SANTA IS A VAMPIRE damian serbu

This story is basically a set of conversations that show how the whole Santa mythos is a front for a narcissistic murdering vampire.  It is borderline Bizarro genre which is going to limit the audience for it dramatically.  It is also packaged in a way that I think many readers will misunderstand, leaving them confronted with something much more offensive and less plot-driven than they were expecting—and while clever, completely without charm.

For strength of concept, and assuming the right audience, I am giving the story a good rating.  But I think it will attract many more reviews that are negative and disgusted, and not without reason.  A few blood spots on a “rom com”-esque cover is not enough to warn people about a fowl-mouthed shallow alcoholic protagonist and a story in which almost nothing happens but when it does it involves poop, private parts and child murder.

Enter at your own risk.

Review copy courtesy of Netgalley, 4/5

ALL THE DOGS ARE DANCING j m goguen

ALL THE DOGS ARE DANCING is an absolute triumph in terms of world building.  The post-apocalyptic North America that Burner and Aaron traverse has texture, beauty, foreboding, strange perils, deep history, and layers that give it a strange plausibility despite being fill with roaming lions, bands of human cannibals, werewolf fight clubs, and terrifying deadwalkers.

Burner has a great deal of charm as a protagonist and the planned future alpha of his pack--which makes a peaceful subsistence living  migrating back and forth across the re-wilded countryside and staying away from the cities which are largely dystopian nightmares.

The plot, however… well.  It starts off as a risky rescue mission but quickly becomes a disorganized zigzag across the country punctuated by torture, explosions, more torture, and more explosions.  While Burner and Aaron instigate a few situations they spend the latter half of the story largely being rescued by more influential individuals.  The author makes use of some pretty huge coincidences, a couple of info-dumps, and the story eventually just peters out without anything in the way of an obvious conclusion.

This story is also very much a “with romantic elements” rather than a romance, but the charms of the main characters are undeniable and they do get a happily-ever-at-least-for-a-while. but it’s kind of a bittersweet one compared to the life Burner was living in chapter one. I found the entire book wildly original and entertaining but hope that in her future endeavors the author decides to focus more on blending these aspects with a plot that properly resolves by the end.

That said the vampires-by-another-name in the story are a truly novel take on the vampire idea in their origins, attributes, and philosophies. Goguen has mastered the art of not over-explaining how the supernatural-esque elements of the novel work, and they stand apart for the cliches that are now so common.  That alone makes me inclined to see what else this author may have written and look for opportunities to return to this dark world.

Review copy courtesy of Netgalley, 2/5

VICTORIAN VAMPIRE romance pup

VICTORIAN VAMPIRE has a lot of exciting supernatural and gothic elements, but nevertheless manages to be a fairly dull read. It is a full length novel but the prose is quite flat, the scenes disjointed, and the overall impression is of the story written once-through hastily with limited thought and research—but trying to hit a lot of popular tropes.

Our heroine Tabitha seems to spend very little time being a governess, let alone filling the role as would be expected in the Victorian era when your employer is a member of the nobility. In her various wanderings she manages to attract three suitors, one vanishes from the story without much explanation about why he was there in the first place, the other two are a sorcerer and a vampire. There is a disjointed story that involves Tabitha wandering down quite a few dark alleys and finding murderous monsters, and also repeatedly entertaining bachelor men unchaperoned. Anachronisms about.

If you aren’t worried about any kind of plausibility you might find this to be an entertaining read with the requisite romance happy ending. For me, I think I would have preferred it if Tabitha’s antics lead to a more realistic and unfortunate end and the vampire ended up with her employer, the lusty Lady Irene, instead.

Review copy courtesy of HiddenGems, 1/5, #Yawn

THE VAMPIRE’S MASQUERADE Kiersten fay

Based on the blurb I expected THE VAMPIRE’S MASQUERADE to be a dual point-of-view story, when actually it is told entirely from Kasima.  The romance is quite straightforward and mainly impeded by the hero and heroine hesitating to express their level of commitment—which is understandable given the overall context of the story.  The author does a good job of filling in the world-building and introducing characters from the first book (which I have not read).

The vampire mythos itself is not especially interesting with standard romance vampires (a.k.a. hot vampire super-heroes with no real problems from their condition) but I did like the back-history of the civil war between humans and vampires after the vampire’s were outed. Honestly, I might have preferred a more gritty story from this time period rather than a largely cozy romance set in what seems like a very comfortable community doing well after the reconstruction. THE VAMPIRE’S MASQUERADE is not an overly complex story but emotionally gratifying and engaging throughout mainly due to Kasima’s likeability. 

Review copy courtesy of Netgalley, 6/10 #SuperheroVampire

MASKED LONGING alana delacroix

MASKED LONGING is a vampire adventure-romance executed with professional polish.  The vampires are of the super-hero type with all the speed, strength, psychic ability and longevity advantages but really none of the disadvantages.   Estelle is assuming the duties as the most important vampire queen’s head of military/security.

This story is clearly part of a series and the author does a pretty good job of getting the reader up to speed, except for taking a very long time to explain that the masquerada, our hero Stephen being one, are equally long lived human-to-human shapeshifters.  Both heroine and hero have hundreds of years of baggage that is getting in the way of them getting together romantically, and there is also an inconvenient war going on.

