This was the last of those seven stories in the Seven Against the Dark introductory first chapter collection I've been reviewing. I ended up not liking a single one of them although the first and the last both captured my imagination for a short time.
The first was about shifters, this last was about vampires. Neither of those are my favorite fictional topics, so it was a long shot anyway, but I really thought this last one might make it until it turned into a pathetic little YA love triangle. This things are so overdone, so tedious, so unimaginative and soooo boring that it almost makes me physically ill when I encounter one of them.
The problem is that all a love triangle like this does is to render the leading female into a spineless and vasillating flibbertigibbet who has no real mind of her own, cares nothing for either guy, in that she's quite happy to keep both of them on a string, or alternately and equally unsavory, she's merely a pawn in the hands of not one, but two men. I can't stand female characters like that and I am no fan of female authors who create such an appaling waste of a female character.
Set in London in the Regency period, which was very roughly the first twenty years of the eighteenth century, the book description has it that "vampires have always lived among them, quietly attacking unsuspecting debutantes and dandified lords as well as hackney drivers and Bond Street milliners. If not for the vampire slayers of the Gardella family, these immortal creatures would have long taken over the world." Really? The world? There are no other vampire slayers on planet Earth, and the secret has been so well-kept that there's not a single person outside of the family and their closest confidants who's aware of the problem, let alone doing something about it? I'm sorry but that is as pathetic as it is irresponsible, and it assumes everybody is stupid.
It's like Trump knowing full-well how dangerous Coronavirus was and doing nothing about it not even when literally hundreds of thousands of people have died. It's also a losing proposition given - from the 60% of this that I read - that vampires are positively rampaging across London. They would need droves of full-time vampire slayers to keep this infestation under control, not one YA chick. None of the premise made any sense.
So anyway, Victoria Gardella Grantworth is the new Buffy. The author freely acknowledges the inspiration, but unfortunately she picks the most idiotic parts of the Buffy story to lay upon her new hero. Although she starts out in fine style and there was even a bit of choice humor (but not enough), the story quickly devolved into every YA cliché imaginable and started going downhill for me. The worst part was when Victoria meets the bad boy, Sebastian Vioget.
This guy is a complete jerk, and a pervert, and yet Victoria lets him get away with pawing her and doing whatever he wants. He has more hypnotic control over her than do the vampires and yet she sees nothing wrong with his constant pawing of her, his demand to see her belly-button, his uninvited touching of her and his stealing one of her gloves. The first time the two encountered each other, I was about ready to ditch this story because I could see exactly where it was going, but foolishly, I decided to give the author a fair chance and I read on only to have my worst fears confirmed.
The second encounter between these two was even mnore ridiculous than the first. This is Victoria, supposedly the champion, and a woman who is raised to interact with the highest of society and behave properly at all times, but who for reason unexplained allows herself to be alone with this stranger, and takes zero offense as this asshole of a letch essentially feels her up? She's a trained vampire slayer who gets an icy chill on her neck when a vampire is close, and has no compunction and very little ineptitude in killiong them, yet she countenances this jerk and his boorish behavior, a man who is the sleazy manager of a club that openly accommodates vampires over which he has no control? It made zero sense.
There was a discrepancy between the freebie version of this book which was offered as part of the 7 volume introductory book that I began reading, and the first volume of this individual novel which I picked up (it's a freebie) when I had thought initially that I might be desatined to enjoy it. In the standalone novel, I read (or more accurately, tried to read!) the following:
"Why do you think it was a vampire attack?" Melly qíììH rniiino hpr pvp<¿ "T nrH Tmsrntt likely got too familiar with Miss Colton"What it should have read was:
"Why do you think it was a vampire attack?" Melly said, rolling her eyes. "Lord Truscott likely got too familiar with Miss Colton."The reason I know that is that the compendium version had been corrected whereas the standalone has not.
But I gave up on this in disappointment over the cheesy triangle and the appalling lack of self-respect Victoria has. I thought she was someone I could grow to appreciate as a strong female character, but she is certainly not. She's nothing more than yet another weak and limp YA female produced by yet another female author who should be ashamed of herself for doing this to women. This is garbage, period.
