Mick Farren (1943–2013)

It was a struggle to finish, and it was ABSOLUTELY NOT WORTH READING. There's not enough of a premise here to build a bad novel on, let alone a good one. It doesn't feel like the plot built up to the conclusion or that the conclusion was the inevitable outcome of everything that passed before it.

The characters are not consistent throughout the book, behaving first one way, then another, whatever seemed to suit the author's purpose for the scenes he wanted to set up. In one very early scene we learn that spilled nosferatu blood is a powerful draw to other nosferatu to engage in a fighting frenzy to attack the bleeding nosferatu with "tooth and claw," but in scenes later in the book, the shedding of nosferatu blood has no effect whatsoever on the other nosferatu present. It simply wouldn't have served the author's purpose.

There are no character arcs and no real development of any kind for any of the characters, no plot development. Most of the book is comprised of massive information dumps which are not only unnecessary, they stall the plot rather than move it along. The author also seems obsessed with name-dropping, trying to connect his main character, Victor Renquist, with every major historical figure from every culture around the world that he could find a Wikipedia article about.

I read another reader's review that complained about the author's use of big, fancy words, which I had noticed too from the start of the novel. At first I liked it because it helped create a gothic feel to the book. But apparently the author couldn't keep it up, and there are whole chapters written in a different style before we return to the gothic, erudite language. It's too inconsistent to be effective on any level. In fact, the writing changes so drastically at a couple of points in the book that I wonder if the author had a ghost writer (or a couple of ghost writers) to try and salvage this book. Even if that was the case, it obviously didn't work. The author loves the construction "all but," as in "he all but smiled" or "they were all but beside themselves." He not only abuses this phrase by using it constantly, but he misuses it, resulting in awkward constructions, and he overuses it. Farren needs to learn how to self-edit.

There are point-of-view issues in almost every scene. The author constantly flips between a tight, third person point of view to an omniscient one or another character's point of view for a sentence or two, then back again.

The editing is terrible. The book could benefit greatly from the attention of even the lowliest proofreader, though I can understand why TOR Books didn't want to sink any money into this project. Shame on the publisher for taking on so many books by such an obviously incompetent writer!

It is best to think of this book as a spoof of vampire novels in general. As such, it's still a really bad book, but that's the best light you can cast it in, as if the author's intention is to buck the trend to depict vampires as killers with hearts of gold, angst-ridden creatures who hate their own nature, sexy and sensual, both attractive and repulsive, etc. etc. The nosferatu in Farren's books are supposedly asexual because they cannot experience sexual pleasure (just as they can't get drunk or be affected by the drugs that affect humans), yet the female vampires very carefully dress up and apply makeup to greet the male vampire, and there are references to male vampires taking on a female consort (or seven). There may have been potential there to play on the differences between sensual and sexual -- may have -- but it gets lost in the author's misogynistic attitude toward women, his constant objectifying of women, and his insistence on portraying "powerful" women-nosferatu as scheming, petty bitches.

Not worth reading.

~bintarab… (altro)