Grade: A

“Is she special?”

“I think she’s going to break my heart.”

“How exciting!”

This is one of my most favorite books of all time and I can’t even count how many times I’ve already read it in the past, so you’ll have to excuse some fangirl gushing on my part. When I read this book, I was still in high school and it was the one that got me hooked on books with vampires in them. After this, I read Linda Lael Miller’s Vampire Valerian series, briefly considered Amanda Ashley and Christine Feehan, but after reading a couple of those books, immediately vowed to myself that I will never read a book with vampire in it ever again. It was Laurell K. Hamilton who got me reading about vampires again, but I’m weird and bitter about it now, and really, that’s a story for another time. The vampire in this book is not one of those brooding, sulky, tortured types screaming “Why, God, why?” at the heavens, but rather an ordinary young woman working an ordinary job at an insurance agency who was one day chosen as a potential companion for a bored vampire. There’s our girl, hanging out, minding her own business, and before she knows it some dude with seriously bad breath is sucking on her neck, forcing her to drink his blood, and the next morning, she wakes up underneath a dumpster with a burnt hand and a shit load of money. Does our girl panic and whine and act like an all-around nincompoop? Hell, no. She finds a bag for the money (she doesn’t hesitate to keep it), takes a bus, and goes home to wash off the dumpster stink. Awesome.

When we have a really cool heroine, we don’t always get a cool hero to complement her or vice-versa, right (see all of my Vicki Lewis Thompson reviews)? In this case, you’re in luck. Our hero is not a strutting, grandstanding, alpha-jerk male with a whole warehouse of issues and the bad attitude to go with it. Tommy Flood is a nineteen year old aspiring writer from Indiana whose father told him that if he really wants to be a writer, he needs to “starve” because real artists starve for their art, so he tells Tommy that he has to move to a big city. When Tommy first arrives in San Francisco, he’s got nothing but a dying piece of shit car and a few bucks to tide him over until he found a job. In Chinatown, he immediately finds a room where he could stay, but also has to share it with five illegal Chinese immigrants named Wong who all want to marry him to get a green card (they heard that in San Francisco, men marry other men). Desperate to find a job so he can move out of Chinatown, he follows the suggestion of the Emperor, a famous old bum, to apply at the local Safeway as a night shift manager. Here, Tommy finds himself a rag-tag bunch of losers who immediately become his bosom buddies, and one night, while indulging in a game of turkey-bowling (it’s exactly what it sounds like it is), he also meets a strange, but beautiful redhead who asks him out on date for the next evening. The moment he sees this woman, he tells himself that she’s going to break his heart, but he meets up with her, anyway.

Twenty-six year old Jody was just another worker-bee at Transamerica who, while not exactly passionate about her job, put up with it because it paid the bills. One night, while waiting for her bus, a stranger shoves his hand into her red hair, and yanks her into a dark alley where he proceeds to drain her blood, then force-feeds her his own blood. Jody wakes up two days later under a dumpster with a hopelessly burnt hand and a stack of hundred dollar bills. At first, she doesn’t fully realize what has happened to her, so she trudges home in hopes that a shower will clear everything up for her. As soon as she gets home, she gets into an argument with her nagging boyfriend, which really pisses her off, so she throws a potted plant at his head. He doesn’t die, but passes out. While checking on him, Jody is mesmerized by the blood on his forehead, and though thoroughly repulsed by the idea, licks the blood and almost immediately, sees her burnt hand heal until it is good as new right before her eyes. This is when Jody realizes that she is no longer human. She literally can’t eat or drink (it makes her sick) and for some reason, she is now allergic to the sun (she figures out that the man who attacked her had stuck her under the dumpster to protect her for the sun, but had left her hand out for a reason so she would know that she + sun = not a good mix). She also figures out that she will now need a keeper, a guy who will take care of her in the daylight hours, so she takes what she needs from the apartment she once shared with her boyfriend, then sets out to find one.

Alright, so this isn’t exactly a romance, but it is a love story. This is basically about two people who are lost in a big city and circumstances forces them to find each other and they fall in love. Jody is no pathetic damsel-in-distress whose life was not worth living before Tommy came along. Tommy himself was living a pretty good life before Jody came along. Sure, he’s not even old enough to drink yet and knows that there really are a lot of things he needs to learn before he can become a prolific writer like his idol, Jack Kerouac, but this is why he came to the big city. He needs the experience. When he and Jody meet up, all he could think about is impressing her, so he could get into her pants later (he is nineteen years old), but the more he talks to her and gets to know her, the more he realizes that Jody is the woman who will be the Zelda to his F. Scott Fitzgerald. Before he could ask her out for a second date, however, she’s already asking him to move in with her. Desperate to get away from his current living situation (the Wongs, remember?), he agrees and says yes when Jody orders him to start looking for an apartment where they could live together.

