Tuesday, September 16, 2008
You can eat me but don't bite me
Jeri Smith-Ready: Wicked Game (2008)
The short blurb for this book enticed me to click through an ad on someone's blog. That's how I read a humorous vampire novel in the vampire/goth, "urban fantasy" sub genre of the women's romance novel genre; If that's what Wicked Game is. The novel appears to be targeted at women in their late-teens to-late 20's with broad tastes in party music. I can ask a friend at Romantic Times for an explanation, but why bother? Unlike the romance market, the female P.I. books I consume have large male & female readerships & very little sex even when the protagonists have current intimate relationships.
The premise that grabbed me: A young woman, Ciara Griffin - a con artist trying to go straight, takes a job at a struggling radio station in a Maryland college town. Although the station reaches D.C. & Baltimore, it is small market, & the owner plans on selling it to a notorious media conglomerate unless the ad revenues are increased, & quickly. During the day, the station programs syndicated talk radio crap. But from 9 pm to 6 am it offers superb, authentic genre music by its house DJs: blues, Fifties, reggae, Sixties, goth, grunge/punk. The reason those DJs are so good is because they're all vampires, frozen in the musical eras they inhabited at the time they became vampires.
The vampires are also psychologically stunted, unable to grow culturally or intellectually, slowly becoming ever more distant from the real world; this is what ultimately undermines a vampire's desire to go on existing. These DJ vampires reside in the basement of the station building, have routine, unexciting lives, feeding themselves through an underground network of humans who get an erotic thrill having their blood sucked every two or three weeks. The station's owner, an independent middle-age woman, is also a vampire, & perhaps the most complex & intriguing character in the book. She would be worth a book of her own, but alas, she meets a tragic end.
That's enough for me; lots of plot challenges. Add a romance with the grunge DJ , the youngest in real years, who fits the mold of a handsome, troubled, slightly bad boy studmuffin/hero. Smith-Ready goes way beyond that, to a commune - a nest really - of conservative bloodsuckers preferring invisibility & stirred to violent opposition by our station intern's success at promoting her DJs as vampires - knowing listeners will believe it's just a marketing ploy, convincing the DJs to do outside gigs (only at night, of course), & making the station profitable. There's also the return of her dad, a grifter recently released from prison; & a quasi-governmental agency charged with keeping track of America's vampire population &, if necessary, killing the rogues. It's all very silly stuff, although the vampire commune is well described & chilling; they keep a herd of humans who supply blood in exchange for having all their basic needs satisfied. It is made clear that some of these humans had terrible lives before they found the vampires, so the lifestyle is an improvement, but one they aren't free to leave. It's a kind of cult faith-based charity. There are a few interesting conceptual tweaks of vampire personality, needs, & physiology, particularly the graphic descriptions of what occurs when a vampire is staked or decapitated; think black hole. The supernatural, superpower qualities are still there, but played down. Ciara is educated, creative, self-assuredly hip, not fearless, but her background gives her an advantage, & she takes deserved revenge on another woman, using her as a pawn in an elaborate con.
Except for some blood-sucking encounters straddling PG-13 & R, there's only two major sex scenes in the book, of which the first is by far the best. Ciara, her judgment clouded by horniness, beds hunky Shane, the grunge DJ. He's going down on her & she' s having a splendid time when Shane finds the inside of her thigh even more irresistible than the parts he's tickling, & bites her. Of course, Ciara reacts angrily, kicking him away, not realizing his fangs are curved, & gets so torn up she needs stitches. If she'd stayed still while he retracted his vampire teeth, she'd only have suffered small punctures that would've healed quickly. But he was a bad lover. This sets their budding relationship back a bit, since she's in pain for several subsequent chapters. By the end, he's learned some boudoir manners. What are Ciara's long term prospects for love with vampire? Most likely she'll become bored with him.
