Avon, $5.99, ISBN 0-06-075196-7
Fantasy Romance, 2005
Kerrelyn Sparks’s How to Marry a Millionaire Vampire is deliberately (I hope) absurd for the sake of comedy. In Ms Sparks’ world, the vampires are living among humans but most humans don’t know that, even if the vampires have their own customs and even TV station, the Digital Vampire Network or DVN that no human is aware of. Don’t ask me how. Maybe the vampires have super powers of hypnotism or something.
In this one, our vampire millionaire hero Roman Draganesti (not to be confused with the elves of Silvanesti and Qualinesti, Dragonlance fans) has invented fake blood that can be used by vampires so that no humans ever have to sport fang hickeys again. Naturally, while some vampires are pleased, others are not since it would be like eating KFC only this time the meat is made from plastic instead of chicken. Roman therefore has as many enemies as he has friends that his money can buy. One day, he drops by the dentist Shanna Whelan to get an annoying fang problem fixed when coincidentally enough his enemies drop by to say hello to Shanna and it turns out that she has a secret past and they have mutual enemies. Without telling her that he is a fangface, he sets her up under his protection with twelve stereotypical Highlander vampires as her bodyguards.
The humor is comparable to that in books by Stephanie Rowe, where humor is often of the absurd kind with plenty of plays on words as puns and parodies of pop culture to bring out the ha-ha’s. If you find the idea of vampires watching Blood and Disorder, the cop show, and soap operas As the Vampire Turns and General Morgue on DVN funny, these books will be exactly your type. If you don’t, you may find the punchlines too obvious and therefore not as funny as the author would like them to be. In short, these books are polarizing, I’d think, because some readers will find them funny while others will find them absurd. Me, I find this one pretty funny at times but I also find the author stumbling on her way to the punchline pretty often as well. Still, if Ms Sparks manage to hone her sense of humor a little better like a stand-up comedian would after a few years on the circuit, I’d probably get into the swing of things.
The characters are completely flat and forgettable, but clearly the main priority here is the ha-ha-ha’s. This can be a problem, as I don’t particularly find the humor that good. Still, How to Marry a Millionaire Vampire is a pretty interesting read in a novelty kind of way.
