Carmilla by Sheridan le Fanu

Rating: WORTHY!

Finally, a classic that I enjoyed! Published only one year before the author died, the 1872 novella Carmilla is an engrossing tale of one woman's hold on others through her vampire charms. It's narrated in first person by a female protagonist named Laura (and one who I initially thought was a male narrator!). Normally I do not like first person voice, but in this story it's not obnoxious or overwhelmingly ridiculous.

The story is of the Countess Karnstein, who has lived for a century or more, moving from place to place and changing her name - but always the new name being an anagram. We meet her as Carmilla, but in earlier times she has gone by Mircalla and Millarca. Naturally until the story is quite advanced, the actors in this drama have no idea of Carmilla's age or her vampire traits.

Wikipedia declares this to be a lesbian vampire story, but there isn't any overt lesbianism in it and I think in declaring it as such, the author of that article (who I'd be willing to bet is a male!) misses the fact that in Victorian times women were often in close relationships with impassioned statements of love and feeling, but without necessarily any lesbian inclinations or behaviors. Perhaps that's what le Fanu intended, or perhaps it wasn't. For me, I don't care either way; I just don't think the case has necessarily been made.

In many ways this story was a template for Bram Stoker's much better known Dracula which came a quarter century later, but vampire tales and legend precede both of these books by a good many years. There is the female victim, Laura, and clueless male companions and friends, but again I take odds with Wikipedia's assertion that this is a female empowerment novel since it isn't Laura who saves herself in the end. In fact, she plays a rather passive role in this story. Predictably (in hindsight!), it is an older male expert who shows up later and finally dispatches the vampire in her coffin.

This story begins with the oddball overture of a carriage racing along and overturning right outside where Laura and her father live, and the plea of the female who is riding in it that Laura's father take charge of her youthful (so it's understood!) and out-of-sorts daughter, to enable the woman to continue with her urgent journey.

Those were much more trusting times, and the nobility were much more reliable, and trustworthy in general, so none of that is particularly strange for the era. What is strange is that this traveling party is neither explained, nor is it ever seen or heard from again. There's no explanation offered as to who the travelers are or why they're in such a confounded hurry, or even what their relationship is to Carmilla, if any. So they disappear and we're left with Carmilla and her blossoming relationship with Laura.

The two become, as they might have said back then, bosom companions, despite Carmilla's somewhat odd traits: her lethargy, her sleeping very late into the day, her pallour, and her off-kilter habits. They declare love for each other, but nowhere do they exhibit any overt behavior or any behavior beyond what might be expected of any pair of young Victorian ingénues who are very fond of one another and excited to have such a suitable companion.

After a time through, Laura starts succumbing to some sort of a wasting illness, accompanied by bizarre dreams, and stories are spreading of deaths in the nearby communities. Despite this, it isn't until General Spielsdorf comes into the story that Laura and her father learn that the supposedly extinct Karnstein family has an extant descendent: a countess who does not die, but relocates herself periodically under a new name and preys on vulnerable, young local women. After a search, Carmilla's tomb is located on the derelict Karnstein estate, and she is summarily dispatched, leaving Laura with bittersweet memories.

I throughly enjoyed the story, perhaps being primed to favor it through having seen the 1970 Hammer Film production of Carmilla which was titled The Vampire Lovers and which played very much into the lesbian aspect. It starred Ingrid Pitt, a vamp herself, as Carmilla, along with the startlingly fresh and youthful Madeline Smith as Laura, and the inevitable Peter Cushing as Spielsdorf. It was the first of a trilogy, but I can't recall if I ever saw any of the sequels. I enjoyed that movie however, and it does follow the story quite well, so anyone who isn't interested in reading an old novella might like to see the film instead. I commend the book though as a worthy read.

Aurora Sky: Vampire Hunter by Nikki Jefford

Rating: WARTY!

"First in an action-packed series: Thanks to her rare blood type, Aurora finds herself battling the undead in Alaska for the government. All that’s keeping her warm is gorgeous Fane — but he might be a vampire, too…" Of course it's first in a series. Of course Buffy, er Aurora, has to hand-fight the vamps. There's no way in hell that a scientific method could ever be found to poison them. And of course her lover Spike...er Fane...(Fane? Seriously? Jesus!) is a good vamp.

My only question here is: Does this author have an original bone in her body? Because it seems to me I've seen this exact same story told scores and scores of times already.

The Witch Hunter by Nicole R Taylor

Rating: WARTY!

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.

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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.

The Rest Falls Away by Colleen Gleason

Rating: WARTY!

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.

The Vampyre by John William Polidori

Rating: WARTY!

Here's another classic, and I have to say right up front that the story of how this novella came to be written is far more interesting than the story itself actually is! I'm not a fan of vampire stories. They're tedious for the most part and with few exceptions, but this is a classic and in my ongoing quest, I decided I should read it. In its favor, it's very short!

The legend is well-known to anyone who has any interest in Mary Shelly, Percy Shelly, or George Byron: it was the wintry cold summer of 1816 which was literally overshadowed by the eruption of Mount Tambora the year before. That volcano spewed out so much ash that, though it reduced the temperature of the planet by only a fraction of a degree, it ruined the crops the next year and caused widespread famine. This is what people don't get about climate change - oh it will only heat up by a degree or two, they think, dismissively. They think it isn't worth worrying about, but it's actually highly significant and dangerously destructive.

So that summer, the two Shellys, plus Byron and his doctor, John Polidori, were staying at a villa close by Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Mary was only eighteen. After entertaining themselves one night by reading ghost stories to each other, Byron came up with a challenge that they each write their own. None did! Mary began work on a short story that over the next couple of years expanded into a novel, which was published in 1818 as Frankenstein. Percy didn't write a damned thing. Neither did Polidori at first. Byron began a tale about a vampire, which he abandoned, leaving Polidori to complete it. This is that story - a mere thirty pages or so which didn't materialize as a published work until the year after Shelley's novel.

It's tedious to read. The doctor goes on for screens at a time in a single paragraph making it a chore to read, and the story has no drama, no excitement, and no real ending. There's barely even any vampirism in it! I cannot commend it as a decent read.

One Foot in the Grave by Jeaniene Frost

Rating: WARTY!

According to wikipedia, One Foot in the Grave is volume two of the 'Night Huntress' series, being preceded by Halfway to the Grave by six months, but according to the listing in the novel itself, the first volume is OFitG, with HttG following. I'm confused. Actually, I'm more confused by the titles: what, pray tell, is the practical difference between having one foot in the grave and being half-way to the grave? Isn't that the same thing with different wording?! This is a big problem with a novel series - how the heck do the newbies know where to start unless there's a volume number on the cover? Yeah - dig inside, I guess, but what a nuisance. Oh well, best foot forward - to the grave....

