Buffy 2.0

Warner is planning a remake of the Buffy movie. Joss Whedon is not involved.

IN SEARCH OF DRACULA raymond mcnally and radu florescu

This is the 1994 edition of a book that was first published in 1989 as 'Dracula, prince of many faces: his life and his times'.  Most of the book focused on the historical figure of Vlad Tepes and his connection to the character of Dracula.  There is a lot of information and some helpful grey scale illustration.

The main limitation of this volume is it's rather haphazard structure which seems to relate more to how the authors discovered the material than how a reader might want to assimilate it.  The later section on vampire fiction and movies in general is already hopelessly out of date.  This is no long an area where effective comprehensive coverage is really possible.

This book might be a little tiresome for a casual Dracula enthusiast, good for a more dedicated one, but lacking the rigor and referencing a true expert would demand.


3/5

THE VAMPIRE WITH THE PINK HANDBAG sharee greene

I wanted to like The Vampire with the Pink Handbag, I really did. It is gay fiction, it has vampires--two of my favorite things. Oriole, a unfeasibly gorgeous male teenage vampire is going to a school specifically for vampires for the first time. He immediately becomes friends with two vampire girls, Jamie and Pear. He also immediately gets caught up in a tumultuous romantic relationship with another boy called Josh, and entangled in Josh's mysterious connection with two other powerful teen vampires, Roland and, um, Rayon. (Yes, a sexy mind-reading vampire named after a cheap synthetic fiber).

My first stumbling block was that none of the characters are very nice. They behave erratically and several of the 'love interest' males are extremely abusive, violent, judgemental, unfaithful and controlling. But that's fine so long as they love you, apparently. I get that vampires in this world are slow to mature and at the mercy of a turbo-charged form of adolescence, but that doesn't mean I find their melodramatic dialogue and sexual violence acceptable and entertaining. (By contrast Edward Cullen starts to look like a sensitive new age metrosexual.)

I suppose I could have gone with the premise and content of the book if the writing and formatting had allowed me to get swept up in the hyper-hormonal world of vampire college. Unfortunately Ms. Greene's prose is feels like it needs some time to mature. The narrative seems more focused on costume than motivation, and is rife with shifting points of view and jarring word choices. Add to that the lack of right justification and spacing between paragraphs that ranges from none to four of five lines for no apparent reason, and reading this book became something of a chore.

The Vampire with the Pink Handbag is a reasonable and timely idea for a teen vampire novel but it fails in the execution, quickly becoming a mire of head hopping and bed hopping lacking either the style or narrative momentum needed to make this a book a pleasure to read.

2/5

Cross-posted with POD People

BE STILL MY VAMPIRE HEART Kerrelyn Sparks

I like a good vampire trope as much as the next gal, but I do have my limits.  A red-haired Scottish vampire in a kilt is kind of pushing it.  Especially as he is meant to be 500 years old but treats the late Victorian costume kilt as if it was authentic.

That said the vampire hero is funny and charming, and the mortal slayer heroine is ironic and independent.  The romance between them is amusing enough, although the ending is even more of a forgone conclusion than usual and the adventure sub-plot is thin-to-non-existent.

Overall I would give this a 3/5.