My Harlequin Blaze Audible subscription is the gift that keeps on giving, and this week it was Kimberly Raye’s 2007 vamp romance, Dead Sexy, which is the first in her Love at First Bite series. Set in rural Texas, Dead Sexy is the story of a 100+ year old motorcycle riding vamp named Jake McCann who comes to Skull Creek to face off against his maker and nemesis and either become human again or be destroyed trying. Jake feeds on both food and sex, and needs a lot of both to be ready for the big showdown. He spies Nikki at a carnival and senses that she has resisted her own sexual impulses for so long that she would be a fantastic power source. For her part, Nikki is 30 years old and the owner of a beauty shop. She loves her small town life, with the bake sales, the nursing home bingo, her fixer upper house, etc., but has had a hard time finding a decent man. Her mother is the town slut, a woman who knows how to have a good time. Nikki’s aunt, who helped raise her, is the town angel, and is perhaps a bit too concerned with propriety. Nikki tends to view all of her choices through the lens of how those two women — the angel and the devil – would feel about them. Her character arc involves learning to live for herself.
It’s a Blaze, so there are sex scenes, including while riding a moving motorcycle.
I actually still enjoy the vamp man/human woman romance, and I appreciated the “sexual energy” twist thrown in (the more orgasms, the more power he has and the less blood he needs to drink — not his orgasms, of course, but his partner’s. That is how you know you for sure are reading Harlequin and not something else.) but this romance was on the unthrilling side. Jake was a standard issue hero, perfect looking, perfect in bed, manly, protective, etc., and thus bland. Nikki was more interesting, with shades of Sookie Stackhouse, and a great sense of humor. The portrayal of small town life was more cliched than the norm. I found myself looking at my iTouch to see how far along I was more than I usually do.
The book ends with an Epilogue which is actually the beginning of the next story in this series, Drop Dead Gorgeous. Neither Nikki nor Jake is in the epilogue, and I confess I was annoyed by it. Another in the series is Cody. (Others are A Body to Die For and Once Upon A Bite. If you really really love cowboy vampires, you can get all of them in an e- bundle).
Now for the question about souls. In this book, Jake says angrily to his maker “you stole my soul.” But what does that mean? When I think of all the things a soul could be, Jake has them or could have them. Possible candidates:
- Free will
- Consciousness and/or self-consciousness
- Spirit in a religious sense
- Unique personality
- Mind
- Essence of some unspecified kind
- Moral goodness
Often in vamp lore the soul is code for moral goodness, which is connected to the lack of free will signaled by blood lust. So, for example, in the Buffy series, when Angel loses his soul he becomes evil, and not just evil, but seemingly incapable of being good. He bites, drinks and kills whomever he wants.
When people criticize vampire romance for “defanging the vampire” one thing they might mean is that the difference between being a vampire and being a human is indiscernible. Certainly in this book it was. Sure, Jake had to stay out of the sun, had to drank blood, and was stronger than the average male human, but other than that, nada. How different is that, really, from a pale skinned bodybuilder who has a weird diet? You can point to eternal life as the big difference, but I find the concept “eternal life” to be essentially meaningless in books like this one. Their age difference may as well be 5 years as 500 for all of the difference it makes to Jake’s character or to their relationship. Jake sought his maker for a century, but would it have really felt different to me as a reader if he had only been looking for a decade? I don’t think so. And the HEA is eternal, but to me as a reader, it feels like any other HEA, which always has an infinite feel anyway.
What narrative force is the idea of a “lost soul” is supposed to have. What is it doing for the book if it isn’t any *thing* in particular?
I think there’s a strand of recent urban fantasy in which the soul is a get-out-of-jail-free card. If you still possess your soul, you can’t be sent to hell, forced to do the devil’s bidding, etc. Kim Harrison’s Rachel Morgan world is the example of this that I’ve read most recently.
Rachel’s soul has rather too much “narrative force” for my taste, in the sense that it’s used as a club to drive her either toward or away from action. What it lacks is any connection to the rest of her life and being; it’s a bargaining chip in dealing with external forces, not something that affects her endogenously.
I actually think the solution to most of her problems would be to get over thinking that a blackened/charred/missing soul is code for moral badness, admit that she’s attracted to scary powerful yikesness, and shack up with one of the middlin’-evil characters like Trent or Minias. That may indicate that Rachel’s instrumentalism about her soul has influenced my own attitude toward it. It ends up functioning like an old-school romance heroine’s virginity: not quite, not quite, not quite… ah, heck with it, take the plunge.
You can point to eternal life as the big difference, but I find the concept “eternal life” to be essentially meaningless in books like this one. Their age difference may as well be 5 years as 500 for all of the difference it makes to Jake’s character or to their relationship. Jake sought his maker for a century, but would it have really felt different to me as a reader if he had only been looking for a decade?
This is a really good point. I shall ponder it.
Well, in many ways, I miss the evil, conscienceless vampire, but if he still existed, how would he find love and redemption? Now that would make a good book! Vampires have morphed into sexy human-types or human wannabees who, unfortunately for them and us, must drink blood to survive. In some cases, as in the BDB, they can even eat meat – rare or raw. The vampire in today’s erotic literature has been de-fanged. I won’t comment on the book because I haven’t read it, but I will say that in today’s romantic literature, vampires are tragic, lonely figures in need of a woman’s touch or salvation – I totally get the appeal, but as I said, I miss my evil vamps. Guess that’s why I prefer Eric to Bill.
@RfP: It;s funny you mention Harrison becaus eI am in the middle of Dead witch Watlking — ans struggling with it. Rachel is not an attractive character, by which I mean, she doesn’t attract me.
@Victoria Janssen: Well, in fairness, Balzes are very short. they have to rely on cues that get their gravitas from outside the genre.
@Julia Rachel Barrett: I agree on the conscienceless vamp. But when somebody says “you stole my soul”, it has to mean SOMETHING. After thinking more abotu it, maybe it means “subject to the need for blood”, i.e. a kind of lack of freedom from blood thirst.
Well, either that or you stole my freedom to make meal choices. I guess it means that you took from me my humanity and force me to prey on the race of people I used to be a part of – now I am separate.
Jessica, I was lucky enough to start the Rachel Morgan series in the middle. I liked the books very much–until I went back and read the earlier books, at which point I realized how much the characterization had drifted between books and how little intentionality there seemed to be in how the relationships developed. I thought both that and the overall storyline were in need of a reboot. Kim Harrison apparently felt the same way and has done it (or tried to; I haven’t read the last couple of books). I’m sure that turn-around has cost her some fans, but I have hopes for it.
You might be interested in the concept of the soul as explored (sort of) in “Soulless” by Gail Carriger. I resisted reading the book, because I couldn’t really get into the idea of soullessness, but her idea–well, I won’t say anything more. Just that the heroine doesn’t have a soul.
That said, I do think there needs to be a difference between a vampire or other meta-human, and regular humans. IF that’s the mythology.
I think that a paranormal/fantasy novel ought to BE paranormal, not just hint/flirt at it. (As in: The Lace Reader by B. Barry had a lot of descriptions about how lace reading ought to be done, but nobody ever actually read any lace in the story, nor did it play a part –the actual reading of the lace–in the narrative. Then, why did it have all the lace reading junk???)
I want to WALLOW in the paranormalness and the fantasy.