I started this novel out fresh from the excellent Dead Until Dark which means that Jeaniene Frost isn’t getting perhaps as fair a deal as she ought in the comparison, but what really hit me strongly in the first hundred pages was how 'young-adult' this novel seemed even though it isn’t a YA title. That's not to say that YA titles are bad per se, but picture the worst YA instadore you ever read, and that's what I'm getting at.

The main character is Catherine Crawfield, who goes by Cristine Russell and is known as the Red Reaper by her vampire enemies because she has red hair. She has dyed it for anonymity in this volume, but I don’t see the point of that given that vampires have heightened senses and can tell who she is regardless of her hair color! That's not the problem though. The problem is how sickeningly on pretty darned near every page, we’re treated to Cristine's desperate pining for her ex-vampire love, "Bones", who I shall refer to as Boner from this point on because this isn't about love, it's about sex, period. I can understand that she was hot for him, but she left him, not the other way around, and although she did it unwillingly, it has been well over four long years. This is a woman who is in serious need of urgent medical therapy.

That aside, the story hasn't been too bad (and it's hard to put aside when the stench of it is rammed under your nose on every other page). Cristine works for an offshoot of the Homeland Security Agency which is tasked with keeping the vampire population under control, so yeah, it’s the vampire hunter trope. Except she's described as a 'huntress'. I'm not quite sure how to rate the potential genderism in employing the feminine form there. This is a writing problem. Do we say both genders are equal and therefore use only the one term, so as not to 'discriminate' against women by using a specific feminine term for them, or do we go the other way and argue that employing what has been hitherto the masculine form is actually a form of insult to the woman so depicted?

I've tended towards the former option: employing the masculine term universally, but this is really something each writer has to decide. Look at it this way: what if we employed exclusively the feminine form, even to describe the male? So for example, if this novel had been about Cristopher Russell (instead of Cristine) we would call him a vampire huntress. How many people would find that strange, and doesn’t it say something awful about our society that such would be the case? It’s worth a thought or few.

At the start of this volume, Cristine is tasked with bringing down an ancient and powerful vampire. Cristine FYI, is literally half-vampire/half-human in that her mother was impregnated by a freshly-turned vampire who evidently had viable sperm flopping around in his resurrected testicles. This gives her enhanced powers which is how she came to be hired by the HSA. How that works is something quite literally never discussed in vampire stories: have you noticed? They supposedly have no heartbeat, so by what means does the nutrition from the blood they drink get to their cells to keep the vampires looking so young?! Osmosis?! In Cristine's case, how did that sperm become genetically changed in order that it could both still match up to the mother's genetic complement, and confer upon Cristine the vampire traits she garnered? This suggests that vampirism is genetic: that the dying body undergoes a genetic change before resurrecting as a vamp. But no one ever talks about it!

Frost employs some standard vamp tropes, such as older vampires are more powerful, and silver kills them, whilst dispensing with others: her vampires aren't allergic to crosses, churches, or daylight, and the silver knife not only has to penetrate their heart, but it has to be twisted to actually kill them! Thus although Cristine stabs this vampire in the heart, she's in deep conversation with him (another trope: smart-mouth your foe as you beat the crap out of each other - thoroughly unrealistic but sometimes entertaining) and from her conversation, she learns something which causes her to spare his life and let him go free, just as a favor to her ex-lover. Will this come back to, er, bite her? Of course, she then has to stab herself to make it look like he escaped, but it’s fine since she heals very quickly.

Cristine's best friend Denise, who knows all about her, is getting married, and Boner shows up as one of the groom's retinue. Cristine is a complete Mary Sue here. At that point it was patently obvious to we readers that Boner was going to show up, yet Cristine is completely clueless, and then she turns to Jell-O® in church when she sees him. It’s truly pathetic and frankly made me nauseous. This kind of writing stinks, but as I said, other than this tripe, the story isn't too bad at all, so I had planned on trying to stay with it. That plan failed!

I was very roughly halfway through this and as I said, finding parts which were interesting, but it was so hard not to drop this in the recycle bin because the "romance" was so awful, so tedious, and so uninteresting I honestly didn’t know how much more of this I could stomach, especially since I finally had some more library books, every one of which was calling to me far more strongly than Frost's 'amateur masturbation for teens' tome was. Parts of her effort did continue to be really interesting; that wasn't the problem. The problem was Cristine's dishrag-to-a-bull act which had continued to travel beyond merely sickening and into heaving stomach convulsions and projectile vomiting.

The hilarious irony is that Cristine was so angered at being such a limp dick in Bones's company in church that she hared off to the next gig her team was supposed to undertake (so to speak!) alone! Yeah, she's that kind of moron. There was a nest of vampires hanging out at a dance bar, so rather than go there immediately to deal with it, the team evidently had decided to let the vampires kill a few more innocents before they took them down; they planned to raid the place the next night, but Cristine decided to do the job herself like the dimwit loose cannon that she is.

She killed a bunch of vamps, and Boner (the walking hard-on to Cristine's slavishly gushing pussy) showed up and killed one more, but there were still three to go, so naturally, Boner takes Cristine dancing while they wait for those vamps to show because, god forbid they should actually go outside and wait for them! The other vamps turned up (their vamp instincts evidently having failed to warn them) and these three were also rapidly dispatched. Boner then raped Cristine; not sexually, but vampirically. Cristine had no problem with this - she limply let him have his way as he sucked heavily on her blood, preparing herself to die. I told you she needed therapy.

This so-called hero of the novel is nothing but a toy for a guy who has no reason whatsoever to be attracted to her other than that she evidently is a moist location in which to keep his dick when he doesn't need it free for urinating. Cristine hasn’t even an ounce of self-respect or feminine strength to her name. She's no hero. She's no one to look up to. She has no spine. Why is this essentially always the case in vampire stories? Why is it all-too-often the case with female so-called heroes in novels in general? Are we not to even expect a feminine main character in a vamp story who isn’t an invertebrate when she finds herself within smelling range of some hot vamp's blood-engorged brain-dick? Can nobody come up with a better way to tell this kind of story than this god-awful whiny, clingy, needy, co-dependent drivel? And what does it say about the women who enjoy this garbage?

The problem today was that I was stuck at work and this was the only lunchtime reading I had, so I gave it another half-hour, and it continued in the same - er, vein! Or maybe vain? If I could just excise the mindless teen-romance trash, I could enjoy the novel because I'm interested in the overall plot and where this will go, but I'm not coping well with Jeaniene Frost's depraved wallowing over what is, let’s face it, an abused woman. The problem is that the plot is increasingly taking a very distant back seat to the endless nymphodore (that's the same as instadore, but where the relationship is exclusively sexual) "romance" which doesn't even feign a weak pretension towards actually being romantic!

