Brings little that’s new to the world of literary vampires, but its unconventionality should leave readers with fanged...
Grayson’s debut comedy trails a relatively young vampire helping his high school crush—the woman who turned him—stop a powerful old vampire with plans for world domination.
When Josh Blackthorn’s vampire sponsor leaves on business, the two-year vamp’s replacement is Becky, who gave Josh his first bite at their high school reunion. Becky requested the gig to ask Josh to join in her fight against her evil stepfather, Günter Van Helsing. The bloodsucker may have killed Becky’s father, and he also seems to have hypnotized her mother into marriage—practicing the same mind control he’s plotting to use against the world. Are the fledgling vamps a match against a vampire more than a century old? A number of vampire novels have a tendency to list guidelines for the undead, particularly when one is the narrator, but Grayson’s story thankfully avoids this. He allows the specifics of vampire life to unfold gradually (Josh quells the garlic myth with a quick joke about using it as a spice), without interrupting the main plot of stopping Van Helsing and rescuing Becky’s mom. The majority of vampire attributes cover familiar terrain: Senses are heightened, stakes kill and sunlight is tolerable with enough sunscreen. Grayson adds a few atypical touches—vamps reflect in mirrors and werewolf-killing silver bullets prove lethal to vampires. Josh and Becky’s romance isn’t fully fleshed out, relegated mostly to Josh’s jealousy over the presumed closeness between Becky and his human pal Steve. But Josh and Becky’s scenes together are pure regalement, especially when they spend the book’s second act practicing hypnosis and psychokinesis to combat Van Helsing’s powers, leading to their donning aluminum-foil hats to block the old vamp’s mind reading and caps to cover the foil so they aren’t seen as conspiracy nuts. The final act involves a somewhat typical attempt to infiltrate the villain’s HQ, but Grayson retains a good amount of humor throughout and incorporates subtle wordplay: “Vampires are suckers for the gothic look.”
Brings little that’s new to the world of literary vampires, but its unconventionality should leave readers with fanged smiles.Pub Date: June 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-1480179066
Page Count: 376
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A not-very-illuminating updating of Chaucer’s Tales.
Continuing his apparent mission to refract the whole of English culture and history through his personal lens, Ackroyd (Thames: The Biography, 2008, etc.) offers an all-prose rendering of Chaucer’s mixed-media masterpiece.
While Burton Raffel’s modern English version of The Canterbury Tales (2008) was unabridged, Ackroyd omits both “The Tale of Melibee” and “The Parson’s Tale” on the undoubtedly correct assumption that these “standard narratives of pious exposition” hold little interest for contemporary readers. Dialing down the piety, the author dials up the raunch, freely tossing about the F-bomb and Anglo-Saxon words for various body parts that Chaucer prudently described in Latin. Since “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” and “The Miller’s Tale,” for example, are both decidedly earthy in Middle English, the interpolated obscenities seem unnecessary as well as jarringly anachronistic. And it’s anyone’s guess why Ackroyd feels obliged redundantly to include the original titles (“Here bigynneth the Squieres Tales,” etc.) directly underneath the new ones (“The Squires Tale,” etc.); these one-line blasts of antique spelling and diction remind us what we’re missing without adding anything in the way of comprehension. The author’s other peculiar choice is to occasionally interject first-person comments by the narrator where none exist in the original, such as, “He asked me about myself then—where I had come from, where I had been—but I quickly turned the conversation to another course.” There seems to be no reason for these arbitrary elaborations, which muffle the impact of those rare times in the original when Chaucer directly addresses the reader. Such quibbles would perhaps be unfair if Ackroyd were retelling some obscure gem of Old English, but they loom larger with Chaucer because there are many modern versions of The Canterbury Tales. Raffel’s rendering captured a lot more of the poetry, while doing as good a job as Ackroyd with the vigorous prose.
A not-very-illuminating updating of Chaucer’s Tales.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-670-02122-2
Page Count: 436
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
PERSPECTIVES
A daringly placid novel about—here goes—a quiet, reflective serial killer. Leaving his first 13 victims behind in Oregon graves, Vann Siegert drives his pickup east, ending up in a small Massachusetts town where he rents a room with the Deans—postal worker Doug, his wife Jane, and their daughter Karen—takes a temporary job with the post office, drifts into an apathetic affair with his co-worker Ferrin, and resumes his affectless avocation, offering his bottle of Southern Comfort laced with poison to acquaintances, hitchhikers, stranded motorists, and the homeless. McCreary (Mount's Mistake, 1987) clearly knows that the success of Siegert's deadpan first-person narrative, with its ritual avoidance of suspense or even logical causality, depends on the storyteller's self-portrait, and though his principal revelatory devices—flashbacks showing Siegert's matter-of- fact abuse by his mother and his doubling with his dead brother Neil, moments of unfulfilled passion counterbalanced by understated homicides (Siegert is incapable of closeness to anyone but his victims and his dead), and, eventually, the arrest of Doug for Jane's murder after the police have picked up Siegert's own trail—press too schematically toward a rationale of Siegert's divided nature, the narrator-killer successfully resists his author's attempts to explain him away. Disturbingly effective in evoking the hypernormal killer. But don't expect the usual pleasures of the genre.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-670-83414-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1991
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
