Loins Series - Once Burned

Loins. Grab ’em if you got ’em. That line is borrowed from the rap song in that link, which is a song about being a Tucson gangsta from a former peer of mine in university who left his very aggressive stance as a hardcore evangelist born-again Xian to return to a life of debauchery. So, good for him.

Anyway I’m not sure how else a book that makes Stephanie Meyer appear as though she beholds the craft and imagination of Bram Stoker slithers its way onto my blog, other than to point out it was a book club recommendation by someone that definitely was not me. Because if I am to be getting off to vampyres for 300 pages, it is at least going to get weird. None of this pop-sensation Trueblood nonsense, or Queen of the Damned, or Blade, or stories that Joss Whedon craps out and people salivate over because OH MY GAWD IT’S JOSS WHEDON!

There is a very brief list of things I liked, so we’ll just cover that and be done. First up: Electrocution. I like how this author’s audacious nature re-defined what it means to be electrocuted. “I mildly electrocuted the perpetrator…” no. No you did not. “When I was a child, was electrocuted and didn’t come out of the coma for weeks OMG!” Again, no. Can’t happen. Think of being mildly murdered. That is how much sense the author makes. What boggles my mind is to think –  or rather trying to think – of friends, family, editors, and publishers actually reading “mildly electrocuted” and just totally being okay with it. Like it means a little zap. It means death by electricity. I would not let someone try to pass off “mildly drowning” and then gaining the power of making people wet when they touch them as a means of a premise to a novel. What further discourages me is to think this person got paid. Paid in real, actual, dollars to write this stuff. It boils my blood.

Pictured: Whampire

The other favourite part of this story is that vampires just are. They just can! And what sort of vampires are they? Of course they’re basically cliché TV vampires from the modern era. No effort goes into the foundation mythology (a subject I particularly enjoy in any fictional universe) or how they came to be. And why can they fly, any explanation there? Of course not, don’t fret your brain, this is just a story about thrusting in a meat sword to the hilt. Can the author describe why they die, or appear to die? How that happens yet they still don’t decay? Any sort of insight as to why that would happen would be grea- Oh no, don’t get me wrong, I still want to know how Vlad the Impaler licks up messy virgin girls’ remains when he takes their honour from them, I just meant after that…could we then explore the universe of vampires and their defiance of modern science or at least make some shit up about how their disease, affliction, gifts, what-have-you, came into existence?

In the end, I thought these scribblings of a rather boring, uninteresting, unadventurous middle aged woman’s fantasies are better left in a shoe-box with her other quick release apparatus of equally lame, predictable, greasy nature. To the hilt!