A quick word about the English language: it's not still four hundred years ago! No one calls women 'poppet' or 'kitten'. It seems that Frost has seen one-too-many Pirates of the Caribbean movies. And I don't care if she tries to argue that the vampires are old and still using the lingo they heard in their formative years, because then she's arguing that they cannot or do not change no matter what era they're from, and her own writing gives the lie to any such claim: clearly they do change. So please, "pop it" in the trash unless you intend upon including a barf bag with each novel you sell.

As if the rape wasn't bad enough, Cristine was kidnapped by Boner and woke up lying in bed with him. As a result of this, she decided to get back together with him! Is this what we want to set out as an example for young women* that if your lover persists in stalking you and in doing things you didn’t invite and have no control over, then the best solution to this dilemma isn't to kick the son of a bitch in his balls and report him to the authorities, but to get back with him and let him have what he wanted all along? Let's face it, this relationship has nothing whatsoever to do with companionship or with being with the right life-partner. It has entirely, solely, and exclusively to do with sex. There is no love or romance here.

* yeah, she's a teenager: though she's twenty seven, Cristine apparently has the body of a nineteen year old! Again, there's no explanation for how that works. If she ages so slowly that her life expectancy might be double or more what your common-or-garden human gets, how did she mature so rapidly that she looks even nineteen now? Shouldn't she look like she's three or something? Of course, then the thing with Boner would be entirely inappropriate. Not that it's any more appropriate to have a hundred year old vampire dating a nineteen year old woman....

Moving right along now.... Despite my desire to find out what happens in the rest (i.e. the non-brain-dead portion) of the story, I'm going to ditch this one and move on to something more intelligent, or at least more entertaining and far less tedious. Perhaps I will hold onto the novel, and maybe try and get back into it at some other time. Maybe if I skip the gooey parts completely and just read the other bits, I can still read it to the end and enjoy it insofar as that goes. Unfortunately, in order to do that, I'd still have to dig through the goo to find the good! For now, this is warty!

Vegan Vamp by Cate Lawley

Rating: WORTHY!

This was another freebie from a book flyer I get via email. I downloaded it some time ago, and I forgot about it until I saw it offered again in that same flyer, so I dug it out of my collection and read it. It's nice not to be beholden to Net Galley for a change, so I can pick and choose whatever I feel like reading at the time, and take my time with it rather than feel compelled by deadlines and archive dates!

The story is very short, and clearly it's aimed to be a loss-leader to lure potential addicts into a series. I'm not a series fan, nor am I a first person voice fan, nor am I a vampire story fan, so this one had three strikes against it to begin with, but it was so different, or at least it promised to be, and I am a big fan of not taking the road most traveled. I was pleased that the blurb did not lie and that this novel actually worked its way under my skin. I ended up enjoying it.

That said, series? I'm not sure I want to get back into this in another story even though I enjoyed the first one, because that way lies madness. It takes a person into that insanity territory where you're doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. This applies to you whether you are writing a series or reading one. So maybe I'll be back, but while that decision remains to be made, let's look at this one volume.

Mallory is not liked by her fellow office colleagues, except when she buys drinks. On this night, after doing that very thing and resenting it, she leaves the bar early and wakes up several days later with no memory of what happened in between. Plus she's lost many pounds in weight. Eventually she gets to a doctor who realizes that she's been bitten by a vampire. Mallory is referred to an underground vampire society that the doctor feels can help her. The problem is that she's not your usual vampire. The thought of blood, let alone drinking it, turns her stomach, as does much of the usual food she had liked to eat. She finds through trial and error that a vegan diet works for her.

That immediate issue settled, she takes up a commission from the vamp society to track down her attacker, who will be giving the underworld a bad name if he (or she) continues unchecked in this apparently random assaulting behavior. So the story goes and it was entertaining, amusing, and quite interesting although the mystery was a bit of a mess-tery. That aside though, I enjoyed the story and the voice, and the fact that the novel is set in Austin even though the author isn't. I will definitely consider reading another volume of this.

My Pretty Vampire by Katie Skelly

Rating: WARTY!

This was a waste of my time. There is no story here, just female nudity and random bloodletting. The inexplicably named Clover isn't in such. She's a vampire who demands blood. Her brother kept her confined for several years in order to protect her and humanity both, but Clover is hardly the sharpest canine in the dentition.

She breaks out and seeks fresh human blood. No excuse is given for why she simply doesn't drink her brother dry. She clearly has no morals, yet for reasons unknown, she leaves the man who has imprisoned her for years, untouched, and picks-off assorted, random innocent people she encounters. She's too stupid to know she must get out of the sunlight until she starts broiling herself. She's not remotely likable, and the ending makes no sense at all mostly because it's not really an ending in any meaningful sense. Story? What story? Art? What art? At least it was short.

Comic book writer Jaime Hernandez recommends this. I have no idea who he is so you'll have to remind me never to read anything by him if he thinks this is so great. He either hasn't read it and therefore is completely clueless, or he's just completely clueless. I don't get why idiot publishers think a recommendation by a writer most people have never heard of somehow carries any weight. I honestly do not give a damn what other writers think, even if they're writers I like. I want to make up my own mind, and I did. I certainly cannot recommend this waste of time.

The First Taste is Free Pixie Chicks - Tales of a Lesbian Vampire by Zephyr Indigo

Rating: WORTHY!

Not to be confused with The Pixie Chicks by Regan Black, or with the Pixie Chicks' Writers Group, this story was so whimsical (and very short, but it's free - as an introductory overture) that I was lured into reading it and in the end, it was not a bad temptation at all. I'd be interested in reading more, but the story is an episodic one, and there are ten episodes, which means you'll end up paying nine dollars for the whole book. Is it worth that?

Only you can answer that question, but consider that there is no page count offered for these 'episodes', only a file size, which is a cautionary omission! This one (excellently titled 'The First Taste is Free!) is 174K. The next one is only 211K so that means it's hardly longer than the free book - maybe 25 - 30 pages max, depending on font size. So all ten can't me more than two hundred to two-fifty or so pages. For nine dollars it had better be good for as slim a volume as that would be.

Mega-vendors like Amazon have forced authors into this world though, so it's what we as both writers and consumers have to deal with. Will it work? Does it pay? I guess we'll find out! At least with this method, the author gives you the option of buying bite-sized pieces and you can quit any time, so you don't find you've laid out the full price for a novel that you can't stand to read past page twenty! Frankly, I'm wondering if I should try that with one of my novels. I had this weird idea for a humorous story just a couple of days ago, and I'm wondering if it might be worth experimenting with this technique: write it as a short set of episodes for ninety-nine cents each. It's worth a try, but I would never run it to ten volumes of twenty pages each, so you can relax on that score!

I'm not familiar with the author at all, but I seriously doubt that Zephyr Indigo is a real name. I also have my doubts that the author is even female. It's a sound marketing ploy to have a female front for this kind of story, but I feel like it's probably a guy; however, I do not know, so I could be completely wrong on both scores. I often am!

