VAMPIRE ACADEMY -- Richelle Mead

Oh, whither the vampires of yore?

You know, the ones that were eerie. The ones that were sinister. The ones that were more than, well, ordinary people that happen to drink blood.

I'm not a huge fan of vampires, but the ones I've liked have always drawn their seductive power in part from their otherness and from the fact that they never quite tamed, even if they love you.*

I picked up VAMPIRE ACADEMY in large part because I was so disappointed with BETRAYED, and because I thought, "Hey, a finishing school for vampires is a concept that practically writes itself. Surely they can't both get it wrong." Plus, the author is from Seattle, so I read it on the plane to Kansas City on the first leg of my recent journey back to the Emerald City.

The book is about a pair of girls: Lissa, a living (as opposed to undead) vampire princess and Rose, her half-vampire bodyguard, who attend a school for vampires and their guardians in Montana. As the book opens, they've run away from the school, but are quickly found and returned. Most of the plot is concerned with teenage social maneuvering, but as Lissa's strange abilities begin to fray her sanity, it takes on more depth and emotional resonance.

As far as life at a vampire boarding school, Mead doesn't get it wrong, but she doesn't quite get it right, either. It still left me longing for a book with a strong sense of place.

On the other hand, she does get a lot of things right. The narrator's believable as a teenage girl and is possessed of a strong and distinctive voice, the world created is interesting, the love interest is compelling, and there's a genuine and nuanced relationship between the two best friends. Some supporting characters are flat, but others have enough depth to be interesting.

But the only thing that makes the vampires vampires is the fact that they drink blood. Other than that, they could easily be fairies, werewolves or even just humans with magical powers. There's no edge to them. They're just ordinary folks with fangs.

I'd like to recruit Henry Fitzroy, Gerald Tarrant, Joshua York, and Simon Ysidro to teach at the school.

Rating: ***

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*The ideal vampire for me is actually not really a vampire: it's Gerald Tarrant from C.S. Friedman's Coldfire trilogy. Ironically, he does all the things that a vampire should do better than most actual vampires, with the possible exception of Barbara Hambly's Ysidro.

DEAD WITCH WALKING -- Kim Harrison

I was in the bookstore, having a chat with my best friend about my disappointment in the Buffy Knockoff subgenre, when a geeky-cute girl slipped around the corner of the aisle, placed DEAD WITCH WALKING in my wildly gesturing hand, shyly smiled and told me I'd enjoy it, and scurried off.

If I were male or gay, it would have been a total meet-cute.

So, I read it in the airport while waiting for a plane to Kansas City, and have mixed feelings.

Over break, I (finally) watched Pan's Labyrinth with my sister. In the DVD extras* there was a fascinating segment with Del Toro in which he talked about fairy tales. He characterized them as "very simple, and very brutal" and went on to talk about how people these days are afraid of simplicity. Movies that are too simple make us nervous. Characters that are too simple make us nervous. Music that's too simple makes us nervous.

I kept thinking back to that observation while reading DEAD WITCH WALKING. Rachel, the main character, pulls off the Tough Chick shtick better than most narrators, and a couple times I even giggled aloud. I was genuinely curious about the villain. Her relationship with Ivy, her vampire roommate, is pretty intriguing. And her meeting with her love interest, even if it happens at the 11th hour, is memorable. It was a mostly enjoyable read.

On the other hand, I couldn't tell you what the plot was. At 416 pages, the book felt rushed. There was so much crammed in that it was hard to follow the arc of the plot, or that of the subplots. At any point in the book, I had difficulty feeling where I was in the arc.

I can't put my finger on it exactly, but while it was a fun read, I was relieved when it was over. I don't think I'll be reading any more in the series.

Rating: ***1/2

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*I have been so terribly, terribly spoiled by the Lord of the Rings DVDs. I inevitably feel cheated by the special features on other DVDs. But still, this was the Collector's Edition, and the features were pitifully few.

THE ACCIDENTAL VAMPIRE -- Lynsay Sands

Oh boy, oh boy. My first real paranormal romance -- not YA, not vampire hunting with a side of relationship, but an honest-to-goodness real-live romance novel. I read it on the way to Chicago.

Ah, the eternal question: where the [insert expletive of choice] are the editors?

I spend a lot of time wondering this. I see movies like, for example, The Da Vinci Code, and am astonished that apparently, in every single stage of production, everyone involved failed to notice -- and remark upon -- the fact that "This can't be this -- the fleur de lis!" is not a line that should have ever been written, let alone spoken on screen. Honestly, people, you all failed. What scriptwriter thought this was a good line? Why didn't the editor smack some sense into him? Didn't Tom Hanks notice that this tortured syntax was awkward to say, not to mention an untenable abuse of the English language, when he had to wrap his tongue around it? Why was the director okay with it? Didn't anyone notice that no one @(*#%^ing talks like that!?

