EMOTIONALLY CHARGED selina fenech

An unremarkable teen girl learns that she can turn other people's emotions into super-speed and strength.  Like any superhero story a team turns up to take her in, but it turns out they aren't the heroes she expects.

Emotionally charged is a novella, about 25,000 once you deduct the sample from another book that makes up about ten percent of the pages.  I think it had some pacing issues in that it started slow and ended suddenly. It starts like team drama, is more like an adventure in the middle, and romance in the end. 

But overall the writing is strong and the story engaging after the suspicious super-team appear on the scene. It hits on a few mild but worthy themes such as what true heroism is and where to get true self-esteem. However the ethics of draining or blocking emotion go largely unexamined other than some obvious conclusions about how the resulting power should be used. [3/5]

EMBRACED BY THE SHADOWS mayra calvani (Twilight Times Books)

Alana is a fantasy heroine in more ways that one. For a starts she a stunning twenty-two year old red-head with curly hair to her waist. But also the book opens with her starting her first job as a restaurant manager, her only qualification a bachelor's in philosophy, and the day before opening she is hanging out in her apartment and having drinks with her friends (not going crazy over last minute arrangements and taking a crash course in hospitality and accounting). And then the restaurant closes at midnight and the "manager" immediately leaves to go dancing with her friend and get drunk. If that isn't a fantasy world, I don't know what is. Meanwhile her best friend is "secretly" seeing a married man... by openly frequenting a hot nightclub with him on opening night. 

But never mind. If that sort of thing doesn't bother youthis is a nice retelling of the engenue and vampire trope. the plot progresses a little jumpily with leaps in time that I a not sure are meant to read as hours or days or just be completely non-linear.  But essentially Alana thinks she is sleep-walking and having hot dreams.  When of course she is really having not entirely consensual vampire-style lovin'. Sadash the vampire alternates between frightening, seducing and saving Alana like a good super-alpha-male should.

One part of this books I really appreciated was the very uncompromising approach to immortality which sets this story apart from the usual 'vampire as superpowers with fangs' romances. There are little flashes of subtlty like:

"Remember what you told me. The Devil is also an angel."
"Was."

The story gets more complex in the second half. A strange love, a twisted friendship, a murder mystery. It also develops some implausible elements, like a gunshot at a party that nobody hears. Overall there is more to like than dislike in this story but it is an untidy melange of cliched and novel, romance and mystery, and a plot that seems to wander at times as if the author's intent changed as the story progressed.  That is why 'Embraced by the Shadows" ends up with a 3/5.

LEECH david eveleigh

Playwright Jean Kerr once said “I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want - an adorable pancreas?”. But in the word of leech by David Eveleigh, vampire-like beings see, smell and hear humans inside and out—and so have very different notions of beauty. Thus reluctant paparazzi photographer “just pretty” Maria, becomes an unfortunate participant--and ultimately pawn--in a game of wits between a brave private investigator and an evil vampire king.

Leech is really a fairly straightforward horror/adventure story with a hero, hero’s girl, villain and minions and a small cast of secondary characters. It flirts with more adventurous themes such as what really makes one a parasite, but never gets very far into them. It toys with taking a new angle on vampires but uses them ultimately as a stock embodiment of evil. It strays somewhat into romance territory with the unusual decision to have Maria be the point of view character for much of the middle of the book, but its culmination of the story is the triumph of hero over villain not love over adversity.

Leech is a very readable vampire novel with hints of greater ambitions but, in my estimation, the different between good and great is the willingness to take at least one major risk. Any one of Leech’s more novel elements could have represented an exciting departure from tried and true tropes of the genre, if pursued just a little further.

3/5

New Release: Other Side of Night: Bastian & Riley Series: Other Side of Night by S.L. Armstrong & K. Piet

Out today: Other Side of Night: Bastian and Riley by S.L. Armstrong and K. Piet (Storm Moon Press)

"Vampires walk among us. For centuries, they have adapted, learning to pass undetected in our world. They no longer fear the day, only the sting of direct sunlight. They are students, bankers, lawyers, and even actors. But when the sun goes down, they are all united by their eternal thirst. We do not see them from our safe and comfortable side of the night. But sometimes, one of us is drawn away from the light and we cross into their world. Into the other side of night."

Vampire as Baby/Baby as Vampire

One of the most interesting theories about the essential nature of the vampire comes to use from Lloyd Worley at the University of Northern Colorado.  Worley identifies the vampire as one of the stock mythical figures of the our culture.  Something that is changeable on the surface but derived from an enduring and fundamental fear.

 

Worley proposes that the the vampire somehow springs from our feelings about fetuses and babies.  The fetus, after all, is sustained directly by its mother's blood for none months.  While young babies are active throughout the night and demand nourishment directly from their mother's body. 

 

References:

• Worley L (1991). The Prenatal and Natal Foundations of the Vampire Myth. International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts.