It feels like someone went up to Francesca Lia Block and told her, "Vampires are hot right now. You should write a book about vampires!"
And there doesn't seem to be much inspiration beyond that for Block's latest novella, a tale of vampiric angst and luxurious misery called "Pretty Dead." While her prose is as luscious and vivid as ever, the story itself is a paper-thin hodgepodge of vampire cliches -- you've got the wangsty wealthy vampire, the sinister and hedonistic ex-lover, and some rather boring humans who dream of being immortal.
Charlotte is a vampire, living a life of glamour and beauty in modern L.A., and locked in the flawless body of an eternal teenager. But when her friend Emily dies (apparently of suicide), Charlotte finds herself changing -- she breaks a nail, develops a zit, and finds herself perspiring. At the same time, she finds herself drawn to Emily's grief-stricken boyfriend Jared, who has figured out what Emily really is (she uses lots of sunscreen! She must be a vampire!) and wants her to turn him.
And at the school she currently attends, she encounters a face from her past: William, her former lover and maker, who seems to be followed by widespread disaster wherever he goes. Charlotte looks back on her long life with William -- how he seduced her away during her mourning for her twin brother, and how they traveled through countless decades of change, fashion, and immortal numbness that has slowly left her hollow. But William has one last shock for his former lover and protege...
Francesca Lia Block has a way with words, and "Pretty Dead" is no exception. She washes the entire book in jewel-toned words ("a rim of darkness like the blood-red trimming a pale rose") and an atmosphere of sorrowful hollowness, and darts like a bird between mossy forest glades, ballrooms, luxury-encrusted mansions, the fiery streets of war-torn Paris, and the glitzy nightlife of Los Angeles. She also seems to have acquired a dress fetish -- there's loving descriptions of all Charlotte's designer clothes throughout the last century.
Unfortunately, the plot is as flimsy and pale as a spiderweb. It's basically a standard "wangsty vampire mopes about being immortal while falling in love with a human" story with some rather predictable plot twists; moreover, the entire melodramatic ending feels cheap and contrived. Block inserts some interesting ideas into the story (such as immortality destroying one's ability to feel), but those ideas just sit there -- they never seem to be expanded into something deeper.
Perhaps the biggest problem is Charlotte's transformation from a vampire back to a human... we never really find out how or why. It's a nice aversion of the usual vampire/human romance trope, but it needs to make some sense.
And Charlotte is pretty much your standard "good" vampire -- she spends the entire book wangsting about how horrible it is to be an immortal "pretty monster," but she doesn't really do anything to improve her life. She's also the most passive vampire I've ever read about. And though we see how William became a vampire, it's never explained how he turned into a raving hedonistic sociopath. And Jared is basically a pretty body with no personality -- we never hear why he wants to be a vampire, or why he's so enamored of Charlotte.
"Pretty Dead" is a web of pretty words stretched over a fleshless skeleton -- Francesca Lia Block had some promising ideas, but the underbaked characters and limp plot just end up being another "woe! I'm such a sad vampire!" clichefest.
