Title: Prelude to the Vampire War
Author: Jay Ishino
Date: 2022
Publisher: Sibyl
Quote: "Christina tried to match her pace, but it was no use."
Christina is a vampire hunter. In this first part of a series of novels about the struggle to contain an irruption of humanlike and alien vampires, Christina is in the most immediate danger of her group of vampire hunters, because she's young and pretty and, let us say, excitable.
There's always been a fine line between adventure fantasy, horror fantasy, and erotic fantasy in vampire lore. Vampires are supposed to represent absolute evil. Readers are supposed to enjoy watching them die with no remorse, no concern about their being human too. This is supposed to provide relief from pent-up emotional tensions. But although Bram Stoker reminded readers continually that Dracula was the sort of sick, repulsive old man whose charming book-learned English was a parody of charm, Lucy became a different kind of menace, a beautiful blonde vampire lady into whose arms children, even more than young men, wanted to be gathered.
So, Christina is a lovely blonde who's recently dumped a young man called Reede, obviously because he seemed a feeble reed to lean on, and become a little too friendly with Sonya, a black-haired British vampire. (Ouch, that cliche of casting British villains in American fiction bites. Pun fully intended I'm sure.) Sonya seems to be the significant other of Gertie, but we soon learn that Gertie is really obsessed with William. All three of them are vampires. All of them want to neutralize Christina as a hunter by making her a vampire. And Christina's dreams about Sonya, whom she's chasing and not catching in chapter one, are steamy, and when she meets William...
This novel is mostly about the supposed sensual details of vampire life. Vampires convert humans into vampires by getting the humans to drink vampire blood; in some vampire lore this happens because some humans want to be vampires, but in this book it happens because vampires coax their hypnotized victims, "Don't you want to be with me forever?" Vampires stay together for what feels like forever, but although they still feel physical attractions they don't feel love or loyalty, so their togetherness doesn't seem to bring them joy. We see a vampire setting out to commit suicide by facing the rising sun; we see vampires draining each other to the point of death. We also learn about the half-vampires, or relatively decent vampires, who meet most of their nutritional requirements by killing animals but get high on the blood of vampires. Then there are the alien vampires, who don't look human and attack humanlike vampires as eagerly as they do humans. Long quotes would violate this web site's contract. It's a hazard of reading fiction online that novels can contain high concentrations of words, like "bite" and "blood" and worse, that attract Bad Things to computers. I can stand it, but I'm not sure my computer can. I will not be reading more of this series...for the same reason some readers will probably devour it.
This Prelude is a complete short story, containing some suspense within its own story as well as setting up the rules for the rest of the series. Full marks for that. I did cringe a bit, though, when the British villain says "bloody" and the alpha male character--which side is he on, anyway?--seems like a knock-off of Mr T. Jay Ishino did try to encourage diversity in casting if anyone ever makes a movie of this story, but let's hope that in the rest of the volumes the stereotypes are less groan-inducing.
No comments:
Post a Comment