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Description:
Welcome to the Bite Club - where the only requirement for membership is death...
West Hollywood, California. The Creative City. Liberal and welcoming. Free from discrimination and hatred. A safe place to live if you're gay. But West Hollywood isn't safe anymore...
Someone in town has a macabre passion for beautiful young men. Healthy, gym-toned male bodies keep turning up - tortured, drained of blood, missing parts, and quite dead.
WeHo Coroner Becky O'Brien is helpless to stop the accumulation of corpses. At the end of her investigative rope, she calls upon an old college friend, Christopher Driscoll, who is something of an expert on serial killers. Rushing to her aid, Chris arrives in town with his quirky boyfriend Troy in tow. Prowling the dark alleys and cruisy bars of WeHo in search of the psychotic fiend, the trio soon realizes that something possibly not human has taken up residence in Boy's Town - something with an insatiable hunger for the flesh and blood of hot young men.
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Qvamp says: The main characters are a vampire and his 'Renfield,' as is a ghoul that they meet along the way. Other characters are assumed to be gay, but are not explicitly stated to be so. The book is fun and enjoyable read. The characters do tend towards the stereotypical, but in an amusing way. |
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I'm the type of vampire/shapeshifter fan that likes a little originality in my stories. I did not get that in this novel as I had hoped.
The story would have been much more engrossing had it not been so cliche. The pacing would have been much smoother if page fillers of unnecessary back stories hadn't been written for every single character that was introduced in the novel. The back histories weren't really that interesting and broke the flow of the novel, the back histories that were told, did not move the story along at all. They felt more like detours, page fillers.
The characters would have been more interesting if they were more likable or kind. I didn't get the feeling that the two male lovers actually loved each other, but merely tolerated each other. And there were unnecessary harsh words exchanged between characters that should have had a more amicable and loving relationship. I found that their personality descriptions were contradicted by their actions. For example: Becky is supposed to be this top notch pathologist who is extremely attentive to details, but a few paragraphs later, she's an overweight, sloppy junk food eater that leaves crumbs and sugary smudges in her path. A person as meticulous as she is supposed to be would not be so sloppy or easily distracted by food.
There was too much slapstick comedy. Now don't get me wrong, I'm no stranger to slapstick, I'm a fan of slapstick done well! But the comedic pace of this novel seemed off and inappropriate in various situations and I didn't find it at all funny.
I don't know, perhaps this is what Mr. Bodner was going for in his novel and if that's the case, then this just wasn't my type of vampire novel. Also, anyone who has a liking for shapeshifters may not like this author's vision of them.
But my biggest complain is this: If Mr Hal Bodner's idea of humor is to make juvenile fat jokes throughout the span of his novel, I was not amused. It got tired fast within the first 15 pages. Please take into consideration who might be reading your novels (perhaps a big-boned reader or two.). A fat joke or two isn't taboo, but numerous 'greedy, sloppy fat people' jokes is ridiculous. Not only is it insulting and annoying to the reader but it's hard to be care seriously for a character who happens to be the butt of all jokes. I wanted to like this book, I wanted to love this book, but the characters fell flat to me. I'm sorry.
My honest review...
By: Steven ( steven06@gmail.com )
This book is one of the best queer horror stories I have read to date.
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