Berkley, $4.99, ISBN 0-425-13133-5
Paranormal Romance, 1992

Braindead characters, oversexed caricatures, purpler than purple prose, and rubbish of a plot. You can’t blame this book for not being half-hearted when it comes to being crappy.

This book, I discover upon coming back from an UBS siege, is book two in some series. Oh well, no harm giving it a try anyway; I’m in the mood for some sexy vampire romances, after all. Then I frown – egads, the same hero is paired with three different women in three consecutive books. This isn’t romance, it’s David the Oversexed Bloodsucker Fiend Does Dallas, er… LA.

And this book hits the smelly stuff the moment I read the first chapter: a letter from a whiny, co-dependent idiot named Veronica begging our stud muffin vampire-slut David de Morrissey to come back and love her again so that she can be whole again (or some rot). Then David is boinking another vampire slut named Darienne few chapters down the road, all the while wooing an equally buxomy bunny name Alexandra Peters. Boink, boink, boink, crap plot, crap characterization, crap book. The sex isn’t even steamy.

Bad enough Veronica’s conversation is nothing but “I love David! I want him back! Why must he leave me? Oh God… the pain! I can’t do anything without David by my side!” Romantic? More like pathetic, especially when this Veronica is clearly unable to function without David. Sad. Likewise, Alexandra can be Veronica for all the character she displays – no spine, no personality, nothing but “Oh David! You’re so manly!” Give me a break.

And David and Darienne, who must be the most energetic boink bunny this side of town, have personalities of a pancake. They are nothing except overheated, over-sized genitalia – they can’t do, think, or say anything that don’t involve sex. Boink, boink, boink. Yucks.

Fair enough if this farce is some sort of soft-porn thingie, maybe then I would get into the whole ridiculous farce, but this is a romance (or so it says in the spine), recommended by several well-known authors on the cover (I’m sure this would haunt these recommend-happy authors in the future). Yucks!

And the sex… oh my, I am still laughing my head off. The prose is simply hilarious, a complete mess with everything turgid, erect, throbbing, pulsing, wet, and even puckering thrown in for good measure. And when the grand finale of a particularly silly 5 page marathon is “he shot steaming stars into her” (the Armageddon?), my laughter turns into a whoop of hysterical giggles. You must read this meteoric event to believe it.

This book would have gone straight to the pile of crap books in the storeroom, if not for the fact that I paid for this, and I want some of my money back! Back to the UBS this goes, and it can’t go fast enough, along with the next two books that I wouldn’t even want to look at now.