Predatoress [Paperback]

Emma Gabor (Author), June Marshall (Editor), Sarah Werrin (Illustrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 4, 2009

A PREDATORESS IS BORN
A gifted, beautiful college freshman, Emma, is victimized by a vampire in Transdanubia, Hungary. In turn, she selfishly vampirizes her three best friends for companionship in her nightly quest for human blood. They rampage through Hungary and Vienna spreading the scourge. But her conscience and desire to love Zoltan and live a normal life, drives her to find a cure based on original genome research. She has a chance to rid the world of vampirism once and for all and become a power for good.
IN THE BEGINNING...
It's September 2003 in the ancient town of Sopron, Hungary, when one of Dracula's spawn turns me, Emma Gabor, an 18-year-old college freshman, into one of The Undead. I become a blood-thirsty but reluctant vampire, constantly questioning my morality as I foist myself upon victim after victim.
Compelled by survival and unwilling to tread this path alone, I vampirize my three best friends, Kati, Gizi, and Eszti. We go on bloodthirsty rampages every night, luring our victims through charm and sexuality or simply overpowering them with tricks and violence.
Out on the town one night at Club Colosso for a joint feeding session with my friends, I dance with Zoltan Szabo, a genetic research fellow at the university, who is also the love object of my friends, Kati and Eszti. We form a friendship based on scientific interests and fall in love at a charity ball held in the ancient castle of Frakno. We consummate our passion! I now realize that working with Zoltan could be the key to freeing my friends and me from this terrible scourge of vampirism! I must, with great pain, hold back from telling him the truth and from making him one of The Undead.
To minimize our chance of getting caught in town, and to spread out the victims more evenly, the four of us go to Budapest in search of prey. We invite the composer, Attila Vertes to our nightspot table with a poem, which he answers with another one, suggesting he knows what we are! He discloses that although her mother was a vampire, she protected him and he composed his opera, "Bloody Tears," about her. There is an instant union of souls between him and Gizi, who invites him to Sopron. Eventually I am compelled to tell Zoltan about my condition. He is repelled and rejects me....

Editorial Reviews

Review

AN UNUSUAL HUNGARIAN VAMPIRE
Emma's story is certainly an unusual take on Hungarian vampires, whose lineage ostensibly started with Dracula a.k.a. Vlad the Impaler. Emma tells her tale in a truly entertaining, informative, and viscerally funny way.
For an eighteen years old college student, she paints her story canvas with broad strokes of utterly believable deep anguish, hope, experience, and knowledge. Stephenie Meyers at al. beware - I expect Emma to become a major force in the genre! --Steven Kingsley, Co-publisher

About the Author

EMMA: AN ONE OF A KIND WRITER
Emma is a precocious 18-year-old college freshman when she receives the Embrace, as the act of vampirizing one s victim is known. While her last name is Gabor, she is not related to either Zsazsa Gabor and her sisters, or to Dennis Gabor, who won the Nobel Prize for discovering holography. However, she is a scientific prodigy, whose chosen field is cloning and genetic research in forestry.
Her family s struggle to survive in Hungary at the end of Second World War, the subsequent Soviet/socialist rule, and the fall of communism is the historical background of her younger years. Her parents most fervent desire is to give her all the opportunities they were denied in the Workers Paradise.
As her story unfolds, her struggle to retain as much of her human self as possible plays out against the evil now ruling her body. She discovers that the price of becoming and staying immortal is horrendous:  constant lying, cheating, and victimizing innocent people, all the while being in a never-ending state of pain and unhappiness.
She also discovers a new side to herself, as the leader of the pack of four young and beautiful female vampires. She claims it s a matter of expediency, but it is her intelligence that makes her a natural leader.
Her beauty, quick mind, and scientific abilities, even in her vampiric state, attract Zoltan, who also works in her chosen field of genetic research. She falls in love, and despite all odds, finds both happiness and a cure for vampirism with his help.
Her will to live, love, and be a contributor to, not a destroyer of life, makes her journey through the darkest compulsions of human existence possible. Actually, much more than possible - they make her triumph inevitable.

Product Details

• Paperback: 390 pages
• Publisher: Newmedia Publishing; 1st edition (July 4, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1893798577
• ISBN-13: 978-1893798571
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,523,934 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Of Crimson Joy: And his dark secret love, Does thy life destroy. -William Blake, July 19, 2009

By 

Cherise Everhard (Michigan, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Predatoress (Paperback)

Emma is a typical Hungarian teenage girl. She lives at home with parents and has a few girlfriends she is really close to. While her pals are already interested in the opposite sex, Emma is more interested in her studies. Then one night she is awoken by a stranger in her room, he takes her blood and the life as she knows it and turns her into a Predatoress.

Emma reluctantly embraces her new lifestyle as a Vampire and although she wishes she were mortal she selfishly turns her best friend Kati into a Vampire, and then the two of them turn their other two friends, Gizi and Eszti, into Vampires. Soon this foursome is terrorizing their hometown on their quest for blood to sustain a life none of them is completely comfortable with.