Getting back to novels, I may blink at one or two grammatical mistakes or run-on sentences or really, really lousy pieces of dialogue, but I accept that even the best authors occasionally have brain blips and even the best editors can't catch everything.

But when it happens on practically every page, I start to get annoyed.

THE ACCIDENTAL VAMPIRE had what sounded like a cute premise: Elvi Black doesn't know how she became a vampire, and since she's taking her cues from Dracula, she's getting a lot of it wrong. When her best friend sneaks a personal ad for Elvi into the paper, the novice neckbiter meets up with Victor, an ancient vamp who will -- oh, never mind, I'm just going to quote the back of the book here, because this sort of campy goodness really should be shared:

FATE GAVE HER FANGS. HE'LL SHOW HER HOW TO USE THEM.

I figured, oh hey! Humor! They're not taking themselves too seriously! This can't be that excruciating!

Le sigh.

Elvi is an idiot. She goes five years without food (although not without blood, obviously) because vampires in movies don't eat. It never occurs to her to try it and see what happens. She gets rid of all the mirrors, despite the fact that she can see herself in them, because vampires don't have reflections. And the townspeople for whom she's a mascot of sorts are just as stupid as she is.

It wasn't funny; it wasn't even cute. It was just painfully, painfully stupid.

Along come her prospective beaux, all of whom are fine hunky males of the bloodsucking persuasion. And that was when I realized:

Holy crap, this really is porn for middle-aged women.

Not just sexual porn (although there's plenty of that sort of thing going on as well) but emotional porn. When the other vampires inform her that yes, she can actually eat, Elvi runs out immediately to the grocery store and is escorted by all the men, who enable her lack of impulse control enthusiastically. When she's laid up, they all bake for her. Everything she does, no matter how mundane or how careless, is fascinating to them.

They're not even romantic -- just slavish.

Then there's the explanation for vampirism. Vampires are from Atlantis, and they have things in their blood called "nanos" which keep them ever-young, but are fueled by blood.

Apparently, for all their highly advanced technology, these Atlantean fraktards weren't creative enough to figure out what came after their dangling prefix. Seriously, guys, nano-whats!?

The author spent a lot of time repeating herself, verbatim, sometimes within the same paragraph, all of which made it really hard to finish the book. I rarely ever skim a text rather than actually reading it, but at some points I had to or I wouldn't have been able to finish it.

She also goes to great lengths to emphasize that Elvi and her best friend Mabel are older women (in their sixties). How enlightened! Except it makes it that much harder to forgive the characters for having the reasoning powers of a developmentally disabled toddler. For most of the book, someone is trying to kill Elvi. Oh, the suspense! SPOILER: It's her neighbor and friend, whose son is wearing pale makeup and fake fangs. The neighbor learned from watching Dracula that the only way to cure vampirism is to kill the vampire who bit the kid. So they go through elaborate assassination attempts (despite the fact that they really like Elvi and don't object to her being a vampire) without ever bothering to notice that their son's pallor rubs off on his clothing.

Most of the suspense for me came from wondering who was putting the Stupid Juice in the town's water supply, but alas, that mystery was never resolved.

Oh, and as contrived and sappy as you can imagine the denouement being? Triple it.

I don't understand. There's just no reason for it to be this bad. Does anyone actually enjoy this sort of bad writing? I mean, I feel like you could have the domestic-man-porn and the sex and the vampirism and still have something that's not so frustrating to read. Sure, you're going to feel a little silly for reading it, but it shouldn't be this headache-inducing.

Rating: *

WORKING FOR THE DEVIL -- Lilith Saintcrow

Just as every cop is a criminal
And all the sinners saints
As heads is tails
Just call me Lucifer
cause I'm in need of some restraint

I blame Buffy for the rash of ass-kicking, smart-talking, bitchy female vampire slayers and the legions of sidekicks who inexplicably give them unconditional love.

I don't mean to imply that loving Buffy herself was inexplicable. Buffy was something special. Even when she was bitchy, she was prone to saying things like, "I'm cookie dough. I'm not done baking." Even as she was touted as "the blonde who strikes back" in gender studies courses and pop culture crit, she was busily disarming our heroic archetypes with plain, good-old goofiness. And girliness.