That said, and though I was skeptical about this story, it did win me over, so there is something there. You;'re quite free to disagree of course, but for me, I thought it was pretty darned good for this genre. The story was fresh and different, and though the sex is rather perfunctory, which may displease many female readers, it really did feel like it counted as erotica. It's about a lesbian vampire. Much of what is termed erotica these days is nothing more than smut, but this wasn't like that. I know it sounds cheesy, but the erotic bits are decently if somewhat clinically done and the story that links them is actually an interesting one.

The vampire is sick with herself and looking for a cure or for the vampire hunters to find her and finish her, but she meets this pixie one night, alone in the forest, which is a dangerous place to be when vampires are loose. The vamp of course get the hots for her, but the pixie, who goes by the amusing name of mint (but who may as well have been called catnip) will only give in to her desires if the vampire meets with Ariel, the pixie goddess. Ariel has a mission for the vampire - to work with the pixies in finding a cure for vampirism.

For me it made for an interesting story, even though it was only some twenty pages. I am sure this is what the author wants, to lure readers in, but you can't blame him or her for that in this ebook world we've created for ourselves, and this is a good lure. Maybe I'll be lured into reading more. We'll see.

Vampire Academy Graphic Novel by Leigh Dragoon, Emma Viecelli

Rating: WORTHY!

For a graphic novel created by two female writers/illustrators, I found this to be rather more sexualized than it ought, particularly regarding main character Rose. Emma Viecelli's artwork aside though (and the art wasn't bad at all in general terms), the adaptation by the curiously-named Leigh Dragoon was faithful to Richelle Mead's original, and overall, the story was told well. As usual I could have done without the ridiculous and pathetic "romance" between Rose and the academy's pet gorilla, but other than that, I liked this adaptation and I recommend it for anyone who likes the original or who is interested in getting up to speed on the story without reading the original, which I reviewed back in May, 2014.

There was one bit of unintentional amusement, which is when Rose has one of her trips into Lissa's brain. The illustration clearly shows Lissa from a third party perspective, climbing up through the trapdoor into the attic where she meets Ozera, but the text confidently states: "And there I am seeing the world through Lissa's eyes." No, you don't see the world through Lissa's eyes looking directly at Lissa, unless she's in front of a mirror! Sometimes I wish writers were a little more intelligent than this - or artists, whoever is at fault here, but they're no worse than movie or TV depictions of such things which are routinely in third person perspective and which look utterly ridiculous because of it.

Night Owls by Lauren M Roy

Rating: WORTHY!

The vampire bookseller! Yes, that was what lured me in! I picked this up on spec from the local library (bless their little cotton pages!). Books are just like relationships, and if you've been bit as many times as I have by book blurbs, you tend to get book-shy, especially if it's a book in a genre that you're not given to reading. In my case, I am not a fan of vampire stories, but once in a while one comes along which shakes things up enough to keep it interesting. This was such a novel.

This is clearly intended to be the start of a series, and I am not inclined to follow series because they are way too repetitive and uninventive. They're a really lazy way of writing novels, and I have little time for them, with few exceptions, so this will be the only one of this series that I read.

The basic premise is that there are two factions on the side of good. One is Valerie McTeague, the bookseller, and the other is Elly Garret, who has been trained by a member of an order which destroys vampires. To make it really interesting, there are tow kinds of vampire,s and this come right out of Vampire Academy. I liked the first couple of novels, and I loved the movie, but I went off the series pretty quickly because Le Stupide was strong with that one. So Elly is really Rose, but there is no Lissa.

There are strigoi and moroi here, but the bad guys are called 'jackals' or 'creeps' - and at least they have some motivation for their behavior here, although how the two groups a differentiated into each class of vampire is a mystery. They are, and we're expected to accept it on faith. One group is suave, sophisticated and trope vampire, the other is stinky, primitive, savage, and low-life. It's really just class warfare, royalty v. peons. Differentiation between good and bad vampires is nonsensical to me, and represents nothing more than a ridiculous modern trope added to vampire lore for the benefit of undiscriminating teen readers.

Trope runs rife through this story: vampires live in hives and are allergic to holy water, can't cross hallowed ground, can't come out in daylight, are allergic to silver, allergic to holy water, and can be killed with a wooden stake - but it has to be Rowan wood! Why, I have no idea. None of this lore makes any sense to me (and isn't explained here) so any attempts to put vampires on a pseudo-scientific basis by talking of virally-transmitted disease and what-not, is bullshit. Vampires are cold (yet move superfast?!), they have no heartbeat, no blood circulation, so how does their body receive nutrition from the blood they drink? By magic! That's the only "explanation" so as far as I'm concerned, paranormal writers can shove their bullshit science! It makes no sense, so don't insult me by trying to make it make sense. Just tell the freaking story!

This author does bring in one or two new items (at least new to me, maybe these are ripped off from elsewhere, too. I can't say), such as a magical element, whereby "runes" are used as wards against vampire incursion, but they're pretty useless since they really don't hold the vampires back. The driver in this story is that there's a magical book which the bad vamps want, and which has fallen into the possession of the good guys. Why this book is not immediately destroyed is the biggest plot hole in the entire novel. It is of no value in fighting the vamps, so there's absolutely no reason whatsoever for keeping it around, Burn the book and everything that follows, including death and destruction, will never happen. Obviously this is why the book isn't burned (there would have been no novel otherwise!), but it made no sense and was a huge disbelief inducement! If you're going to do this, please find a reason why it cannot be destroyed, don't just let this hang out unquestioned, and unexplained!

That said, I liked many of the characters in the novel, especially Val and Elly, who I thought might become an item, but who did not. I liked that the story moved fast and there wasn't any vampire worship going on. I liked that Val wasn't a thousand years old and absurdly falling for some teen-aged guy. She wasn't and she didn't. There was no dumb-ass romance here, for which I was ludicrously grateful. I liked the two succubi (yeah, it's that kind of kitchen sink story). A novel about them might be worth reading, but this is about this novel, and was it worthy of my time? Overall, and despite the issues, yes to me it was and on that basis I recommend it.

Crossroads by Sophie Slade

Rating: WARTY!

I picked up this book as an advance review copy from Net Galley. I'm not a fan of vampire stories, werewolf stories, or paranormal romances, but I've read one or two, and this one promised to be different in that the vampire was married to a human female (at least he was after the first few screens), and contemplating reverting to human if only his wife's concoction could be perfected. I should have known better than to trust a blurb! It's hard to believe that a series like this which depends upon the vampire character would actually cure him anyway. Now that would be a story, but I'm guessing, sadly, that it's not the plan for this series.

This was volume two in a series (and it has a prologue! wasn't volume one the prologue?!), and I have not read volume one, so it's possible that I was missing something from that, but having read ten percent of this, which was more than I honestly wanted to, I don't believe I've missed anything at all! Lance and Leila have a half-human, half-vampire child, and they get married in the beginning of this novel. Lance is the leader of one of the vampire clans in England, and ridiculously rich in addition to being, as Derek Zoolander might put it, really, really, ridiculously good looking. His wife was voluptuous and beautiful, because there cannot be ordinary, everyday people in these novels.

So much for hoping that this novel would eschew trope and venture onto new ground. Every single vampire trope save one was here. It was the typical centuries old vampire falling in love with the mortal human, which doesn't work and is frankly disgusting. It's the old vampires and werewolves don't get along trope. It's the old vampires are ageless and beautiful, which is tedious, trope. It's the old vampires are organized in hierarchies with leaders or queens or whatever, and the country is divided into organized territories, which is a tired cliché. It's the old vampires are inexplicably rich story. There was absolutely nothing that was original. There was nothing to set any atmosphere, and there wasn't a single piece of descriptive prose worth the name, not in the part I read. It was all talk and movement.

The one exception I mentioned was that despite all this vampire trope, they seem to have no trouble going to Aruba for their honeymoon, and being out in the bright sunlight. If you're using all the other tropes, why not that one? Who knows? The most serious problem as that if you removed the paranormal element, this same story could have been told about a rich businessman and his trophy wife. There was nothing her that really required vampires and werewolves. The guy could have simply had an ordinary illness. The entire Harlequin romance catalog could have one of the characters be a vampire, with nothing else changed, and republished! What would that give us? Nothing we didn't have before!

The novel is supposed to lean towards the erotic, but there was nothing erotic to be found here. Not that I find vampires erotic at all, but the love-making here was full of cliché and frankly, was boring. The funny thing is that at one point we're told that the sun was starting to set. The couple had sex three times, and then decided to sleep all afternoon. Wait, wasn't the afternoon already gone if the sun was setting?! Maybe the sex was so great that it turned back time? Wouldn't it be great to have sex like that?!

Part of eroticism is playing-out the love-making, making it last, teasing, slyly stimulating, being a playful bit mean by withholding and denying from time to time. There's an old joke that erotic is using a feather; kinky is using the whole chicken, but there was neither here. This sex chickened out. It was much more of the 'slam-bam thank you ma'am' style: an urgent drive to orgasm, avoiding the scenic route like the plague,, and offering no rest stops to appreciate the journey or the view along the way.

It really was just a determined rush to orgasm, and the saddest thing was that there was no love-making after the orgasm either. Here I mean love-making in the old-fashioned sense where endearments and warm touches are exchanged. There was no pillow-talk, no nuzzling, no gentle hands on the back or the hips, or wherever. There was no hugging, snuggling, or holding, no sweet teasing as an invitation to a future encounter. It was like these two couldn't wait to get out of bed, or to fall asleep. This betrayed all of the 'lovey-dovey' talk they spouted so tediously endlessly at each other the rest of the time.

I was actually glad that they slept, because if I'd had to read about Leila arching her back once more, or reading of her saying that she was "more than okay" one more time after having sex, I would have to arch my back and throw up before I was more than okay. Here's an example of the prose:

"More than okay," she said, grinning. "Here," I sad, biting into my wrist. A moment later, red crimson blood dripped from the wound. "Drink this," I gently cooed, knowing that I needed to heal her.

This is part of the problem. No, not the red crimson blood(!), nor the cooing, but the fact that Lance effectively owned Leila. She's "Mrs Lance Steel" (Lance Steel, really?! It sounds like the pseudonym of a porn actor!), and he's always putting his arm around her "protectively". He's hovering over her and worrying about her like she's his child, not his wife, and it was creepy. It was creepy how obsessively they were "in love" which actually felt fake in the extreme. There was creepily obsessive parenting, and it was creepy when they'd just become married and he kissed 'the bride' like so: "my tongue danced with hers before our family and friends." Seriously? In front of the guests they're tongue kissing?

The objectification of 'the bride' - especially given that this is a female author - was as sad as it was disturbing. I read phrases like "Leila was beyond beautiful in a white, spaghetti strapped wedding gown that accented her curves in all the right places," way too often. Nothing about her mind was said, like all she had to offer was this body and once that was gone, what use would she be to any man? This is upsetting. At least it was until I found myself contemplating how "her curves" could ever be accented in all the wrong places and managed a smile at last.

These two flew off on their honeymoon in Lance's private jet, but while it had sufficient range to fly them to Miami, it didn't have the range to get them just 200 miles further directly to Aruba? That was curious, but a minor issue. I think I really got to a point where I wanted to throw the book a the wall when Leila microwaved a bag of blood and stuck a straw in it to feed their child. Smart moms don't even heat breast milk in a microwave. The nutritional value of the blood would be destroyed if it was microwaved, but then since we get no vampire lore related here, perhaps not. Who knows?

That said, the thought of this happy, happy, joy, joy family sitting around with the kid sucking blood through a straw from a microwaved bag, and the husband hungrily gulping down his own blood bag, while the doting wife sits beaming at them both was simply too hilarious to take seriously. I had hoped, as I said, for something different, but all I got was more of the same tired ideas that have been staked to death long ago. There was nothing new here and nothing worth my time.

I had hoped to make it to at least 25%, but like a bag-o-blood, I honestly could not stomach it. The idea of a centuries-old vampire even remotely finding a twenty or thirty year old woman appealing as a partner carries the same creep factor as a ninety year old man marrying a nine year old child. What could they possibly have in common? Why would a normal woman find anything attractive about a man who drinks blood from hospital bags and sucks her blood when they make love, without even asking? Perhaps there's a market for this, but I could not take it seriously. Paranormal stories seem to do really well, but they're not for me when written so un-inventively. I wish the author the best of luck with this, but I can't in good faith recommend it.

Interview With the Vampire Claudia's Story by Ashley Marie Witter

Rating: WORTHY!

I'm not a fan of Anne Rice, nor of vampire stories in general (although I've made one or two exceptions), and I never read Interview With the Vampire, but this story looked appealing. I did see the movie, which was okay, but nothing special for me, so I had a vague idea of what was going to happen. This novel is essentially the same story as Interview..., but it's told in graphic novel format and from the PoV of Claudia, the young girl who is adopted by the two male vampires and who is played by Kirsten Dunst in the movie (the two male vamps are played by Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt). Now there's a dysfunctional family!

This version really digs into the psychology of Claudia, exploring her feelings and fears, and her understandable frustration and disgust with her mind maturing whilst her body remains that of a child. What a horrible fate. What a awful prison in which to be trapped! Doomed from the start because there is no way to win in this scenario, Claudia slowly grows to hate Lestat while perhaps hoping for a life with Louis which, while practical and appropriate from a purely chronological perspective and perhaps even a moral one, can never practically happen. Perhaps if they had lived three hundred years earlier when it was considered normal for children of Claudia's age to be married off? Perhaps if Louis had some spine? There's no happy answer to be had here.

