Review Archive

Now that the past few (very busy) weeks are behind me, I can focus on reviewing Jim McDoniel’s An Unattractive Vampire, which I finished a few weeks ago. It’s the second of three winners from Inkshares’s Sword and Laser contest—the first being The Life Engineered—and is a pleasure to read. An Unattractive Vampire is a humorous swing of the pendulum, a witty response to a zeitgeist flooded with angsty teenage vampires who are no longer monstrous, no longer the stuff of horror. It is a guffaw in the face of the “sexy vampire” that boldly states, “you think that’s a vampire?! THIS is a vampire!” And yet, there is angst, and kitsch, and a healthy number overly-sexualized teenage vampires in An Unattractive Vampire. And it all serves to move along an active, interesting, quickly-paced plot that rewards the reader greatly. It follows an unlikely trio, orphaned siblings, the older sister—a