Garlic, sunshine, and holy water have no effect on him, and he doesn’t just suck blood—he devours human bodies completely. However, he does have a human girlfriend, Norine, and is actually quite fond of her. But when a criminal organization attempts to kidnap her for a forced prostitution ring, he decides to destroy them. In the process, he finds out that they have a rival organization and takes his vendetta to them as well—and when Norine is killed, he goes after anyone and everyone he deems responsible, from humans to other vampires. Can he destroy his enemies, or at least find a place where he can be satisfied in his revenge?
The vampires in this story are not sexy, or charismatic, or vulnerable—only cutting off their heads can kill them. This makes them rather more gritty and realistic-feeling, less romantic and sparkly, which may be a necessary correction to a somewhat-over-romanticized genre. The first-person perspective here gives the impression of putting the reader in the head of a psychopath, who has no moral qualms or fear of violence whatsoever. At least initially, that’s a very creepy effect.
However, as the book goes on, it becomes clear that a psychopath with no real emotional depth is not interesting to read about, however bizarre or disturbing his actions. The protagonist in this book uses the same flat, monotonous narrative tone to describe going out for hamburgers, adopting a dog, having sex, or devouring someone’s eyeball in front of them, and this lack of emotional variation becomes tiresome very quickly. This is not helped by the author’s inclusion of large amounts of unimportant and irrelevant detail, such as the patterns in ceiling tiles or a random drinking contest with strangers who aren’t part of the story and never show up again.
There is very little plot to this book, beyond a series of brutal and relatively pointless murders, very little suspense, no character until the very end who’s any match for the protagonist, nor any real weakness to handicap him, and no strategy on his part beyond “find people, fight them, kill them horribly, then repeat again and again.” Additionally, it’s rather hard to sympathize with or care about anyone in the book—the only major character in the book who isn’t an amoral, brutal, murdering thug is Norine, and she’s dating one. The author’s phrasing tends to be clumsy and overly formal, such as “I stepped back to see if I could define the subtle taste that evaded the descriptive words of my vocabulary, ignoring Waters as he muttered words professing me a cannibal” and the author has a tendency to mix up homophones, using, for example, “peeked” for “piqued,” “peaking” for “peeking,” “vile” for “vial,” and, most oddly, “strait” for the much more common “straight.”
Though the characters lack emotional variability, this book offers a strikingly gritty portrayal of vampires.
~IndieReader.