You can feel the claustrophobia creep in from all the ragged edges of their lives. Claudia is strong and forceful - a sharply delineated counterpoint to the weak and vacillating Louis. She's the one who makes things happen and finally rids them of Lestat - or does she? This story does not end well for Claudia and we knew this all along, even if we wanted to hope for a better outcome for a juvenile vampire.

Ashley Marie Witter's story and art work are enjoyable. The art is simple and sepia toned, except for the blood, which makes it quite effective, even shocking at times. The vampire gore is restrained and sparse. I have issues with vampire stories which generally fail their own logic even within their own framework, which makes the stories truly dumb and unappealing to me. I have issues too, with two-hundred-year-old vampires finding anything of interest in a sixteen year old school girl, which is one reason I detest vampire stories in general. This one rather turned the tables on that, though. Instead of having a dirty old man lusting after a virginal juvenile (Edward, I'm looking at you, and don't you dare sparkle at me like that), this one went the opposite way and had a younger, but maturing vampire falling for an older one. I don't know how old Louis was, but the age difference between him and Claudia probably wasn't two hundred years!

There's another issue with vampires, too, which wasn't well handled here. They are eternally youthful, meaning that their cells regenerate. This is part of the canon, so it's fine insofar as it goes, but then in this story, Lestat gets injured and the injury failed to heal. I didn't get the 'logic' behind that. Those issues aside, though, I really enjoyed this retelling and I recommend it.

Vampire Academy graphic novel by Richelle Mead

Rating: WORTHY!

I favorably reviewed Vampire Academy (the original novel) back in May of 2014, and I favorably reviewed the movie, too. This is a third strike and you're in review since I liked this graphic novel, too.

I had no interest in the original print book version of 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. There was nothing to account for it other than religiously inspired stupidity. The first thing kids are going to do when they discover a novel is banned from school is to seek it out and read it!

This graphic novel, adapted by Leigh Dragoon and illustrated by Emma Vieceli, followed the original print book quite closely, but with a few necessary abbreviations, so I'm going to refer you to that review for details. With regard to this one, I enjoyed it. It was a fast read, well illustrated (if a little flatly) and it moved at a cracking pace. I recommend it, especially if you haven't read the novel.

Life Sucks by Jennifer Abel

Rating: WORTHY!

This graphic novel about vampires is hilarious. It deftly removes all the sickly sparkle from the modern genre (a sparkle which was never there in the early vampire stories save for the one written by John Polidori (The Vampyre), inspired on that famous night when Mary Shelley invented Frankenstein). In this story, there wasn't a glimmer of glamour. This one is more like a cross between Dracula and Clerks. The art work by the unlikely named Warren Pleece, and by Gabriel Soria was functional but nothing spectacular by any means. I wonder if this style was chosen precisely because it complemented the dressed-down" text? Who knows?!

The story is of a young man, Dave, who applied for a night shift job at a convenience store. He didn't know the store owner was a vampire, so went happily into the stock room where he was "turned" and became enslaved to his maker. I don't know who first invented that trope, but it is popular in the genre. Now the sort owner can get his employee to do anything he wants him to do for minimum wage and he can't be denied! Great business plan, huh? The sad thing is that from the employee's perspective, nothing has improved - it's all deteriorated. Dave doesn't get women fawning over him as vampires are popularly supposed to do. He still has to work for a living (so-called), and he used to be a vegetarian, so now his diet is appalling to him. He drinks plasma and substitutes, shrinking nauseously from the idea of actually biting someone. Un-life seems hardly worth living until he encounters a charming Goth girl, Rosa, a Latina.

Here's where the novel took a bit of a slide for me, because the only thing he (and his friends) have to say about the girl is that she's beautiful, so here we are once again objectifying women. Rosa is given no other credit. Admittedly the guy is lusting for her from afar and doesn't know her when the novel begins, and admittedly he's not the sharpest tack in the box, but this business of rating women solely on their looks is as primitive as it is obnoxious when you get right down to it. Graphic novels in particular need to get over this. In this case it was bad because Rosa is shown to be rather dumb and precipitous, so maybe they were right, and beauty is all she actually had going for her.

The funny thing here is that Rosa has a rather Twilight take on vampires and sees them as suave, sophisticated, wealthy dilettantes. She's unconvinced when Dave tries to educate her about how un-life actually is. Rosa starts falling for surfer vampire (now there's a concept) Wes, and Dave rails against it, pissing Rosa off, until she finds out for herself how Wes really is. Later, she learns of Dave's true nature. She wants him to turn her, but he won't, because he doesn't want to condemn her to his un-life style.

The ending is crappy, but it's worth putting up with that for the rest of the story. I recommend this as a worthy read.

This totally Bites by Ruth Ames

Rating: WARTY!

This short novel (~180 widely-spaced, large font pages), aimed at middle-graders, amused me greatly from reading the blurb. Reading the actual novel was a slightly different experience. Emma-Rose Paley is a middle-grader who weirdly dreams of red eyes watching her at night. I know authors don't have a darned thing to do with their book covers unless they self-publish (or maybe if it's a young children's story or a graphic novel where they illustrate it themselves), but I have to ask what this girl is dressing for on the cover of this book - not her age, that's for sure, and not to look Goth. Did the illustrator even know how old she was supposed to be? Who knows.

One thing which annoyed me was ER's description of her friend "Gabby" which is a tragic diminutive of the gorgeous full name of Gabrielle Marquez which she sports. Why it's Gabrielle and not Gabriela, I don't know. Gabby is, commendably, a vegetarian (we rarely see those in novels). The problem was that immediately my pleasant surprise arose, it was harshly slapped away. ER tells us that, just as Gabby puts up with ER's burger cravings, she puts up with Gabby's salads. What? The only thing a vegetarian can eat is a salad? I'm sorry but that's an insult and totally inappropriate. It's condescending and abusive, and I see this repeatedly in books which have a vegetarian character. If it's not salad, it's nut cutlets or something equally ridiculous. If the author were making this kind of 'fun' and hurling snide comments at a person because of their skin color or their sexual preference, would it be considered appropriate? Damn straight it wouldn't. So why do we get a bye when it comes to something like food preference?

It doesn't end there. "My BFF can be a bit annoying when she starts gushing about the wonders of bean sprouts" we read. Can we heap the clichés any higher? Yes, we can! "I can get you some tofu to practice on" Gabby says shortly afterwards. There's a difference between an author portraying a character as behaving in a certain way - even in being a bigot and a moron - and the author themselves shamelessly embracing attitudes which are at best ignorant, and at worst, downright insulting. I was not much of a fan of Ruth Ames after this, but I still had to try and read this novel, which wasn't turned out in the dark ages. It was published just five years ago. You would think people would be a little more accepting and enlightened.

