Customer Reviews

The Embrace: A True Vampire Story

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(19)

 

 

The back blurb of my copy of "The Embrace" claims "The Embrace will forever change the way we look at one of the fastest-growing religious movements in the country and its most vulnerable fold: our children."

Are they claiming Satanism or "vampirism" is one of the fastest growing religious movements? Since when? Or are they insinuating that modern day witchcraft = Satanism/vampirism. If that's the case someone really needs to do some homework. I sure hope the book is researched better than the back cover copy . . .

The Embrace is the author's pieced together account of a vicious true life crime perpetuated by a vicious, disturbed young man who believed he was immortal (among other wacked out theories). Rod Ferrell and his group of mindless followers are aimlessly traveling from Kentucky to Florida where Ferrell intends to add his ex-girlfriend Heather to his "coven", kill Heather's parents and steal their vehicle. The group then plans to head to New Orleans and crash with Ferrell's "vampire" friends. The sheep-like clan members don't take Ferrell's claims of murder seriously and laugh it off. Unfortunately, he wasn't kidding around and they find themselves accessories to a crime that is anything but funny.

I won't comment on how accurate this retelling of the events leading to the murder happens to be as I was completely unfamiliar with the case until now. The book reads like what I'm assuming it is: a collection of interviews pieced together by the author. The problem lies with the dull way the author presents her material. The book is extremely tedious and very repetitive and could've been trimmed by a hundred or more pages. This all makes for a very dull read for anyone not familiar with this case.

Don't bother reading this book. I went to school with several of the characters in this book, the ones from Florida, and I was a friend of a couple of them. Aphrodite does a terrible job of writing this book, the story has no flow, and she revisits simplistic ideas, while breezing over major issues. There was more to the story than vampire novels and Goth music. Trying to explain Rod's action in that fashion is like trying to say, "Oh, well Hitler just had a bad family life and self-esteem issues."
The real question is how could sane people follow such a freak. I would suggest that you rent the movie "Vampire Clan" instead. I will cost less, it goes by quicker, and tells the story just as fully without any of Aphrodite's conclusions. Plus in the movie everyone looks a lot better than they did in real life.

This book is about a 16 American boy from Kentucky named Rod Ferrel, a Schizotypal wannabe "vampire" addicted to Anne Rice and Marilyn Manson music, who took his vampiric friends Scott, Charity, and Dana down to Florida where he used to live to basically kidnap his other friend Heather Wendorf and all go to the location of Anne Rice's "Vampire Chronicles", New Orleans, to live as an immortal coven for the rest of their eternal lifes. However, while in Florida, because Rod Ferrel was so stressed from escaping Kentucky, he killed Heather's parents with a metal crowbar in the process of liberating her and she didn't find out until later on the road. Her older sister Jennifer came home, found the dead parents, called the police, and Rod and his "coven" were arrested several days later, all convicted of murder and put in jail.
Sure, it may sound like an open-close case, but what makes it so interesting is two things...
1. The media really exploited this case as a way to slam the "Goth" culture, which T.V. knows nearly nothing about. Most of the emphasis they put on the case is that Rod Ferrel dressed and acted like his vampire character Vesago in his insane/immortal fantasy world. He was so insane and had such a Charles Manson/Jim Jones thing going with his friends, he made them all believe they were vampiric demons sent to Earth to open the gates of Hell. At times he sounds dillusional but intelligent, but at other times he just sounds like a misguided idiotic teenager, which he basically was. News and T.V. said he drank his victim's blood but the murders were actually not based on vampirism, but based suprisingly soley on stealing a car and not being arrested for that! So the actual crime wasn't a vampire sort of thing, it was a theft gone wrong of thing. The media though just because he dyed his hair black and wore all black he was a goth, but really he just had a highly disfunctional family and suffered from schizotypal personality disorder.
2. In the author's opinion, this double murder showcased a decline of moral and sweetness in the American youth, paticularly the alternative crowd. Indeed, she calls whatever this is, I'm guessing schizotypal disorder, a "religion", which implies it has something to do with Wicca/Pagan/Satanism, or some other alternative religion which isn't fair to groups of those crowds. They get enough crap from intolerant Christians enough, and don't like having an isolated sick, drugged up, bad seed teenager's crime being traced to them.

I recommend this book if you want to know about the case in great detail, what happened before the murders in Kentucky and Florida and how the coven came together, and after the murders and what happened at the trials. After reading the book, I felt sympathy for Ferrel, he was messed up and it sounds like his horrible mother had a very negative influence on him. I enjoyed reading about what Rod was tied up in while he was in Kentucky, and about how he almost went on a rampage there, got expelled from school, tried to kill his mom, drank his friend's blood, gained countless followers with his dark showmanship, and allegedly tortured cats and dogs. Buy it to get a good look at the possibilities of what can happen when unstable teenagers go absolutely out of control.

In The Embrace Aphrodite Jones tells the story of the murders of Rick and Ruth Wendorf by a self proclaimed coven of "vampires." The story telling is often flawed by Ms.Jones use of shifting points of view and highly "purple" prose.

