![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Vande Velde, Vivian - Companions of the Night
Sat, Jul. 28th, 2007 01:22 amSeveral people recced this to me, particularly after I read Twilight.
This is up there with Annette Curtis Klause's The Silver Kiss as one of the more interesting takes on vampires, particularly if you're a bit fed up with the Anne Rice-an broody angsty vampires (Peeps is also a cool take, but I think the Klause and this will appeal to the same people). I am a huge vampire fan, but because of that, I am rather sick of the usual romantic, dark and painfully emo vampires that I usually get in fiction.
Kerry accidentally gets involved with the affairs of vampires and vampire hunters one night at the laundromat, and she ends up spending most of the book attempting to be helpful enough to a vampire so he won't just kill her.
I really loved the vampires in this book; they actually feel like they've lived for quite some time, as opposed to psychologically being a high school student for centuries. I particularly loved the moral ambiguity of the book, that the threat to Kerry felt real and immediate, and the lack of romanticization. This is what a vampire-human relationship might work out if vampires were real.
Kerry herself is also a neat character; she has realistic reactions to the reveal of vampires, and Vande Velde does a great job of portraying how shock has Kerry both terrified and strangely pragmatic, often at the same time.
On the other hand, I'm not quite sure if I completely buy the ending, but I did enough to enjoy the book, or as much as you can enjoy a tense thriller that never holds back on the sense of danger. I think I'll be looking for more of the author's books now.
This is up there with Annette Curtis Klause's The Silver Kiss as one of the more interesting takes on vampires, particularly if you're a bit fed up with the Anne Rice-an broody angsty vampires (Peeps is also a cool take, but I think the Klause and this will appeal to the same people). I am a huge vampire fan, but because of that, I am rather sick of the usual romantic, dark and painfully emo vampires that I usually get in fiction.
Kerry accidentally gets involved with the affairs of vampires and vampire hunters one night at the laundromat, and she ends up spending most of the book attempting to be helpful enough to a vampire so he won't just kill her.
I really loved the vampires in this book; they actually feel like they've lived for quite some time, as opposed to psychologically being a high school student for centuries. I particularly loved the moral ambiguity of the book, that the threat to Kerry felt real and immediate, and the lack of romanticization. This is what a vampire-human relationship might work out if vampires were real.
Kerry herself is also a neat character; she has realistic reactions to the reveal of vampires, and Vande Velde does a great job of portraying how shock has Kerry both terrified and strangely pragmatic, often at the same time.
On the other hand, I'm not quite sure if I completely buy the ending, but I did enough to enjoy the book, or as much as you can enjoy a tense thriller that never holds back on the sense of danger. I think I'll be looking for more of the author's books now.