This book reads like a memoir, told from the viewpoint of Emma, the friend that starts it all. The book summary promises an interesting and unusual vampire tale that pulled me in immediately. Unfortunately, the actual story fails to pick up speed until the book is about half of the way through. The storyline gets bogged down with Emma's ramblings of genetics, DNA, Hungarian histories and delicacies, and the repetitious fights and feedings between the 4 friends. It made it difficult to weed through the prose to get to the heart and vitality of the story, which ends up being Emma's quest for a cure for her, her friends and the other Vampires out there.

The main problem I had was with Emma herself. She is not a likable heroine or villain. Her bossy, know-it-all and selfish behavior makes it really hard for the reader to care about what she has to say. She comes off as immature one moment and pompous the next. When Emma is only a few hours old in her new vampire persona, she begins to speak, act and dictate as though she is lifelong authority on Vampire etiquette and ethics. If I had been one of the three friends she had turned, and then ordered about and lectured relentlessly, I would have staked her in the heart after about 5 minutes.

I was really looking forward to this tale, but ultimately found myself disappointed. The marketing campaign for this book is brilliant, and I have no doubt it will be a success because of it. Reader's can also visit Predatoress dot com and purchase a bottle of Emma's own Blood wine; a luscious and fruity Red Zinfandel, with a bite. Perhaps I should have drunk the bottle of wine whilst I read?

Cherise Everhard, July 2009

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not Twilight or True Blood, but I love it!, August 21, 2009

By 

Cherise Kachelmuss "Mom and More" (IL) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Predatoress (Paperback)

I never got into vampire movies or books, I honestly thought it was stupid and not a genre I liked. Then with all the hype about Twilight, I decided to jump on the bandwagon and read it and from there I got hooked. Then I read all the Sookie Stackhouse books, which are the basis for True Blood on HBO, and now I just loved and finished Predatoress by Emma Gabor.

Predatoress is a vampire book based in September 2003 in Sopron, Hungary, when Emma was changed forever. Emma, 18 years old, had a bright future ahead of her as a scientist until one night when she was bitten. In order to survive, she vampirizes her three best friends and they all go out together every night to feed. Well you know when girls get together there is always trouble and of course there are disagreements and love problems.

Without giving away too much of the book, Emma realizes she can't live that way forever, obviously who would want to. One night while she is out clubbing with the girls, she meets Zoltan who is a genetic scientist that every girl is practically in love with. First, Emma could care less, but the she falls for him, even though he two girlfriends have feelings for him. Then Emma realizes that with her knowledge and Zoltans, maybe they can work together on curing Emma's condition.

I really enjoyed this book. It was different and it is interesting to see how different authors create their vampires. The Predatoress vampires have their own ways of doing things and surviving. This book though does get into some blood detail, so if that grosses you out too much skip over those sentences. I also loved the turn at the end, you may think the book is over and then "pow" something happens!

Predatoress was released on July 4th and is a 390 page paperback. It is a quick read though and kept me reading!

You can also check out the Predatoress website to read more about the book and author!

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars An Obvious Self-Publish, August 17, 2009

By 

Cyprith - See all my reviews

This review is from: Predatoress (Paperback)

Predatoress is an unreadable, obviously self-published book. Ignoring the pixilated cover image, the first major problem is the formatting. This is not a book that has seen an editor's desk, let alone an editor. The grammar is childish at best and punctuation is scattered at random throughout. There are no indents whatsoever. The author uses page-breaks to separate her massive block paragraphs and the margin is Word's standard 1.5 inches--totally inappropriate for a 5.5 x 8.5 inch book.

The plot is slow and stilted, the characters flat, cardboard cut-out support for the obnoxious lead, the writing itself miserable to wade through. After less than a few hours as a vampire, the lead starts preaching about vampire decorum to her attentive audience of best friends who, as it so happens, are hardly upset the main character has turned them into undead, bloodsucking monsters for her amusement.

One of the major problems I have with this book is that even when you ignore the fact her main character is generally unlikable, you have to deal with bricks of unrealistic dialogue. For instance:

"Though he's thin, at least he's not drunk, so his blood is not diluted with alcohol, which is rare for us these days," I said. "I like his spiciness. I think I taste a hint of saffron. I'd go for another Indian any day, even if I had to get two to satisfy the quantity of blood I need. But Indian tourists aren't that common here in Sopron, or in Hungary in general. We just got lucky tonight. I think we need to re-evaluate. There's nothing wrong with good old Hungarian blood. And tomorrow night, when we go to Club Colosso, that may be all that will be available to us."

Notice that after the main character wastes nearly a minute of your life telling her best friends (who, being her best friends, should know everything she's just spelled out), the other characters in the scene are allotted exactly three sentences. Another example of the sheer lack of writing skill displayed in this book is the random occurrences of poetry.

"Blood

A woman talks of blood
Like some aphrodisiac
She stands in its ruby flood
Like an amnesiac
Her blood is ripe and red
Young and fervent
Her body leaps from bed
She is your servant."

All in all, if you must read this book, get it from the library. It's not worth a quarter at a garage sale, let alone $17. Even the cheap wine they're giving away with it cannot salvage this wreckage of a novel.