaries of Lucy Westenra and Mina Murray as they ramble on, mostly about men and gossip. This part (disk 4) becomes quite boring, but having said that, there are several unintentionally funny parts in this novel. One is when the 'creatures of the night' (mostly wolves) are 'singing' and Dracula pauses to listen. He asks a man name Harker to "Hark" (p76)! I thought that was priceless. Later, Mina describes the funeral of the captain of the Demeter and writes of the huge number of sea-faring folk who wanted to take part in the funeral - but that's not quite how Stoker phrases it: "...the owners of more than a hundred boats have already given in their names as wishing to follow him to the grave."! To his credit, though, Stoker does have some interesting and forward-thinking things to say about the "New Women" on page 142.

Lucy Westenra's mother doesn't feature in the movie, but she features strongly in the novel as the architect of her daughter's death though her habit of constantly removing or accidentally destroying the garlic wreaths supplied for her daughter's protection; however, the real architect of her death is van Helsing himself through sheer incompetence. he knows perfectly well what is going on yet he fails consistently to prepare her or her loved ones for her welfare, to warn everyone adequately about what must be done, or to safeguard her from vampire attacks. The single best maneuver which would have secured her health would have been to board up the external door to her bedroom, but no one even considers this! She has no one sitting with her on a regular basis and those who do are not augmented by support from others so that they do not risk falling asleep on her. Sad!

This novel is, like Frankenstein, quite boring in many places, a fact which is in no way ameliorated by the sad narration from either Adams or Spencer. One really big advantage of listening on CD is that it is really very easy to skip to the next track without even having to turn a page!

In the final analysis, I have to rate this warty!

Undead and Unwed by MaryJanice Davidson

Title: Undead and Unwed
Author: MaryJanice Davidson
Publisher: Penguin
Rating: WORTHY!

Here's an author not ashamed to have a dot net address, nor ashamed to have fun and poke fun. I normally detest vampire novels, but I couldn't resist this title! I got into this first volume (of what has become an extensive series) quite easily, and although I found some parts of it odd, I found most of it is very entertaining. The main protagonist is Elizabeth Taylor (no, not that Elizabeth Taylor), and her perspective on life is both feisty and amusing, as well as deliciously irreverent. She definitely has a peculiar PoV, and a distinct view of her place in life.

Or should I say: her place in death? One frosty night, she steps out to retrieve her cat from the middle of the street, whilst simultaneously forgetting to check for random vehicles sliding into her on the ice and propelling her into a tree. She wakes up in cheap clothes in her coffin and can't understand what happened; it's not so much the coffin which bothers her, but the cheap clothes...! At first, she thinks she's a zombie and tries to kill herself to complete her journey to Heaven. She fails. A little child leads her into the knowledge that she's actually a vampire, but she has a hard time accepting that because she shows none of the standard vampire allergies: to garlic, to churches, to holy water, to Christian crosses. She does have heightened senses, increased strength, and a great thirst, but she also controls that admirably.

She's infuriated that her detested stepmother stole her shoes and goes to retrieve them, thereby revealing to her family that she's a vampire. No one seems to think that's a big deal: not her father, nor her mother, who is living elsewhere, nor Jessica her best friend, who has bought her house and car and gifted them to Betsy so she can have a life. Or a death.

Betsy is lured out by a call from someone who seems to know all about her circumstances, and who promises to bring her up to speed on vampirism, but she's abducted before she can get there, and taken to the lair of "Nostro" in a cemetery, who is such a stereotype that she can't help but snort laugh after laugh at him. He's infuriated, but he can't stop her walking out. One of those who appeared to be in Nostro's crew, a tall handsome man by the name of Sinclair accosts her as she leaves, and though she finds him hot, she detests his behavior and throws him through a stone cross.... When Betsy gets cross, she really gets cross.

On her way home she encounters a suicidal doctor, Marc, about to pitch himself off a roof, so she tells him her story and talks him out of it. He promptly becomes her house-mate. It's supposed to be temporary while he finds himself a place to stay. Now we have all the trope demographics covered: Jessica is black and Marc is gay, while Sinclair, the buff vampire, is courting Betsy to garner her help in defeating the evil Nostro, and Betsy holds out until he gives her ten pairs of designer shoes, and then she's all in while still, er, keeping Sinclair out!

