The Reformed Vampire Support Group -- Catherine Jinks
Vampires. It's been hard to avoid them over the last few years, what with their sparkly skin and their super strength and speed and extra-sensory powers, amazingly good looks and ability to sell 80 bazillion books without breaking a sweat or breathing hard. (Or breathing at all, for that matter.)
Nina Harrison is here to tell us the truth about being a vampire.
Being a vampire isn't the slightest bit sexy. Or exciting. Or fun. Every Tuesday night, she has to go to a meeting of The Reformed Vampire Support Group and listen to a bunch of sickly vamps whinge on and on about their monotonous lives. That, and she gets lectured about how her Nadia Blackstone novels are propagating unhelpful and unfair myths about vampires, thus making their existence more dangerous. This has been her life for 25 years, since 1973, when she was fanged at age fifteen.
The mysterious slaying of a fellow support group member is scary, yes. But it's also exciting. Because now, with a few of the other members of the group, she's going to track down the killer.
I was really excited about this one, because it sounded like such a fun take on the vampire genre and just so different from what's been cluttering up my shelves and floor and mailbox lately. And because I loved the cover art.
I still love the cover art. Actually, I like it even more after having read the book.
The inside of the book didn't do a whole lot for me. Yeah, it was a cool idea, and I get that the repetitiveness of Nina's existence was very probably deliberate because that's how she felt about her life and as she was telling the story, that'd be expected to come through, BUT that kind of repetition doesn't make for much entertainment value. For me, anyway.
I never really felt much of anything for the characters. While I read, I wasn't particularly concerned about their safety and mostly distracted because I couldn't figure out if Dave (a vamp in the support group) was in lurrrve with Nina or if he was secretly her long-lost, unknown father. (Actual biological father, not her sire. She knows who to blame her vampirism on.) I was very surprised when, at the end of the book, the answer to that question made me smile -- that reaction suggested that I cared more than I thought I did. Despite that, when I closed the book, I had no desire to open it again. Or to revisit Nina & Co. at another time for another adventure.
All of that isn't to say that there aren't good things about the book -- I enjoyed seeing how Catherine Jinks played with the conventions of the genre (Horace alone made the book ultimately worthwhile for me) and the writing is smart. And quite often witty.
But I still didn't find it ultimately enjoyable. My lack of emotional attachment, as I said, was the main issue -- hardly any of the characters were particularly likable (whining gets really old really fast, and most of them do a lot of it) and hardly any of the characters were all that interesting* -- but I also felt like Nina just told, told, told me the story, rather than letting me experience it. This book is similar in a lot of ways to the Evil Genius books (tone and style, crazy plot twists), but I felt that there was much more to Cadel and his co-stars than to any of the characters in this one.
_________________________________________________________________________
*I can do unlikable if I'm trying to understand what makes someone tick. But if the inner workings of the mind and heart are pretty apparent from minute one, there isn't much to figure out.
_________________________________________________________________________
Previously: