The Reformed Vampire Support Group - Catherine Jinks
Vampires are meant to be so glamorous and powerful, but I'm here to inform you that being a vampire is nothing like that. Not one bit. On the contrary, it's like being stuck indoors with the flu watching daytime television, forever and ever.
I own, but haven't yet read, another book by Catherine Jinks: Evil Genius, about a school for training supervillains. So just from that I knew that her take on vampires would be a little more amusing, a little less earnest than the latest fashions in vampire lore: sexy, beautiful vampires who fall in love with humans and have exciting super-powered battles. This, my friends, is no Twilight.
Nina is a vampire, who is stuck at age fifteen, when she was infected. The problem, though, is that she's really fifty years old and is tired of being treated like a child. She and several other vampires are part of the Reformed Vampire Support Group. They meet regularly to talk about being vampires and to encourage each other not to attack humans. On the whole, they're a pretty pitiful bunch. Weak, totally useless during the day, and for the most part poor. After all, how do you get a useful job if you're a vampire?
Then one day Casimir, the oldest vampire (whom nobody really liked anyway) turns up dead in his coffin, staked through the heart and, for good measure, shot with a silver bullet. Clearly his killer is a little over-enthusiastic, but it sends the vampires into a panic. When they try to track down this vampire slayer, they wind up (of course) in over their heads in something much bigger.
I suppose it wouldn't be too much of a spoiler to say that there are werewolves who turn up (and one of them is sexy) and there is some adventure and swashbuckling, but for the most part Jinks plays with the conventions and is not writing for Stephenie Meyers' fans. Rather, if you're one of the people who finds the Twilight phenomenon really annoying, you're probably more the target audience for this book.
It's not fantastic literature by any means, but it was an entertaining summer read, and maybe a temporary antidote to that other vampire series.
Fed to jonathan's brain | July 31, 2009
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