Customer Reviews

A Taint in the Blood: A Novel of the Shadowspawn

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

S M Sterling's great strength is the the depth of his world building. Here the premise is the existence of a human sub-species with special abilities. This sub-species was dominant until the genes disappeared into the general population with occasional sports appearing as monsters or tyrants. Then a couple of centuries ago a secret society started to breed back to the sub-species which has become the the secret masters of the world. Their abilities are great but balanced by an inability to play well with others of their kind, poor emotional control and nasty tempers. The theme of the series of which this is the first book is the vampires' plan to thin the human heard either by a plague or even more brutal EMP attack. The plot of this book is the seizure of the girlfriend of a anti-vampire vampire by his twin sister and struggle to recover her. Along the way there are lots of neat weapons, kinky sex, food and shopping porn.

I found this book to be a refreshing new take on the vampire novel.

The "Publisher's Weekly" writeup complains that
"Stirling hits just about every cliché, from the
grizzled vampire hunter and mentor
to Adrienne's pathologically devoted servants...".
The book includes these elements, but Mr. Stirling's approach to these
cliches is decidedly un-cliched.
None of it seems forced, and the plot lines seem very much
character- rather than plot-driven.

As his career has progressed, Stirling has gotten better and
better at writing *people*; this book does not disappoint in that
regard. There are no "why would someone do THAT?" moments that
seem typical of genre novels.

One of the real strengths of the book (and of Mr. Stirling's work
generally) is the depth to which the world and the bases for
the Shadowspawn's talents have been thought through.
This differentiates "Taint in the Blood" very strongly from
books like Laurell Hamilton's, where vampires just *are*, with the
world otherwise pretty much unchanged from the one we live in.

I think Mr. Stirling had fun writing this book;
I certainly had fun reading it, and look forward to the sequels.

I own most of his books, and am a great fan of The Change series. However, I hated this book. The hero's girlfriend is kidnapped in the first 3 pages, then repeatedly raped and tortured for the remainder of the book. The graphic descriptions were unnecessary, and the whole book left me feeling slimy. What happened to S.M. Stirling? Please turn this series around, and focus on plot and character development. Leave the sadistic porn for lessor writers.

Vampires are hot right now, and some authors who previously didn't even dabble in the vampire genre are hopping on the bandwagon.

And though he doesn't actually use the word "vampire," S.M. Stirling is the latest to bounce on with "A Taint in the Blood," the first book of a new urban fantasy series. It's a series with plenty of promise, but the whole thing eventually crumbles into a very long, rather boring stew of exposition and a rather vague, cliched vampire mythos. Plus, I never could warm up to the whiny anti-hero.

Adrian is a Shadowspawn (aka Homo sapiens nocturnus), part of the bloodsucking subspecies that has quietly ruled the human race since prehistoric times (and is sort of interbred with them now). But he lives a peaceful "human" life, for the most part. Then his evil sister Adrienne appears in town and kidnaps his ex-girlfriend Ellen, and makes her into one of the sex/blood-donating "lucies" who serve her and the other Shadowspawn.

Unsurprisingly Adrian is determined to both rescue Ellen and kill his evil twin, so he sets out with his old buddy/mentor Harvey to find both women. But the Shadowspawn are launching a new scheme to dominate the human race, using a new disease to gain control of the entire human race.

"A Taint in the Blood" is a frustrating book -- it feels like S.M. Stirling had all sorts of awesome vampire concepts that strayed from the norm. Then he just slapped them together with a lot of shopping porn, architecture porn, clothing porn, S&M sex, and a plethora of vampire cliches that have already been done to death (example: Council of Shadows, bucketloads of money and sex/bloodletting).

In fact, Stirling seems rather bored with his own story, since most of the book revolves around Adrian and Harvey trekking.... very... slowly... towards Ellen, and Ellen getting used to life as a lucy. Only a small amount actually involves the Evil Vampire Plot Against Humanity. Stirling also heavily spatters the story with painfully awkward pop culture references (the "I drriiiinnnk yooouurrr miilllkshake!" thing wasn't funny the first time, let alone the second) and horribly cheesy EEEEEVIL dialogue ("It's not food unless it screams in despair when you bite it").

In fact, the best part of the novel is Ellen exploring the world of the lucies -- think a perfect little suburban town filled with pretty houses, children and friendly people. It's incredibly chilling, and Stirling is at his best when he explores how a subsociety revolving around vampires would work.