When ER's great Aunt Margo visits, ER quickly determines, which unimpeachable evidence, that she's a vampire, and deduces from this that ER herself is also a vampire - or well on her way to becoming one. At least ER isn't dumb and clueless. That helped. Whether she was on the right track, or completely misinterpreting what was going on, remained to be discovered.

Whether she is or not, I'll leave for you to decide if you choose to read this, the first in a series. For me, the story improved after that early problem, and would have been rated a worthy read were it not for those insults. Kids are likely to enjoy it, but for me, I can't recommend it precisely because of the gratuitous condescension towards vegetarians. Yes, it does totally bite.

The Utterly Uninteresting and Unadventurous Tales of Fred, the Vampire Accountant by Drew Hayes

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a first person PoV novel which for me is usually worst person PoV. I don't like the person because it's usually done badly and gets in the way of telling a good story. Here's the author explaining what a poor choice of voice it was, at the start of a later chapter:

** Note: Since I was not present for Krystal's experience after she was taken from my apartment, she has requested to tell this part of the story in her own words, rather than have it relayed. Therefore, the next two chapters will recount a part of the tale I cannot vouch for, as I did not witness it firsthand.**

As it happens, the voice wasn't completely nauseating so obviously this author can write it, although first hand is two words, not one. If in doubt, dash it out: first-hand!

It takes chutzpah to try to hawk a novel which has the words "utterly uninteresting" embedded in the very title. Fred is an accountant. He's lackluster, timid, and was alternately bullied and ignored in high school, yet he elects to attend the ten-year reunion. He's fortunate that it's at night, because as a vampire, he cannot go out in daylight.

Despite enjoying eternal youth, endless longevity, and vampire 'super powers" such as strength and night vision, Fred is still retiring and intimidated by the school jocks and the school hotties. He does take satisfaction in knowing that as they age and wrinkle, and spread around the middle, he will continue to be slim, strong, and youthful. He contemplates a future where he could visit his nemesis in his retirement home just to make fun of him, but quickly decides he should probably just confine himself to dancing on his grave instead.

He doesn't expect to see any of his nerd acquaintances at the reunion - not friends, even, just acquaintances - so he's rather surprised when Krystal sits down beside him at his lonely table. He asks her about her work, and she promptly makes an excuse to go to the bathroom. He doesn't expect to see her again, but when the lights go out in the gym and he discovers the doors are locked, he makes his way up to the commentator's box high in the rafters to hide out, and he's surprised to find her trussed to a table up there.

He's even more surprised when she finally reveals that she works for a secret government agency which keeps paranormals under control, and he's more than disturbed to discover that the school reunion has been targeted by a hungry pack of werewolves.

This is the start of not so much a story, but a series of chronologically-ordered vignettes which are amusing, engrossing, inventive, original and self contained, although linked to one another. It was interesting to me to read this not only because it's original and offers a really interesting alternative take on vampires, but also because I reviewed a book containing a similar arrangement of stories recently. That book was so repetitive and uninventive that it was boring and not a worthy read. This one, even though it used a similar format, was quite the opposite.

That's not to say there were no issues with it. There are nearly always issues! The question is whether the author can offer you enough of a solid story to make the issues relatively unimportant when it comes to overall enjoyment. This author has an interesting way with words, and often that's fine, but in some cases I was wondering what he meant. "...[T]hat was not a burden with which I had been shouldered" is not good phraseology! "That was not a burden I was used to shouldering" would have made more sense.

In another case, I read, "Ah, the crux of vanity." I can see what he means, but shuddered to read it rendered like that. There were other cases where too many words were used. This is a case of using non-words like 'irregardless' when 'regardless' does perfectly fine. In this case, the author wrote: "...formerly abandoned church..." He meant an abandoned church. A formerly abandoned church is one which is now back in service (pun intended!). There was only one out-and-out spelling error that I noticed, which was "damndest", and which is missing an 'e', and one case of using the wrong word: "...which clearing wasn't feeding." I think he meant "which clearly wasn't feeding." One final one was "We tread slowly across the plush red carpet" when the author obviously meant "we trod".

A spell checker would have caught only a couple of these errors. You need a good editor or beta readers to catch the others. It wasn't all bad though, by any means. The writing in general was commendable and I enjoyed reading this. We get an object lesson in how to avoid using 'inch' as a verb, for example: "She pulled it inward inch by inch" (as opposed to "she inched it in" which is what a writer who loves English less than this author does might have fed their readers).

I was nonetheless disturbed to see yet another writer who is evidently convinced that you can't say 'female character' in your novel without qualifying it by adding "beautiful". We got: "I didn't have a lot of experience with beautiful women asking me out..." and "... it had certainly made her beautiful."

This was the main female character who had been some other sort of persona non grata in high school, and who had been evidently over-weight. How she managed to evidently slim down and turn beautiful post-high-school isn't explained, but the explanation I really wanted was why? Why could she not still be the nerd (or whatever she was) from school? Why did she have to be rendered "beautiful" to make her acceptable, thereby loudly instructing all the real girls who had high school experiences like hers, that they're really still losers because they're are not now slim and beautiful? It's an insult to women everywhere regardless of who they are and how they look. I wish writers wouldn't do this so routinely that it's become very nearly a rule.

That complaint aside, I did, as I've indicated, really warm to this story and to the characters. It moved quickly, told interesting and original stories, and was an engrossing read, so I rate it worthy regardless of the issues I've raised, while hooping for better in the next outing with this author!

The Lost Souls Dating Agency by Suneeti Rekhari

Title: The Lost Souls Dating Agency
Author: Suneeti Rekhari
Publisher: Escape Publishing
Rating: WORTHY!

There is a tiny prologue which I skipped as I do all prologues. If the author doesn’t think it worth putting into chapter one or later, I don’t think it’s worth reading. This is also a first person PoV novel which I normally detest because it’s all "Me!" all the time which is irritating at best. Some authors can make it work, but for most authors, it’s best avoided like the plague. This author makes it work. The story is short - only a hundred-fifty pages or so - divided into forty chapters, yet! The text is pretty densely packed, but it's a fast read.

What drew me to this novel was that the author was not another in a long line of US authors who think the US is the only place worth writing about! She's not US at all, but is of Indian descent and is resident in Melbourne, Australia. The main character, Shalini Gupta, is of Indian descent and is resident in Melbourne, Australia.... The novel flits very briefly from India to Dubai, and then on to Melbourne where Shalini now lives, attending college, while her uncle (not really - he adopted her and told her he was her uncle) remains in Dubai; then he goes missing!

My attraction to the novel in this case didn’t fail me. I loved the simple, matter-of-fact way it was written, and the perhaps slightly tongue-in-cheek acceptance of the paranormal by Shalini and her two friends Neha and Megan. Not only has Shalini inherited some money from her uncle, she has also inherited a mysterious empty warehouse which actually isn't far from her apartment. The warehouse is old and run-down, but she feels compelled to clean it up. The only thing in there is a weird clock which is immovably attached to one of the walls. And the time is wrong.

