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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Horror in name only,
By
This review is from: Bloodchild (Paperback)
There are plenty of poorly written books out there but it is the rare novel that makes me feel compelled to warn off others. This joins the club.
The ad for "It's Alive" ("There is only one thing wrong with the Davis baby. It's alive") was more compelling than this novel about the Hamilton family's experience with their odd child. Dana Hamilton's biological baby is stillborn but there's an anonymous family that wants to give up their child. A mysterious lawyer facilitates the adoption and soon Dana and Harlan are parents to a sweet red-headed newborn. They bring the baby home to stay with them and Harlan's younger, teenage sister Coleen. The kid, of course, is a vampire baby as one might deduce from the title if not the cover. After the long "getting to know you" set up for the characters and their situation, the story trickles out the horror in small doses. The characters are busy doing fairly mundane things that don't move the story forward and then spending the next chapter telling each other about what they just did. There's enough wooden dialog to build a 17th century frigate. The characters behave conveniently more often than logically. Perhaps all this might be forgiven if anything actually happens in the book, but these are the highlights of the vampire plot. You can be the judge of their sufficiency. WARNING SPOILERS: 1) Dana switches doctors from her family doctor to some mysterious vamp doc. The reader never meets him, of course. 2) A nurse, comically referred to Nurse Patio throughout almost the entire book, moves in with the Hamiltons. She is obviously a vampire, but seems to be able to move around in the day. She's build like a WWE female wrestler and seduces Harlan. 3) Dana's mother-in-law, Jillian, moves in to help (prior to the nurse's arrival) and disappears when she gets too nosy. She is discovered in a tool shed by Coleen, undead, but conveniently disappears before anyone else sees her. 4) A dog is found dead, neck snapped. 5) Colleen's ultra religious friend disappears (not, happily, before bestowing upon Colleen a large silver cross). 6) After Harlan has been stupefied by the lovely and slightly manly Nurse Patio, Colleen takes up the investigation, follows the Nurse and Dana to--I kid you not--an "old farm house" where she witnesses a trio of vamps watching her breast feed the vampire baby. An aside at this point to mention that the author's fixation on breast feeding starts to get unnerving about a quarter into the novel. The baby bites the boob that feeds him. We get it. 7) Colleen kills Jillian by touching her with the cross, then calls her boyfriend and a police officer who arrive long after everyone in the farmhouse is gone. Pretty fragile vampires. 8) Colleen eventually goes back, armed with a pocketbook full of crosses. She finds the three vamps in their coffins, drops a cross on them, and poof, dust. Her religious friend has enough humanity left to walk into the (sun) light and die. 9) Baby vamp and Nurse Patio escape; Dana gets preggers again at the end. Woven between all this is a bunch of boring B,C, and D plots involving Colleen's boyfriend, school, and friends. The vampires, their origins and their goals remain opaque to the reader. In fact, the blurb on the back of my copy is entirely misleading: "Only teenage Colleen senses the gathering evil that will turn a sleepy little town into a kingdom of vampires." There is no sense at all that the vampires are moving in to run for dogcatcher, let alone set up a kingdom. Exactly two people are killed and turned into vampires, and one of them only because she was nosy. It's a ridiculous story and I hope this review will save at least one person from wasting their time. Monstrous: 20 Tales of Giant Creature Terror
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
The foundation of "Daughters of Darkness"?,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Bloodchild (Paperback)
I read this book to see if it's in any way connected to Neiderman's newest book under the V.C. Andrews name, "Daughter of Darkness." I guess in a way they could be connected, because neither one is really about vampires and neither one creates a vampire mythology.
In this book, published 20 years before DOD, a vampire baby is placed in the home of people whose baby was born dead. This book isn't nearly as bad as some of the books written in the V.C. Andrews name, but it doesn't pack any punch. The storyline mostly builds via hints and innuendo, which I find kind of irritating as a storytelling mode. And the climax is pretty weak, just soft of a "pff." The wrap-up is weird: "And then, life went on." There are some correlations to DOD, such as how the vampire nurse is named "Rose Patio," like the main characters in DOD. Rose seems to grow in stature at certain moments, which happens in DOD too. And the baby is a boy, which could explain why he was farmed out to human parents instead of being raised with a vampire family like the girls in DOD. It's written in third person instead of first person like VC books always are, but most of the action comes from the point of view of Colleen, teenage sister to the adoptive father. Since the action is all seen from the point of view of suspicious humans, you get few details about these vampires. I wouldn't recommend this book, but I would recommend it faster than Daughter of Darkness. The writing style wasn't as labored 20 years ago, around the time Neiderman was also writing the Cutler family series. There are still some of the author's more irritating trademarks, such as overuse of the word "diminutive," his standard descriptions of sex scenes ("fitting bodies comfortably,") and someone's eyes growing small. One more interesting note: the cover of the book has a recommendation for Neiderman's work...by V. C. Andrews. "Bloodchild" was published in 1990, 4 years after Virginia's death. I can't find any other recommendations from her on the covers of Neiderman books published before 1986. Now, both authors WERE published by Pocket Books in the early 80s, but "Bloodchild" was published by Berkley, a division of Penguin Group. Did Virginia ever really endorse Neiderrman's work, or was this Neiderman endorsing his own product using the V.C. name? (This isn't a snide comment, I'm really interested in the answer. If anyone knows for sure, please comment.) REVISION NOTE: I did find the VC comment on the cover of 1987's "Playmates," and she's referenced as the author of "Dark Angel." So maybe Virginia did make that comment before her death.
5.0 out of 5 stars
BLOODCHILD FAN,
This review is from: Bloodchild (Paperback)
I had to leave a review here because I could not believe the 1 star reviews. I thought this book was awesome. I read it about 10 years ago and it's still one of my top five memorable books. I am a vampire fan and this book brought with it something new and freaky- a vampire baby!
I've actually enjoyed quite a few of Andrew's books. I never find myself wanting after reading one. They often have twist endings that you would never think of. *spoiler* This book was really about the teen sister, though. It shows how a teen girl feels when there is a baby in the house and gives a perfect reason for them not to believe her (about the baby being a demon). Poor little teenager forgotten in the glory of the new babe - she must be jealous! I thought the baby was so scary. Being a mom, you can sometimes feel like your kid is sucking the life out of you - especially right after birth. In this case, it's true. I'm sorry that others didn't like this, but if you can get your hand on a copy, it's worth the read.
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