The relationship of Tommy and Jody is an odd one. Tommy is extremely naive about a lot of things, so basically, Jody becomes his tutor of sorts. Jody is also seven years old than Tommy, so she orders him around a bit, and he is almost compelled to follow her. Jody almost becomes a mother figure to Tommy because she is so much more mature than he is, but Tommy treats Jody like a queen. When Jody confesses to him that she is a vampire, Tommy just takes it in stride (he thinks it’s cool) and vows to help her find out everything they could about it. Tommy reads a bunch of vampire books and “experiments” what he learns on Jody. Together, they find out that she can’t turn into a bat, move things with her mind, or any of that cool vampire stuff. Eventually, the two of them become friends as well as lovers. At first, Tommy is just grateful to Jody because she has sex with him, but later on, he realizes the depths of feelings for her, and begins to do little things for her like buy her turtles, so she can have something to snack on (Jody is repulsed by the turtles). Jody, on the other hand, knows that Tommy is a tad young, but she begins to really care about him, even as she nags him and orders him around. Their relationship becomes a true give-and-take relationship where Tommy takes care of Jody in the daytime and Jody takes care of him at night.

What’s also cool about this book are the side characters. First, there’s the Emperor, who is really just a slightly crazy old bum with two dogs as sidekicks, but everyone in the city seems to respect him, and makes sure that he is taken care of. It is the Emperor who first witnesses the vampire killings, but no one would believe him because they think he’s just a crazy old bum. He befriends Tommy and helps him get the job at Safeway, where Tommy meets other colorful characters. There is Simon, a trash-talking, tough-as-nails fake cowboy, who becomes Tommy’s best friend and tries to give him advice about women (he is always wrong). The funniest side characters in this story, however, are the two cops investigating the vampire murders. They’re the usual seasoned seen-it-all cops that you see on cop shows, but both of them are at a loss when faced with a bunch of dead bodies with the blood drained out of them. Their witty bantering and wry observations about the weird shit going on around them are pure comic gold.

Whenever I’m desperate for something to read, I always find myself turning to my stash of Christopher Moore books, especially this one. The man is a GENIUS. Sure, his characters are larger than life, wittier than anyone you’ll ever meet in your entire life, but there’s always genuine emotion there. There’s Tommy insecurity that Jody will leave him for someone else once she gets tired of him. There’s Jody’s own worries that she’s being selfish about keeping Tommy to herself so he is unable to experience life for himself. Even the Emperor is worried that he really is just a crazy old coot and pretty soon, he will just die and everyone will forget about him. Oddly enough, the truest emotion comes from the man who turns Jody into a vampire. He is an eight hundred year old vampire who has seen it all and experience it all and from time to time, he likes to contemplate about killing himself just to end it all. He is so bored with himself that he turns random people into vampires just to watch them suffer and die a few days later. He never counted on Jody being smart and resourceful. He had thought she would only last a couple of days, tops. There’s this scene where he’s standing atop a very high building, thinking about jumping and ending it all, but he just kind of stands there for a while. Sure, he’s an evil murdering bastard, but you just kind of feel sorry for him ‘cause he’s so damned lonely.

Anyway, this book is an awesome read, so if you haven’t read it already, you gotta check it out. It’ll be worth it, I assure you. If you like this, there’s also Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff (it’s about this guy named Biff, Jesus’ wacky secret best friend that you never read about in the Bible, and the wacky adventures they have together) and the Stupidest Angel, its sort of sequel. If you like those, check out Island of the Sequined Love Nun (it’s worth it for the title alone). I know I’m totally pimping out Christopher Moore here, but I think he’s funnier than Carl Hiaasen and Doug Adams (though both of them are also brilliant, brilliant men) combined. When I grow up, I totally want to write like Christopher Moore. But make lots of money like Nora Roberts. That would be awesome.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 15th, 2005 at 5:33 pm and is filed under Books, Grade: A, Romance: Paranormal, Sci-Fi/Fantasy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.