Adrian is pretty much a standard wangsty vampire -- he hates what he is, drinks "dead" blood from bags, and whines a lot about Oh The Woe Of Being A Hot Immortal With Immense Quantities of Money. And the female characters are a pretty lousy bunch. They tend to be passive trembling damsels, creepy half-crazy "lucies," or depraved lesbian rapist/murderers who apparently want to have incesty sex with their twin brothers. Or kill them. Whatever.

It has some brilliant ideas at the core, but "A Taint in the Blood" just ends up meandering into an aimless stew of cliches -- most notably the angsty vampire-who-hates-himself.

Soft porn, vampires, wealth beyond all reason and characters that are barely two dimensional. Anne Rice did it so much better 20 years ago. I like Stirling's change novels as well as the Emberverse series. But this just left me cold. I didn't care if our protagonists succeeded or not. I hate to suggest it, but it seems like the author just jumped on the Twilight bandwagon. Twilight was a bore. This is worse.

I'm not sure why, but S.M. Stirling decided it was his turn at a vampire urban fantasy series starting with A TAINT IN THE BLOOD. His successful Change Series has garnered him a well-deserved following, the post-apocalyptic stories grim yet hopeful. Now, instead of a retro Dark Ages setting, he tries his hand at magic and demons. Most of us are getting tired of all the blood-sucking out there, but if it's going to stick around, the writing might as well be decent--and fortunately Stirling will force those vampire wannabe writers to step it up a notch, especially in showing how much vampires really are monsters. It's about time.

Stirling's big strength in all his books is world building. Here he takes the traditional vampire lore and twists it into a shape that's more interesting than most urban fantasy. There's the history and origins of modern-day 'demon cannibals' who are born not made, mix in Shadowspawn proclivities and lifestyle, add a pinch of killing methods and details about warfare, and fold in the rules of the Power and how to work around it. Then you bake it into something that looks like a regular cake, but is actually a molten lava cake filled with chocolaty goodness (couldn't help myself, the novel is filled with all sorts of foodie details).

This book has all the clichés. There's the main character Adrian, the wealthy and brooding immortal who's trying to break away from his evil family and their 'humans are only good for food' attitudes. There's the grizzled mentor Harvey, thrice divorced, who carries around his sawed-off shotgun with silver bullets and used to work with Adrian for the Brotherhood. There's the plucky heroine Ellen with the body of a goddess (she's a dead ringer for Marilyn Monroe...), who endures torture at the hands of Adrian's sadistic sister while she awaits rescue. Have we read all this before? Sure, but not written with this much tongue-in-cheek and depth at the same time.

Yet, while TAINT is better than your average urban fantasy, it has its flaws. The most petty being that Stirling is italics happy--between all the telepathy and PoV character thoughts it got to be a little ridiculous. If you want me to get more serious, then I could complain about how poor Ellen must suffer Adrienne's sadist tendencies, and unfortunately we end up having to watch, including one incredibly unpleasant S&M scene. While Adrienne is a deliciously evil villain, the constant sexual abuse witnessed first hand and talked about among her blood herd of 'lucies' got redundant and overbearing.

One thing that starts out as a strength but ends up becoming a problem later is the pacing. Like his other novels, Stirling starts TAINT at a sprint, and blabs about back history along the way, hoping you can keep up. Sometimes you can, sometimes you can't, but the action is enough to keep you reading even if you don't 100% know what's going on. The action does get breakneck enough that readers will stumble and have to re-read when transitions are light on explanation; on the other end of the spectrum is a big gap of time that's glossed over, and even includes a hokey 'Rocky trains for the big fight montage' reference. It kind of felt like Stirling rattled off this book one weekend and had a lot of fun writing it, throwing together interesting concepts along the way, but didn't bother to go back and smooth it all out. What starts out as interesting world building by the end leaves some holes about how the magic works, which is pretty crucial to the plot. Add to that some contrivances, and you read the climax thinking, "What the..." or "That should not have worked."

In all A TAINT IN THE BLOOD could give romantic vampire urban fantasy the jump start it needs, forcing realism and excellent writing into a usually fluffy and melodramatic sub-genre, and could attract readers who usually wouldn't pick up this kind of book. Be careful, though, because it can get over-the-top.

