Yet another October is upon us, which means yet another horrorquest. There are many ways to participate in this August event, and one of the easiest, a way to clear the palate, is to write a review. And what to write a review of? Why, a piece of vampire pulp, of course! This has served me well in the past, and there is an almost limitless supply of vampire pulp out there in the world. The book I am reviewing now, "demon in my view" (capitalized just like that on the cover), was published in 2005, and found by myself in the free pile outside of a library book sale some days ago. I read it yesterday, a process that took me about two hours, including the scoffing.
The book concerns one Jessica, who is just starting her senior year of high school and who is generally pissed off at the world around her, shown by her wearing all black, being sarcastic and not having any friends. Including any boyfriends, even though she is exotically gorgeous, of course. But Jessica has a secret: she is secretly the writer of a vampire novel called Tyger, Tyger, written by her anonymously at the age of 16. (This seemed implausible to me, but apparently the actual writer of this volume, one Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, actually published her book "In The Forests of the Night" at the tender age of 13). The plot of the book revolves around the fact that she isn't just a normal goth girl writing vampire fiction: she is actually channelling, through her dreams, pieces of vampire history. (Making Jessica a self-insertion of some sorts, and making me have a few doubts about the author's sanity.) Sexy evil 5000 year old vampire Aubrey is sent to figure out how Jessica knows so much, but instead of squashing her like a mortal bug, he falls in WUV with her, despite the meddling of some good witches who spend their time hunting vampires. Jessica learns the secret of her dreams, and after her step-mother is killed, she cuts her ties with humanity and goes and joins the undead.
That is the plot, more or less.
What is more important than the plot is what I learned about women from reading this book. Which is pretty much that girls are really, realy dumb. A pretty big conclusion from a single book, and hopefully soon I will forget the book AND forget the inevitable conclusion about female intelligence from it. But:
- If you are a girl, you can make even the most hardened sociopath soften up to you, because you are SPECIAL. The proof of this specialness is having long black hair and green eyes, and also being a sarcastic loner.
- If even after you have softened the heart of the hardened sociopath he still goes out and kills every night, that can be ignored---he isn't killing SPECIAL people, after all.
- If your stepmother dies a violent death, that can pretty much be gotten through in a few pages---she never understood you, since she wasn't SPECIAL.
- If anyone warns you against your relationship with a hardened sociopath, it just means that they are hypocrites.
So perhaps this book is truly a work of horror: contemplating that the relationship patterns inscribed within are running through the subconscious minds of adolescent women truly makes me scared.