As she's trying to figure out what to do with the place, a newspaper begins mysteriously appearing in he building each Saturday. Shalini quickly realizes that this is a supernatural newspaper, and she posts an ad in it advertising the warehouse as a dating agency for supernatural beings! Her first client soon shows up: Victor the cranky vampire. This part was hilarious. In fact the whole Victor thing is really amusing. Get this, for example (and keep in mind that Victor's a vampire):

'Bloody hell, Victor, you scared me! It’s daytime! How are you here?'
'I drove.'

I laughed out loud at that. Note the single quotes which Brit and Aussie novels tend to sport to demarcate speech. They look weird to me, and I grew up in Britain! Anyway, no more spoilers. Shalini takes on three cases, and gets deeper into the supernatural than ever she feels safe doing, but she meets some startling and interesting people along the way.

Be warned that this has a cliffhanger ending - it's obviously the start of a series, and I'm typically not a fan of series, but I'm not averse to reading more of this one!

The Reluctant Vampire by Eric Morecambe

Title: The Reluctant Vampire
Author: Written and illustrated by Eric Morecambe
Publisher: Harper Collins
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. The chance to read a new novel is reward aplenty!

Eric Morecambe died in 1984 at the relatively youthful age of 58 - that's what a lifetime smoking habit will do to you. Paired with Ernie Wise, the twosome formed the most popular pair of entertainers in Britain in the 1970s. Their annual Xmas TV show was always brilliant and hilarious and had a huge following. It held very much the same place that the Doctor Who Xmas specials do now, although even Doctor Who doesn't pull in anywhere near as big an audience as Morecambe and Wise drew.

I got this book thinking it was a graphic novel, paying no attention to the author's name and not even realizing it was by the Eric Morecambe. When I saw the name on the cover, I thought it was maybe his son, or just someone who shared the name. Even wikipedia doesn't mention it, so I was really thrilled that I’d stumbled into a chance to read it.

The story is of a doctor who is called in to cure the son, Valentine, of the ruling vampire of Ketchem, or he will be completely liquidized and sent home in a children's beach bucket. The story has overtones of Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein, as you'll note as soon as you meet Igon, the vampire's assistant, who has only one eye. It's also a bit reminiscent of Spike Milligan's writing. The way it’s written will work for grown-ups or for children.

The castle servant's name is Des O'Connor backwards. Des O'Connor is an English singer and comedian who has pretty much retired now (and earned it!), but who appeared on the Morecambe and Wise show many times. The story begins with the doctor being called to the castle to fix Valentine's attack of the 'vampire vapors', but after a lot of farce, the Doctor learns that Valentine isn’t actually a vampire! Mystery and intrigue - but it all turns out well in the end!

I loved this story because the humor was completely off-the-wall, yet the story still hung together comfortably. There was a plot, and a beginning, a middle, and an end. I laughed a lot and enjoyed reading it. The fact that this story has to be at the very least thirty years old isn't apparent from the writing. It could have been written yesterday. I recommend it, and if you like it, there's a sequel: The Vampire's Revenge.

Dresden Files: War Cry graphic novel by Jim Butcher & Mark Powers

Title: Dresden Files: War Cry
Author: Jim Butcher & Mark Powers
Publisher: Dynamite Entertainment
Rating: WARTY!
Pencils by Carlos Gomez
Colors by Mohan
Letters by BillTortolini
Cover by Stjepan Sejic

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. The chance to read a new book is reward aplenty!

I have to say up front that while I am a huge fan of Jim Butcher's Codex Alera hexalogy, I've never been a fan of his Dresden Files series. I've heard bits and pieces of it in the car as my wife listened to it on trips, but it never appealed to me. It’s not that it’s bad writing per se, it’s just that this kind of thing in general doesn’t appeal to me because it's so larded with trope and cliché that it bores the pants off me, and you know the main character is never really going to get into deadly danger because that's the series over.

I decided to give this one a go for two reasons: firstly, because it's often a lot easier for me to like a graphic novel or comic book than it is to like a novel on the same topic, especially when the novel is written in first person PoV. I can't stand 1PoV because it’s all ME! all the time and that just sucks majorly unless it’s very well done, and it rarely is. So the second reason was that this isn't 1PoV.

Unfortunately, I began running into problems on page two where we're told that there's a war being waged between humans and vampires which has been going on for "nigh on a century", which only tells me that we’re losing, and that our side sucks. How this is even a secret war when it’s fought in the streets between a loan swordsman (or a paltry handful of such) and a literal hoard of vampire animals, is a mystery!

What, in "nigh on a century" no one has noticed the clashing of swords, the masses of spilled blood, the snarling vampires, and the damage to property? And if this is the 21st century, why are we still fighting with swords? The vampires are using Sarin gas and we’re fighting with swords? Seriously? No wonder we’re losing. It’s this kind of thing which makes this truly suck for me, so I was really having doubts about this and I was only on page two! I don’t know Mark Powers, but I expect much better writing than this from Jim Butcher.

The next thing that happens is that Dresden's old VW bug car breaks down. This guy is a wizard and he can’t fix a car? So they're walking through the snow in Iowa, and even though we're shown the setting sun, their shadows make it look like it’s about ten am or two pm. At least in Iowa, unlike in the primitive backwater town Palermo, they have automatic weapons, which seem to do the trick, but this just reinforces my point from earlier, and it makes a more powerful one: if this is all it takes, then why isn't the military involved? Why do we need wizards?

Well I figured out why we need the wizards - it’s so we can have someone make really dumb-ass puns while they're out-numbered and being attacked. Seriously? It’s hard enough to make a novel sound realistic when you have fantasy creatures in it as it is. Does it really make it sound more authentic when you have some moron making cheap and lousy wise-cracks while the team is fighting for its life? Not for me it doesn’t.

And what’s with the women all wearing skimpy skirts the size of large belts, with two of them having slits up the thigh (one of which is almost to her hip). Seriously? And of course the males all wear the pants? There is one exception - a female who wears pants, but then she has a saber and cloak, so she's still a fantasy object. I know that comic book graphics are traditionally biased towards objectifying women, but I live in hopes that we can get a measure or two past that in 2014. I guess those hopes are not much of a place to live yet, huh?

And what are they protecting in this house in the middle of Iowa? A shoggoth - a fantasy beast that looks remarkably like a dragon, and which consumes sentient beings. The vamps (who also wise-crack) want to to unleash it and create carnage on Earth - thereby wiping out their own food supply. Yep. These vampires are suicidal. Seriously?

It was at this point that I decided that this comic book was too stupid to live. The one thing I can say in its favor is that the images (which are standard comic book art) use the whole page as opposed to being a tiny image in the middle of a vast white space which would be a sad waste of trees in the print version. That aside, though, I found no redeeming features in this novel. It's not so much Dynamite Entertainment as Squib Scribblings.