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.
