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.

@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.

This is a really good point. I shall ponder it.

Often in vamp lore the soul is code for moral goodness, which is connected to the lack of free will signaled by blood lust.

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.