Essentially The Embrace is an eye-opening account of lost teens in America that raises more questions than it really answers. The story of Rod Ferell and his followers was an interesting one if just for the fact that it opens a door on a world that most of us don't know about either by choice or plain ignorance. The children depicted in the book could have been helped if only someone showed interest and concern. More than the story of two murders this book is a morality tale of the childern who are lost in today's society.

Had this book been better written it may have reached a larger audience. If it is available in your local bargain book store it is worth the read but I wouldn't go out of my way to hunt it down.

I usually get through books of this genre fairly quickly, and the news stories about the so-called "vampire" murders in Florida intrigued me. However, it took me about 3 months to plow through Ms. Jones's book, not the least due to the embarrassingly bad writing, slipshod editing, and "teenagey" perspective. First things first. If Jones is supposedly an English teacher, I am all the more appalled at her frequent clumsy phrasing, subject/verb disagreements, laughably amateurish cliches (e.g., "in one fell swoop"), and dangling modifiers. I am not just being pedantic here. If I have to raise my head from the story to think, "This is incorrect!", the writing is problematic, and I did that throughout this tedious book. Second, though closely related to the first, is the poor editing. Why didn't a decent editor catch the grammatical errors and those endless, irritating italicized phrases? Once again, they disrupt the flow of the narrative. Finally, Jones implies over and over again that Heather is a victim and a sympathetic figure, but never demonstrates why this is so. She refers to "poor Heather" but fails to show why this kid was victimized. Jones also gives short shrift to the other young people besides Rod and Heather whose lives were destroyed by this tragedy. The story itself holds morbid fascination. But Jones, with her schoolgirlish and awkward writing, doesn't do it justice.

I was eager to read this true story and was intrigued by the notion that such macabre takes place in a proper (if not poor) dry county of Kentucky. The areas of Kentucky mentioned in Ms. Jones's book are known for the don't talk, don't tell society that hinders communication and prevents teens from openly expressing their needs and desires to the extent that they are left completely vulnerable to sinister influences. To its credit, the book makes a dramatic examination into the inadequacy of uneducated and irresponsible parents and a fallible legal system that allows them to perpetuate.

Even a reader from *Kentucky* can identify a poorly written book. I honestly have not read any of Ms. Jones's other works. After this, I don't care to. I hope this is an isolated effort and is not representative of her overall talent. The most accurate description I can conjure for reviewers is this: Aphrodite Jones researches several participants and eye witnesses, including the self-absorbed and deranged Rod Ferrell and keeps all records on little yellow post-it notes. After she conducts the amount of research she feels is necessary, she hurriedly shuffles all the little notes together and transcribes the resulting pile into frantically typed pages to meet a press deadline. There is no continuity, no logical chronology, no transitional paragraphs -- no real feeling in what could be a very chilling tale of reality under our noses. I truly wish someone else would take a stab at this and re-write this story. It is gruesome and demented in the sense that it is true.

This made a great story and I couldn't put it down... until I talked with some of the real people involved. The problem is she takes the facts and adds her own opionion to it, mixing up the truth. Though this is based on a true story, her version is 75% fiction. If you want a version based on Pure facts, try Linedecker's version.

Aphrodite Jones immediately seeks scapegoats to blame these murders on. She finds roleplaying games and music and she sticks to them as the main reason that these tragic events happened. Jones is not a criminal psychologist, she is a tabloid reporter and this book makes that fact apparent over and over again. It starts with a poor premise and that premise is poorly executed. I recommend you spend your time and money elsewhere. I got this book at a dollar store and I spent a dollar too much.

This is the 3rd book I have read of Aphrodite Jones. I find that all three have similar faults, but this one is the winner. I am a long time true crime reader. This book's subject matter interested me because I was living in central Florida when these murders took place. I remember the media coverage well. Of course, this is the account of Roderick Farrell and his coven of supposed vampires. Jones' rendition of the facts does follow along the "basic" story line here, but it is rife with confusing storytelling. Namely, she shifts from topic to topic and back again in a completely confusing chronological timeline. You will find yourself saying, "huh?" until you read further and realize she's talking about something totally different from what you were just reading. Another prickly point with me was her obvious siding with Heather Wendorf. It was a blatant attempt to portray Heather as an innocent bystander. While I am not convinced of her guilt or innocence from an accessory standpoint, she certainly did not do much to dissuade Rod's comments about her parents when she could have intervened. It also begs us to ask the question of why Heather acted so strangley about news of her parents' murder, both after her arrest and subsequent acquittal. Her actions just aren't normal. Aphrodite Jones did everything short of granting Heather sainthood, and her attempts to force feed those beliefs upon this reader didn't work. Again, all in all it was an interesting read simply from the storyline, but not very well written.

I picked this book up because I thought it would be interesting to find out what was in the mind of Rod Ferrell. What I got instead was a wasted $7. Ms. Jones is a very poor writer. The first 150 pages or so kept repeating the same things over and over again. I can't count how many times she wrote that Charity drank Rod's blood. Hello, we get the point. By the time I got to the actual crime itself, I was already frustrated with her lack of narrative and any semblance of chronological order.
I do agree with some of the reviewers who said this book portrays kids who role play as bad seeds. I think this is a gross generalization. I also agree with the reviewer who said that it appears as if Ms. Jones was in a hurry to finish the book.
I wouldn't waste my money on this one if you can help it.