MIRA, $6.99, ISBN 1-55166-886-6
Fantasy Romance, 2002
I’m in shock. MIRA – MIRA! – publishing a vampire romance that isn’t a Silhouette Shadows reissue. MIRA – MIRA! – publishing a book with the words “cock” and “fuck”. Wow. The editors at MIRA have learned two new words today.
And ooh, Twilight Hunger is a romance novel vampire that does the cock fucking thing. Wow. Of course, Dante is still a sap, right down to his “romantic, poetic” name – can I call him Dickie out of spite? Dante is a sap who is so shocked that he, a vampire, has to drink blood. I mean, EEUW. A bloodsucking vampire – HOW DISGUSTING!
At the same time, the author reprises her Dipstick Anti-Vampire Humans bashing as well as the use of the usual Evil Bloodsucking Vampire – HOW DISGUSTING! – plot device, so I have no idea what to think, except maybe Maggie Shayne wants me to hate everybody in her story. Okay, done. Eeuw to vampires, eeuw to humans, maybe we should all kill ourselves and be done with the self-loathing, yes?
Our heroine, Morgan DeSilva, is a human being, eeuw, but she has this Belladonna antigen in her blood, so she is the Chosen one. This means Vampires – good ones, those that don’t drink blood unless it’s freely offered, that sort of crap – will be honored to stand by in the shadows to watch over these Chosen, waiting for the day they will suck the blood out of the Chosen. Cool, man. Morgan discovers a journal by Dante (memo to Ms Shayne: only sissy men keep journals, but oh yeah, Dante’s a sissy, so carry on) in which he describes how his aunt keeps watch over him and then sucks his blood to make him a vampire – HOW DISGUSTING! – and watches as he puts his cock into an innocent girl and fucks her brain out even as he sucks the blood out of her neck. All biological aunties should be this cool, I tell you.
Morgan is enthralled. This is amazing! So she passes off Dante’s sissified incest story as hers and makes lots of money being the new hotshot screenwriter of Sissy Vampire Stories.
Dante, who has been cozying up with Auntie or sulking in self-pity (he doesn’t tell if he has been fucking the brains out of Auntie though), now starts standing in the shadows and watching a naked Morgan sleep. And Morgan will wake up, only to find the bedroom empty. Repeat this “emotional scene”. And repeat. And repeat.
Vampire foreplay, romance novel style. They never fail to stone me out.
Thankfully, the two human vampire-hunter-wannabes are funny. And the suspense part is really well-done. So what I did was to black out Moo and Moomoonoo’s staring at each other in prepubescent-soulmate-eyes-crap and focus on the external conflict part. That is a good story. Moo and Moomoonoo are walking sleeping pills, however, so I don’t know what to say. Except that Maggie Shayne should really straighten out her priorities – look, are the vampires sissies or what? When the author figures that out, instead of going all wishy-washy over the “he’s bad, he’s just misunderstood, he’s bad, he’s mind-raped by his auntie” nonsense, she’ll do a good book.
Vampire stories need accountability too, you know. It’s not fair to blame Auntie for Dante’s sticking his cock in the wrong hole.