Smith-Ready is building a niche marketing scheme around Wicked Game, turning it into a series, not her first series or scheme. She's a smart popular novelist. Although I'll never be a fan of her books, I appreciate her savvy management, unobjectionable tastes in music, offbeat humor, & good looks. You need humor to do vampire, it need not be campy. Anne Rice is tediously unfunny.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
The short blurb for this book enticed me to click through an ad on someone's blog. That's how I read a humorous vampire novel in the vampire/goth, "urban fantasy" sub genre of the women's romance novel genre; If that's what Wicked Game is. The novel appears to be targeted at women in their late-teens to-late 20's with broad tastes in party music. I can ask a friend at Romantic Times for an explanation, but why bother? Unlike the romance market, the female P.I. books I consume have large male & female readerships & very little sex even when the protagonists have current intimate relationships.
The premise that grabbed me: A young woman, Ciara Griffin - a con artist trying to go straight, takes a job at a struggling radio station in a Maryland college town. Although the station reaches D.C. & Baltimore, it is small market, & the owner plans on selling it to a notorious media conglomerate unless the ad revenues are increased, & quickly. During the day, the station programs syndicated talk radio crap. But from 9 pm to 6 am it offers superb, authentic genre music by its house DJs: blues, Fifties, reggae, Sixties, goth, grunge/punk. The reason those DJs are so good is because they're all vampires, frozen in the musical eras they inhabited at the time they became vampires.
The vampires are also psychologically stunted, unable to grow culturally or intellectually, slowly becoming ever more distant from the real world; this is what ultimately undermines a vampire's desire to go on existing. These DJ vampires reside in the basement of the station building, have routine, unexciting lives, feeding themselves through an underground network of humans who get an erotic thrill having their blood sucked every two or three weeks. The station's owner, an independent middle-age woman, is also a vampire, & perhaps the most complex & intriguing character in the book. She would be worth a book of her own, but alas, she meets a tragic end.
That's enough for me; lots of plot challenges. Add a romance with the grunge DJ , the youngest in real years, who fits the mold of a handsome, troubled, slightly bad boy studmuffin/hero. Smith-Ready goes way beyond that, to a commune - a nest really - of conservative bloodsuckers preferring invisibility & stirred to violent opposition by our station intern's success at promoting her DJs as vampires - knowing listeners will believe it's just a marketing ploy, convincing the DJs to do outside gigs (only at night, of course), & making the station profitable. There's also the return of her dad, a grifter recently released from prison; & a quasi-governmental agency charged with keeping track of America's vampire population &, if necessary, killing the rogues. It's all very silly stuff, although the vampire commune is well described & chilling; they keep a herd of humans who supply blood in exchange for having all their basic needs satisfied. It is made clear that some of these humans had terrible lives before they found the vampires, so the lifestyle is an improvement, but one they aren't free to leave. It's a kind of cult faith-based charity. There are a few interesting conceptual tweaks of vampire personality, needs, & physiology, particularly the graphic descriptions of what occurs when a vampire is staked or decapitated; think black hole. The supernatural, superpower qualities are still there, but played down. Ciara is educated, creative, self-assuredly hip, not fearless, but her background gives her an advantage, & she takes deserved revenge on another woman, using her as a pawn in an elaborate con.
Except for some blood-sucking encounters straddling PG-13 & R, there's only two major sex scenes in the book, of which the first is by far the best. Ciara, her judgment clouded by horniness, beds hunky Shane, the grunge DJ. He's going down on her & she' s having a splendid time when Shane finds the inside of her thigh even more irresistible than the parts he's tickling, & bites her. Of course, Ciara reacts angrily, kicking him away, not realizing his fangs are curved, & gets so torn up she needs stitches. If she'd stayed still while he retracted his vampire teeth, she'd only have suffered small punctures that would've healed quickly. But he was a bad lover. This sets their budding relationship back a bit, since she's in pain for several subsequent chapters. By the end, he's learned some boudoir manners. What are Ciara's long term prospects for love with vampire? Most likely she'll become bored with him.
Smith-Ready is building a niche marketing scheme around Wicked Game, turning it into a series, not her first series or scheme. She's a smart popular novelist. Although I'll never be a fan of her books, I appreciate her savvy management, unobjectionable tastes in music, offbeat humor, & good looks. You need humor to do vampire, it need not be campy. Anne Rice is tediously unfunny.
Labels: culture, what I'm reading
