Vampire Beach: Bloodlust - Alex Duval

So... vampires. We haven't ventured with this blog into those dark seductive kingdoms yet but all periods of calm must be shattered eventually by a cacophany of screaming fangirls over all the dreamy bloodsuckers. I'm not going to lie, I generally lose my mind and most of my verbal capacity over vampire stories. They're like a drug to me and I scream with the most obnoxious girl tweens out there. I own t-shirts, a life sized cardboard cutout, every dvd and the sheet music realted to various different vampire populated books and shows and several sagas would count amongst my most loved/obsessed over tales OF ALL TIME. The Vampire Beach series will never ever count amoungst them. Bloodlust is the first in the series but since I'll never read any of the rest on purpose I feel I can safely make some huge sweeping generalisations about the whole lot.



I photographed it here sitting on a book of Keat's letters to Fanny Brawne so it wouldn't be so frightening for you all. The fact that Vampire Beach: Bloodlust is 'Young Adult' fiction meant that I didn't and couldn't expect the same sort of vampires-as-sex-gods rauchiness that brilliant Paranormal Romance series like the Sookie Stackhouse / Southern Vampire Mysteries / True Blood books and spin off tv show could play with. BUT then I of course I realised two true things: the sexiness isn't even the most important or interesting thing about vampire stories AND that just because a book is toned down for a younger audience, doesn't mean it has to be shit. In fact the Vampire Academy series and (yes I'm finally gonna say it) Twilight books were both written for the same crowd and both managed to be completely AWESOME.

Thinking about it, the biggest and most obvious problem with Vampire Beach was that it was boring. It wasn't compellingly written, the characters were uninteresting and vapid. And most importanly it didn't capitalise on the amazing figure/symbol of the vampire AT ALL. No one even said the word vampire until page 129 and by then it only had 40ish pages to go. Plus even around the utterance of the magical word - NOTHING HAPPENED. If I summarised the plot of the book right now: Boy moves to beach, falls in love with girl who has boyfriend, she's a vampire, someone dies, this doesn't bother anyone much. LAME and I wouldn't even be missing anything out from the narrative. Maybe Duval was trying to pad out a much bigger and grander storyline? I hope so. I also hope he won't lose all his readers before something worthwhile happens but I think it's especially hard to keep people interested in bad vampire stories. If you like vampires you'll be spoiled for choice of books / movies / tv shows in any age bracket.

Just a short, harsh review - like a bandaid. Now we can all move on with our lives. Sorry Alex Duval - maybe try werewolves next time??? It's much harder to write a nothing book about them - no excepts them to be anything other than boring :)

At least it didn't take long to read: *^/***** (1.5 from 5 stars)