As well as being an S.M.Stirling reader I'm an old time Buffy fan. This is SO not the Buffyverse [although there are cute asides in tribute to Buff Anne and Mister Pointy]. The author used his amazing world building skills to take every trope about vampires, hidden knowledge of the ancients, secret multi-millennia conspiracies, Old Gods that walk among us and more and turn them sideways in multiple dimensions into something new, strange and wonderful. He took his abilities to work the Dark Side [tm] that he used so brilliantly in the Draka Series and the Sparta books, melded it with the more accessible style of his Islands and Emberverse series and produced something that I pray will be there for many sequels to come. The story is a non-stop avalanche of twists and thrills. The action gets better and better the deeper you get into the labyrinth of the interaction of world and plot. The closest book I can compare it to would be Hamilton's Obsidian Butterfly except Stirling can actually write sex scenes that don't clunk. However both books seem to get more vivid the deeper you get into the contradictory ever changing world created by the writer. Finally Stirling has created his best female villain since Yolande and Skilly. For a man who does brilliant female protagonists that is a hard bar to top but Adrienne Breze is truly a woman one can hate, love and lust after all at the same time. This is a paranormal story for people for avoid that genre and an adventure story for people who claim they don't read genre. It is nonstop roller coaster ride of wonder, action and character. In my opinion it is his best book since Under the Moon.

Where to begin? Take the Draka from Stirling's earlier books, add fangs, throw in some porn and stir. One instant vampire book. Then there is the Kindle price vs hardback, so this one is double trouble.
Even at 6 bucks plus for the hardback I can't suggest this one. What a shame Stirling couldn't have spent his time writing another Peshwar Lancer book instead.

In "A Taint in the Blood," acclaimed author S. M. Stirling departs from his more recent forays into alternate history and instead presents us a world inhabited by the vampire-like Shadowspawn, creatures who share some, but not all, traits with the vampires depicted in Bram Stoker's Dracula. When central character and female protagonist, Ellen Tarnowski, breaks up with her boyfriend, Adrian, she has no idea she's about to become a plaything and food source for his twin sister, Adrienne.

Much of the novel centers on Ellen's attempts to deal with her new life; Adrian's response to her abduction, and, of course, the obligatory and fascinating world-building that Mr. Stirling does so well, and is my favorite part of this book. Listening to Ellen and another "lucy" discuss how vampires get their power, seeing how suburban American intersects with a truly horrific and creepy sub-culture, and even watching the younger Shadowspawn jockey and finesse for position, power and control was enjoyable. One of Stirling's greatest gifts as a writer is to present an entirely reasonable point of view that nonetheless goes against the best interest of his principal audience. In the "Emberverse" series, democracy is depicted as a totally unworkable system and monarchy the modern, reasonable, efficent way: in this series, Stirling uses his vampire look-alikes to point out just how bad human beings are for the earth. He also creates believable, empathetic villians. A few of his supporting characters, however, veered a bit towards sidekick status (i.e. the crusty human partner, the eeeeevvvilll Japanese warlord, the prim, efficent collaborator, even the creepy goth girl) and some of the campy dialog got a bit old as well.

Here's why I didn't rate it higher:

Why is Adrian different from his kind? How did he get that way?
As a woman near Ellen's age, I didn't find her interior thought processes terribly believable.
The entire lesbian/dominatrix thing was done to death in the Draka series. I realize that Mr. Stirling isn't writing for my demographic, but I found it really unpleasant and dull.
The whole fourteen-thousand year old great-grandparents thing was just odd. I didn't understand what was going on at that point.
And, of course, Mr. Stirling being Mr. Stirling, LOTS of food writing... this time, interpersed with clothes writing, architecture and geography writing and so on. Some may like it, others may find it to be filler. You have been warned. My personal preference would be more background and structure and fewer details.
Despite all of the extra time lavished on the details, I didn't really get a clear understanding of how the Shadowspawn came to be, how they influenced society and so on. I REALLY don't understand why they weren't running Stirling's world at this point. How did they ever let humanity get so powerful, with their incredible array of powers?
Another open-ended vaguely cliffhanger like ending. I will be very annoyed if something that appeared to be conclusive turns out to be less so. That's a journeyman's trick.

A decent story, and I'll probably read - but not buy - future volumes.

As someone who has read almost all of Stirling's work I can say with confidence that this was a let down. It really seems like this is a bad mimic of Stirling, I have a hard time believing he wrote this. The vampire parts are all 'borrowed', very cliche, very predictable unless this is one of your first books. If it is, others have done it better, like Ann Rice. Even Twilight is more original and a better read. I just don't understand why he jumped on the vampire bandwagon. If Stirling actually wrote this (I bet it was one of his kids or grandkids), then he didn't bother to even skim whats already out there involving vampires, this is ssssooooo been done ten or twenty thousand times already. His Terminator continuation is way better than T3 or T4, the first few Change novels are awesome, but get more boring as one goes. Bottom line, Taint in the Blood sucked, and not in a good way.