Slowly but surely catching up with these book posts! I would like to say I timed this next one - Vamped by David Sosnowski - intentionally to hit today/on Halloween... but it's just a coincidence... and convenient too... as I wasn't quite sure what I was going to write about today (other than yet another, "Is it Tuesday, yet?!" post!)... so definitely an "aha!" moment.
So yes, another vampire book! I know it doesn't seem to make much sense even to me that I keep coming back to this genre (and I think it is a genre of its own!) over and over again. I think I am a fairly reasonable and semi-intelligent person and I can't quite figure out why I keep getting sucked in (ha!) to these books. And this is even my second vampire book of the year after giving the teen phenomenon Twilight a stab (ha!) earlier this year.
As you may recall, I discovered this book thanks to the Author Q&A section of the last book I read, Mary Doria Russell's A Thread of Grace. Now you may also recall, while I thought that book was well-written and had a compelling subject matter... ultimately, I didn't end up enjoying it all that much. So you are probably thinking it is pretty strange to take a recommendation from a book you didn't really like... well, you are probably right.
That said, the two books could not be more different. Where Grace was a very serious, historical work of fiction that I found to be quite difficult to read... Vamped was easy reading, a satirical / humorous book about... well, about vampires!
This was definitely a different spin on the vampire genre... humans are on the endangered species list with vampires ruling the world... well, not ruling... but merely living their lives... having to work the jobs that there are no humans to do now, buying novelty items like Count Chocula cereal off of eBay (after all food is barely needed except for non-vamped pets), and Alaska has become the hot vacation destination during the times of the year that the sun barely comes out. We learn this all through Martin Kowalski (not a very scary vampire name, huh?) as he is tiring of the eternal life - but stumbles onto a recently orphaned human girl and decides to raise, despite his instinctual urges for real human blood... blood is now manufactured from stem cells, readily available, and warmed up to 98.6 degrees with a vampire's answer to the kitchen coffee brewer... Mr. Plasma.
So there is a lot of fun and terribly imaginative stuff going on in this novel, but something just that ultimately didn't do it for me. While I enjoyed the above-mentioned aspects of the novel (and there were many more of them), I didn't find the storyline or the characters particularly compelling. Nor did I feel like it was terribly well-written... a criticism I usually don't say aloud all too often, because I do have the utmost respect/awe for anyone who can write a novel, let alone getting it published. It just got a bit too cute-sy for me vs. that sharper satiric edge.
One big thing that was working against it is that I was and have been watching the HBO series "True Blood" while I read this book. It covers similar territory. While vampires are still a minority in this world, they have revealed themselves and hope to live side-by-side with humans ("True Blood" is the best selling brand of synthetic blood). There is sly humor in the series (which also based on a series of books - the Southern Vampire/Sookie Stackhouse series by Charlaine Harris - which I have not read)... so a big part of my so-so reaction to Vamped is that is did not even closely approach the level of enjoyment I am experiencing with "True Blood." Granted it is not likely very fair to compare the two, but that's the facts and I'm sticking it to it.
2008 1-2-3-4-5 Reading Challenge: + 366 Pages (Total: 9,171 pages - Finished: 10/15/2008)
-705 pages behind pace for the year (-40 change in pace since last book).
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