Generally I am a huge fan of a romance where the female is more alpha than the male.  However at about the half way point of the book Estelle makes a horrendous decision that involves deserting her duties and gets a bunch of people she is responsible for killed—an outcome she has a passing one sentence of regret about.  Having no respect whatsoever for the heroine meant that the sudden resolution of the previously crippling emotional barriers to love, in the last few pages of the book, didn’t really have the impact it was probably meant to.

A review copy was provided courtesy of Netgalley, 2/5

MOVIE: Byzantium

Another vampire movie to appear recently on Netflix is BYZANTIUM.  In theory this film should be bowed down by he weight of its tired old tropes of first love, coming of age, mother/daughter strife and braided present-and-past storylines.  Yet somehow the quality of the screenplay and acting, and downbeat but atmospheric look of the movie carry it through.

It may help that vampirism gives both the length of time and the stakes to make melodramatic behavior of the leads believable motivations.  Mother vampire seeks a quiet life of transient prostitution to conceal her daughter from an ancient threat she has never fully explained to the girls. Daughter seeks a more refined and respectable lifestyle and yearns to tell someone, perhaps her new quasi-boyfriend, the truth about who she really is.

Both backstory and current conflict come to a crux on a dark pier, where both heroines will be either destroyed or transformed.

See also

IMDB

Rotten Tomatoes

Wikipedia

MOVIE The Unwanted (2014)

I started watching this movie on Netflix without having any idea what I was about, and I suspect that is the best way to watch it.  Then the vampire twist part way through, while somewhat foreshadowed, is still rather surprising and pleasantly shocking.

Hannah Fierman is the stand out performer as Laura, the young woman fascinated by the drifter Carmilla (Kristen Orr in an understated performance). William Kat is the least convincing, chewing the scenery as Laura's semi-psychotic father.

The movie works in its own right as a modern gothic, ad is also a retelling (rather loosely) of Carmilla that vampire aficionados will appreciate.  The movie starts rather slow but the narrative and cinematography built towards an evocative and visually compelling ending.

Highly recommended.

Trailer

Links: IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes.

Leech Women and Monkey Glands

In this 1960 movie a woman discover how to rejuvenate herself by killing men to extract material from their pineal glands.

The idea that dramatic rejuvenation was possible using simple extracts had been quite popular in the 1920s, and this movie represents its last gasp.

A French physician named Serge Voronoff felt that testicles could be transplanted to return youth to men. His experiments included both human and animal subjects. He claimed that grafting young testicles onto older donors not only increased vigor but could combat dementia. The practice of having "monkey glands" implanted in various ways became wildly, if briefly, popular amongst wealthy men.

These efforts were eventually ridiculed and any benefits attributed to the placebo effect. And Voronoff accelerated his downfall by undertaking in creasingly bizarre experiemtns such as trying to ineminte a monkey with human sperm. However, his work did pave the way for more productive transplant surgery and the discovery of testosterone--and he certainly inspired a great deal of speculative fiction.

"The Leech Woman" plays on Voronoffs masculinist focus in a strange way in that the female "leech" must have male donors and meets her downfall when extracting the material she needs from a woman.


See also:

• Internet Movie Database
• Wikipedia

THE VAMPIRE PROJECT Ashley Keogh

If The Vampire Project had been the first chapter of a book I would have been very enthusiastic about it. A vampire child I captured and taken to a research center.  There are intriguing hints that her refusal to eat human flesh may have made her special.

However the story just ends without any real resolution, which is disappointing. That said, it is free on Amazon and might be a good way to sample the author's work, although to what purpose I am not sure as she has not other titles on sale.

1/5

THE DOG NEXT DOOR AND OTHER DISTURBANCES m lopes da silva

This short story collection opens with a vampire tale that is fist deep in the sex/death overtones of vampire myth. The rest of the stories have a similarly perverse and thoughtful tone.  Some are more successful than others but all are worth the time spent reading them. 

Perhaps the simplest of the stories are the ones that will stick with me the longest. The Chipperlee Chair portrays a future where life extending AI is believably banal and imperfect.  Something Better shows how a monstrous mother may not be quite the complete villain she appears. And 'the dog next door' from the title turns a the typical boy-meets-dog stories in a rather twisted direction.

Overall every story displays a genuinely creepy imaginative concept to good advantage. While the characters are often recognizable types they are refreshingly unstereotyped. In fact the implicit misogyny often found in the work of developing horror writers is turned deftly on its head.

Overall I would consider this collection a qualified success, enough to put this author on my "will buy" list when it comes to future works.

3.5/5

Available on Kindle

HOW TO EAT A HUMAN BEING dan dillard

How to Eat a Human Being is an anthology of one poem and six short stories. The poem is fresh and funny and launches you into the collection.  Many of the stories have a Stephen King-like tone and set up a great scenario, but the pay offs are a little weak.

There is a bit of a recurring theme of hero who starts off a bit unlikeable, and end up damned, and women who are either perfect wives or dissolute sluts.  One story called 'Stray' was very effective perhaps because it broke that mold, but it was little over-explained at the end. Overall, an interested if rough-hewn collection.

Now actual vampires in this one, but everyone needs some variety in their life.

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.

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.