Her imitators, as often as not, miss the point. Once, in a discussion about why there's so much bad writing in high fantasy, a friend of mine said:

John Clute, the one unquestionably brilliant critic in sf/f (when you can understand what the hell he is saying) has all kinds of interesting things to say about the difference between Tolkien and his imitators—being able to distinguish between Tolkien and Brooks is the minimum standard for any critical apparatus applied to the genre, in his opinion. One of the observations he makes is about the role of time and change. Tolkien’s world is, among many other things, an attempt to come to grips with the industrial revolution, and everything in Middle Earth is constantly twisting in the corrosive stream of time. The imitators tend to fetishize the tokens of the bucolic world—sword, cloak, stew—and the actions play out in a bubble world immune to THAT kind of change—real change. In a sense, Middle Earth is saved neither for Frodo nor for us.

I think there's something similar -- if not as widespread or profound -- going on with Buffy in the sort of fetishization of the female vampire slayer, the victim who strikes back, that misses the point of who Buffy was and what she represented.

But for better or for worse, an army of pseudo-Buffys, from Anita Blake to Cassandra Palmer to Rachel Morgan to (the colorfully named Lilith Saintcrow's) Dante Valentine have descended upon us. They all have handsome men of the demon/vampire/werewolf persuasion pining after them, and often it's pretty difficult to pinpoint why.

WORKING FOR THE DEVIL isn't really a paranormal romance (the romance part is extremely subtle and not the focus of the book), but I read it anyway because I thought it might have useful elements of the sort we're looking for. Dante Valentine is a necromantic bounty hunter, who gets hired by Lucifer himself to hunt down a rogue demon who's escaped from Hell. He assigns his eldest son, Japhrimel, to protect her.

That's really all you need to know about the plot. Battles, confusion, chase scenes, and the requisite ass-kicking all ensue.

Saintcrow alternately scored and lost points with me for her setting: an Earth that simultaneously pings the futuristic and alternate-history tropes. Sometimes it works quite well, and sometimes she seems to have changed details or place names simply for the sake of changing them. But her settings have distinctive feels, and I'm a sucker for a good sense of place. Hell, in Saintcrow's imagination, is probably the most distinctive and fascinating fictional land I've been to yet: alien, excruciating, and as incomprehensible as you'd expect it to be. But the author seems to understand the difference between mysterious and merely confusing, and stays safely on the right side of that line.

The best part of the story, for me, was the delicately drawn relationship between Dante and her reluctant demon guardian. Dante dislikes him, but comes to rely upon and trust him gradually, and the narration manages to clue the reader in on their growing attraction before Dante realizes it herself without making her seem stupid.

Dante herself is a bit hard to take at times (and gets worse in the following books). She's harsh toward friends and enemies alike, abuses her sidekicks, dishes it out but can't take it, and her witty observations usually seem forced.

But the books move along at a terrific clip and the supporting characters are interesting enough to make up for the fact that the heroine's a harridan. Would I have found it as engaging if I hadn't been stuck at SeaTac waiting for a flight to Milwaukee that had been delayed for five hours? Hard to say, but it was fun in the same way your average action flick is fun, and at the time that was good enough for me.

Rating: ***

BETRAYED -- P.C. Cast & Kristin Cast

When you're trapped at an airport because your flight is delayed four hours, a book can be your best friend. If said book has annoying personal habits or an unpleasant personality, it will be a long wait.

So there I was at SeaTac, waiting for my delayed plane to Portland, and from there on to San Francisco, and there were still two hours to go, and I had eaten everything I was willing to eat, shopped everywhere I was willing to shop, explored every concourse, and called my boss and discovered that he was too busy to entertain me -- er, discuss our presentation the next morning...

Time to read.

That afternoon, the head of our publishing division had plunked down a stack of paranormal romances and informed us that we were going to help her read them. Figuring it's always better to choose than to be forced, I selected Betrayed largely on the basis of its lovely cover. Old adages aside, the publishing industry tries very hard to make it possible for you to judge books by their covers, and seeing as there was no bodice ripping in evidence on Betrayed's classy wrapping, it seemed the safest choice.

Plus, it had a great concept: a vampire finishing school. Say it to yourself a few times. Vampire. Finishing. School. I envisioned a dark mirror of Hogwarts, something that would feed my irrational* obsession with boarding schools while twisting it down new, hopefully black-humor-laden pathways.**

This was not the book I got, but I'm flexible. What I got was a flat, contrived exercise in demonstrating the problems of YA writing, fantasy writing, and romance writing.

A very brief summary: This is the second book in a series. Zoey Redbird is a fledgling vampire (the process of changing from human to vampire is a gradual one that coincides with adolescence). She's been marked by the goddess Nyx, and is the most powerful fledgling anyone's seen for a while -- possibly ever. Fledglings attend a school called the House of Night*** so that they can be trained and supervised during the change, which can be fatal. Zoey's hanging out at the top of Fortune's Wheel at the beginning: she's the favored protege of the school's head, she's defeated her nemesis, she's the leader of a group called the Dark Daughters (think combination clique, sorority and National Honor Society), she's got three men competing for her charms, and all is right with the world.

