IMMORTAL LIES

The first, fast-paced episode of an epic about a fractious family of immortal vampires.

Kadio Ledoro Lakt has had a rough life. By his 18th birthday, his entire family was dead, as well as his best friend and two fiancées–each of whom fell prey to a string of apparently unrelated tragic accidents. Even Jeremy, the vampire mentor whose brutal attack inducted Kadio into the ranks of the undead, has died, leaving him alone and adrift without family of any kind, mortal or immortal. The protagonist finds himself ill-suited to the life of a vampire–Jeremy never taught him how to hunt, and he feels only moral horror at the thought of killing the innocent. His only companions are a kindly nurse, Mother Pharren, who supplies him daily with fresh blood from a clinic (yet seems strangely uncurious about what Kadio really is), and her obnoxious, self-centered twit of a son, Heath, who is deeply suspicious and resentful of this strange boarder. Life on the farm with Mother Pharren isn’t family, exactly, but it’s all he has. Kadio’s solace is upset, however, by a chance encounter with a series of vampires introduced to him in dizzying succession. Kadio meets Ian, the vampire protégé of Leeran, Kadio’s blood brother by way of Jeremy. As a result of this encounter, Kadio meets a slew of other vampires, including Alec, Jayson and Chelsea. Barely moments after meeting, these characters begin fighting, biting, blood-drinking, love-making or exchanging notes about mystical vampiric powers like telekinesis, pyrokinesis, shape shifting and mind reading. The intention seems to be to keep the story moving, but the effect is that readers have little time to explore these characters’ backgrounds and motivations beyond a superficial level. Important revelations about the “immortal lies” of Kadio’s past are lost in the cacophony.

A novel-sized project unsuccessfully crammed into a novella-length format.