LoveSpell, $6.99, ISBN 0-505-52530-5
Paranormal Romance, 2003
Filled with her now trademark imbecile heroines, Katie MacAlister’s A Girl’s Guide to Vampires is mildly amusing at first because it is a blatant parody of Christine Feehan’s vampire stories. Unfortunately, the heroine’s very shrill village idiot antics soon overwhelm the book and my senses and the hero doesn’t help when he overplays his “I know everything but I can’t tell you!” shtick.
Our heroine Joy Randall tells this story in first person. Her friend Roxanne is someone you will recognize if you come across some really strange vampire story fans that insist that vampires are real and they want to meet one so that they can redeem said vampires with their virginal purity. Early on, the local Wicca coot in residence Miranda predicts that Joy will meet a tall, handsome stranger to fall in love with, the usual. Then Roxy and Joy head off to Eastern Europe because Roxy wants to find a Moravian vampire to rob her off her virginity. The vampire arrives and bleeds them both dry, the end. No, I’m kidding about the previous sentence, unfortunately.
At the GothFaire, Joy meets Raphael, the mysterious head of security, whom she finds intriguing. Soon she is having torrid dreams and visions of him. They are life mates, after all. Roxy, however, swears that the walking Christopher Lee caricature Dominic, the guy that runs the fair, is the real Dark One that will claim her precious virginity. When women start dying and for stupid reasons Joy become the chief suspect, Joy realizes that she’s neck deep in more trouble than she realizes at first.
The author is careful to dedicate the book to Christine Feehan so that the more psychotic fans of the other author will restrict their attacks on her on the Amazon reviews page and on their own fangirl forums. For a while I am willing to overlook the frankly moronic main female characters because I get some easy chuckles from the very obvious parodies of the too-somber lifemate concepts of the Carpathians. But as the story progresses, Joy turns more and more into an idiotic diva with a huge chip on her shoulder and an attitude to match while Roxy becomes more and more like a cry for psychiatric help. As Joy starts throwing bratty temper tantrums for the smallest of reasons, Raphael becomes just as annoying. He knows things but he won’t do anything, which means Joy must in turn do more stupid things and because of that, he must die – I propose that someone stake him through the heart with a huge dildo for maximum humiliation effect.
Despite having some amusing novelty quality – it is about time someone parody Christine Feehan after all, even if it’s unfortunately this attempt at parody. Unfortunately, the author’s continuous infatuation with her imbecilic high-maintenance diva heroines that make her last few books totally unpalatable continues in A Girl’s Guide to Vampires, a book all about bad blood in more ways than one.