Naturally, there's no where to go but down. Human teenagers from her old life start dying, her mentor engages in some pretty suspicious behavior, and worst of all, her nemesis turns out to be a sympathetic character.

A more sympathetic character, in fact, then our narrator/heroine herself.

Zoey never misses a chance to remind you that she is The Most Powerful Fledgling Ever. She would rather explain to you, in laborious detail, what every event means, instead of letting you judge for yourself from the consequences of each plot turn. She will describe every other character's personality for you, because apparently you're too dumb to draw your own conclusions from their dialogue and behavior (or, rather, the authors are too lazy to give them dialogue and behavior that would limn their natures organically). She rings false as a teenager, and more frustratingly, as a person that anyone would like.

All of this, along with the general lousiness of the writing (poor grammar, repetitive sentence structure, overuse of the same adjectives, etc.) makes me wonder whether the editor was sleeping on the job.**** The plot seems contrived to move Zoey from one event to the next as needed. Zoey's nemesis, Aphrodite, turns out to be the most interesting character in the book, and despite Zoey's heavy-handed attempts to assure you that She Is Not To Be Trusted, it's hard to understand why she's an outcast. And I got very annoyed with their thinly-veiled anti-Christianity polemic. I'm no more fond of Christianity than they are, but Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick! If you want to rant, well, that's why the good Lord created blogs. Which readers don't pay for.

I put it down at the climax because my plane had arrived, and spent the flight using my iPod as a defensive wall against the overly friendly gentleman next to whom I was seated. It was about 2:30 AM when I arrived in San Francisco, and by the time I'd gotten to my hotel, settled in, and taken a nice bath, it wasn't worth going to bed. So, with the nagging sense of having left a chore unfinished, I returned to Betrayed.

When I put it down, I realized that most of my annoyance flows from the fact that the book commits -- flagrantly -- what is for me the one unforgivable sin in YA or genre literature.

Thou shalt not write down to thy audience.

Okay, lovers of genre fiction -- you know very well that it's us against the world. People look down on sci-fi and fantasy and romance, and if you're a lit major, I'm sure you've had the same experience I have. The Literary Establishment tells you, in no uncertain terms, that the books that satisfy your craving for magic will only ever be a guilty pleasure.

And I hate to say it, but they're right about most of them. For all that sci-fi is a perfect laboratory to explore what fiction freighted with the pressures of "realism" can't, for all fantasy's ability to manifest what "realistic" fiction can only hint at, most genre fiction is cheap and lazy writing. You can't help but notice that "serious" fiction gives you a lot more to unpack in its first chapter than you get in the whole of your average fantasy novel.

For the most part, I accept this. But don't think, that as a genre fiction reader, I don't know that in general, I'm trading the depth I love for my magic fix. But I still expect the authors to try. Lazy writing is just offensive.

And the same goes for YA fiction. We're constantly hearing about how Kids Don't Read, These Days. But if they are, and they're reading your stuff, because they want stories about magic, dear LORD what a sacred trust! You have a responsibility to show them what words can do. I was furious with J.K. Rowling after skimming the first Harry Potter book because for all she knew how to tell a good story, her actual writing was in a sorry state. But she rallied. She may not be comfortable with epic fantasy, but hey, if you can create Hogwarts, I'll forgive you from cribbing from Tolkien and Lewis, especially if you do so in a way that makes your readers want to seek them out.

If you can get reluctant readers to cross the threshold, you have a responsibility to have something worthwhile waiting for them inside. To steal a metaphor from Dan Savage, you should leave the campsite in better shape than you found it. If you've gotten a teen who doesn't already love to read to buy your novel, because they want vampires and that's what you're writing about, you ought to give them more than the absolute minimum. You ought to give them a little bit of the magic inherent in reading.

There's no magic in Betrayed. You might read it to get your vampire fix (although, truthfully, it doesn't even do that well), but it's not going to give you a reason to keep reading. It seems to assume that teenagers aren't familiar with good writing, so there's no reason to try very hard for them. I disagree. Try Stephanie Meyer. At least you get the impression that she respects you.

Rating: *

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*So sue me. I'm American. I know very well that the boarding school experience is actually often a miserable one, but I can't escape the romance of the concept.

**Biting Etiquette 101. Eurotrash Accent Practice in the parlor. Oh man, I want to read that book. Paging Tanya Huff!

***No, it's not a brothel. Get your mind out of the gutter.

****Plus, P.C. Cast is apparently a teacher. I hope to heaven she's not an English teacher.