To cut a short story shorter (and not give away any more spoilers), I rate this a worthy read. Betsy is sneaky, sly, snarky, spunky, and hilarious. I love her attitude, and I enjoyed the plot. I plan on reading at least one more in this series to see how that goes, but I don't know if I'd want to read ten of these. That sounds like too much of a good thing.

Gideon Smith and the Mechanical Girl By David Barnett

Title: Gideon Smith and the Mechanical Girl
Author: David Barnett
Publisher: Tor
Rating: worthy

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is less detailed so as not to rob the writer of their story, but even so, it will probably still be more in-depth than you'll typically find elsewhere!

Erratum in galley ebook
P23 "glitterving" should be "glittering"

The male protagonist of this steam-punk novel is Gideon Smith, a 24-year-old who lives with his father in a small fishing village near Whitby, Yorkshire. Both of my parents hailed from Yorkshire, and I've actually been to Whitby, a seaside town which is featured in Bram Stoker's Dracula, so it’s no surprise that Barnett has Gideon meet Bram Stoker there.

I have to say up front that I'm not a fan of Victorian dramas which seem obligated to drag historical people unnecessarily into the fiction. I find that boring and uninventive, and all-too-often patronizing of, and insulting to the persons so press-ganged. In fact, I made the mistake of reading the prologue to this novel and I found that even more boring and uninventive since it parades out the discredited story that Eddy, the son of Queen Victoria's son Edward (the Edward who gave his name to the Edwardian period of English history) was somehow entangled with the Jack the Ripper murders. This myth was the basis of the Johnny Depp movie From Hell and is patent nonsense. Having said that, Barnett has added a twist to this one which makes his "crime" forgivable, in my book at least!

So, it was not an auspicious start to this novel, but I have to say that Barnett started to win me over with chapter one, where Gideon enters the picture. His father is a struggling trawler captain, and Gideon often helps him on his fishing trips, but the one morning when his father decides to let Gideon sleep in, is the day that the entire crew of the trawler disappears without explanation, and Gideon is left alone in the world, his mother and two brothers having already died some time before.

Well there is an explanation, of course, but that's for you to read, and at that point in the story it was more of a mystery than an explanation (but it clarifies nicely as the novel progresses)! The local fishing community just accepts these disappearances as the sea's dividend for allowing humans to sample its bounty. Gideon is a big fan of Captain Lucian Trigger, a story-book hero who, if not completely fictional, is, I guessed, not remotely like his fictional portrayal. Gideon doesn't quite grasp this, and so he endeavors to contact the man in hopes that he can help with another local mystery that has hold of Gideon's imagination.

It’s in process of pursuing this plan that he encounters Bram Stoker, right before a Russian sailboat runs aground with the all the crew save one, missing. The captain is discovered lashed to the wheel and drained of blood, and a large black dog runs ashore and disappears. The only cargo on the ship is three coffins with soil from Transylvania. Anyone who has read Stoker's Dracula will know where that's headed (but don't be too confident: Barnett has added a twist!). The original Dracula novel is excellently reproduced on film in Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 epic, a movie I highly recommend.

Back to this novel! I do like that Barnett has divorced himself from trope with Gideon. He doesn’t have Gideon go haring off into the heart of the mystery like an idiot. He portrays Gideon as a thoughtful, courageous, and smart young man who realizes that he's going to need help to figure out if smugglers might be connected to his father's disappearance and are operating near his village, but when he talks to a friend of his father's, and also to the village constable, he's dismissed and not taken at all seriously. That's when he resorts to calling Captain Trigger and ends up in the company of Bram Stoker. Stoker learned of vampires from his fellow Irish friend Sheridan le Fanu, but he cannot get Gideon interested. Instead, Gideon resolves to set off for London to personally seek Captain Trigger's assistance. That's when he meets the mechanical girl called Maria who. I guessed. is actually modeled after a real person.

But she isn’t just any old clockwork toy. Nope. She has a body made to look as realistic as possible, and although she's clockwork inside her body, inside her head is a different story. Her creator is Hermann Einstein (which coincidentally happens to be the name of Albert Einstein's father...), but he's gone missing. He fitted her empty head with something that he discovered in a most unlikely location. Her head is no longer empty. Far from it.

Gideon learns how abused Maria is by her keeper, a grungy old man with disgusting tastes, who is in charge of the house in Einstein's absence. Gideon invites her to travel to London with him to find her maker, and she agrees, so they take some spare cash which Maria has access to, and borrow another invention of Einstein's: a motorized bike. This prepared, they set off again for London town, home of Queen Victoria.

