Undead And Unemployed by MaryJanice Davidson

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dracula by Bram Stoker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Undead and Unwed by MaryJanice Davidson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gideon Smith and the Mechanical Girl By David Barnett

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sour Lake: Or, the Beast by Bruce McCandless

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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