It occurs to me that every novel is really a two-in-one. There's the novel the title suggests to a potential reader, and there's the actual content of the novel which the reader ends up wading through or swimming in as the case may be. When I see a novel titled "The Witch Hunter" I expect it to be about witches. I don't automatically think, 'Oh, this novel is about vampires'. But believe it or not, this one is. Hence my distaste for it. Vampire novels suck, and not in a nice way.
I blame myself entirely for this. The novel has the word 'saga' on the front cover, which is a huge no-no to me, but nevertheless there are doubtlessly some older books I have in my collection that may sport this logo, or even a newer book or two that may have bypassed my admittedly lax screening process and made it into the collection without my properly registering it. This is one of those books, quite evidently. And it predictably sucks.
The first problem is that we have vampires who are decades old, yet who do not remotely behave like they've lived that many years. I have yet to encounter a vampire who does. Vampire stories are completely unrealistic to begin with, but even setting that aside and buying into this world for the sake of a good story doesn't actually get you a good story. Who knew? All it gets you is one that's entirely, ridiculously, unrealistic even within its own framework. This, in a nut sack, is my problem with vampire stories.
>The second problem is the vampire tropes. No one is willing to try anything new so all vampire stories, including this one, end up sounding the same. Boring. This is my other problem with this particular one: it was boring from the off, and I quit after only five percent. I confess it's all my fault for even starting to read a novel with the word 'saga' on the cover, but based on my small sampling, this is warty.