Meanwhile Bram is poking around Whitby in pursuit of a vampire, and he discovers one of the very last people he might have expected to find - and she is the very antithesis of what he expected a vampire to be! Little does he know that his investigations will bring him right back into contact with Gideon.

And that's all the detail you get for this one! The story continues apace, and continues to be engrossing, as Gideon and his growing ensemble of acquired friends begin pursing seemingly disparate threads that I felt, even before I knew one way or the other, would all lead back to the same source. There are airships (one piloted by a very adventurous woman), there is a trip to a ancient and exotic location where trouble is stirring big time, there's air piracy, there's a threat to the empire over which the sun never sets, and there are truly evil creatures (and that's just those working for the government!). All the threads lead to a fine yarn, and a taut fabric, and though I was less than thrilled with the ending (the novel is evidently the start of a series), the quality of the writing and the plotting merits this story as a worthy read. I recommend it.

Sour Lake: Or, the Beast by Bruce McCandless

Title: Sour Lake: Or, the Beast
Author: Bruce McCandless
Publisher: Ninth Planet
Rating: worthy!

Disclosure: This novel came to me in paperback as a gift via my wife who is a colleague of the wife of the author. As I always do, I'll give it my usual review: if I don't like it I won't hesitate to say so, and I'll tell you why.

So when I started this one I thought, "Oh dear, I am not going to be able to finish this," but as I plowed on, the plowing got easier, so I'm about half-way through it as I start this review, and I am enjoying it! Phew! No un-neighborly feuds in the offing - yet!

So why did I have such a hard time getting started on this? Well McCandless writes a bit like Stephen King, and I don't mean that in a complementary manner! My problem with Stephen King is that he has a character flaw, to whit: he can't introduce a character without giving that character's entire life history back through several generations! I find that abysmally self-indulgent and boring in the extreme. If it doesn't have any real bearing on where your novel is going, I do not care how well you've thought your character through. I really don't. McCandless isn't anywhere near as bad as King, but he does appear anxious to show some of his research even where it isn't relevant to what's going on. Fortunately, this lapses into disuse after a few chapters and the story really kicks into high gear (and he doesn't have a prologue so props for that too!).

Unfortunately (to finish this line of thought!), that's what you get (in King's case) from success: you get people who don't know how to honestly self-edit and you get editors who are too spineless to say no. If anyone but King had turned in some of his door-stop novels, they would have been kicked out on their ear or they would have been literally ordered by the publisher to strip the novel down; you know the old "Don't use two words where one will do". In King's case, it's "Don't use two words where a novelette will do. It was for this reason that I ditched King after The Shining, which was brilliant. I tried to pick him up again with the 'Dark Tower' trilogy - remember that? the trilogy that turned into a hexalogy or a heptalogy or whatever the hell it currently resides at? I think I made it through three volumes of that before I become seriously ill from it.

But I digress - or do I? This is a writing blog as well as a reviewing blog, so it's appropriate to digress, I guess! Anyway, this story begins in 1911 in Texas. I thought it would come through to the present, but it remains in 1911. It begins with some people disappearing, and being found with their throats torn and their corpse mutilated and their body drained of blood! Yes, it's a vampire! Or is it? It's certainly a more realistic take than Charlaine Harris has! But it;s way more than you might think.

A Texas ranger is called in who has his own agenda, and a local doctor is part of the team together with his son, his friend from Harvard medical school (a rare black doctor), and a huge black guy whom the local town people suspect of being responsible for these atrocities. They narrow down their area of search to a local mine, but when they go out there's a posse, they're repelled by gunfire. The plot thickens, just like coagulating blood! But you know they;re not going to leave it at that.

So I've finished this novel and I recommend it. It's really well written, and while you need your tongue firmly in your cheek for the 'true story' aspects of it, particularly parts of the epilogue, I can't take anything way from McCandless. He's done a damned fine job. Do be aware that he doesn't hold anything back in the way of describing gore. If you can handle that, you're in for a treat.

Postscriptum: I actually got to meet Bruce McCandless today and he's a charming guy. I enjoyed meeting him and his family very much, and I was glad I gave him a decent review so that he didn't have to pummel me into the ground (just kidding!). On a serious note, he did pummel me at basketball and dodgeball, but them I'm lousy at both, so maybe that wasn't such a big deal. But he's a great guy and I'm glad I got a chance to talk with him. Go buy his novel! Now!