Ratings
Own it, Love it, Buy it in Hardback
Worth it's weight for Trade or Paperback
Borrow it from the Library
Borrow it from a Friend
Bury It
Werewolves and humans living together in harmony
Donna Boyd’s The Passion (Avon Books, 1998) opens with a tantalizing question: how can there exist a creature that is half human and half werewolf when werewolves cannot sustain an erection in human form? No, bestiality is not the answer.
In nearly Rician detail and almost as excruciating, Boyd teases and tempts her reader with the Darwinian puzzle. We meet Tessa, the star of the novel, pet and cherished human to Alexander Devoncroix (and where do we get these names? Dictionary of Names for Science-Fiction and Fantasy Writers?) destined-to-be Alpha Male; but of course, he has an evil twin—well, close enough, an evil elder brother. Tessa's papa knew werewolves well, and even entertains that her father and the werewolf were lovers. Of course, there is a lover's triangle involving Tessa, Alexander, and the lovely and esteemed pack leader, Elise. Since the outcome of this triangle is the crux of the novel, I won't spoil it for you.
I will, however, go on to point out what kept me reading this book was the same thing that kept me turning pages of Rice's Queen of the Damned (and no, it’s not because I'm a masochist), and that is, I wanted Boyd's take on the werewolf experience. Rice, and countless others who have since ventured into the realm of the sympathetic vampire narrative, gave us spectacular things to ponder: what did they see? sense? how did they feed? feel? From Rice’s blood drinking to quench the thirst of a limp penis, to Collins’s kick-ass version of Ripley with fangs, horror writers attempt to make their protagonists, and their unique situations, sexy. Sure, some truly achieve the gruesome detail of blood and gore, paralleling it to normal human function of eating food—making the reader both understand and be repulsed by the character at the same time, but not Boyd. Boyd's werewolves don’t eat humans. And if you, like me, are willing to put up with an I-can't-believe-it's-not-butter plot just to experience Boyd’s take on the werewolf existence, let me tell you this: go pull out your sticker books from the fourth grade, because it’s the same thing: rainbow colors and shootings stars. A sensation so far beyond pain, it’s ecstasy, the reader is supposed to believe. So stunning to watch, it makes the virginal Tessa all wet and gooey.
Boyd should have started her novel where she ended it, with an aberration of two species running amok, jeopardizing the delicate wool that has been pulled over the humans' eyes. And in true horror-writer fashion, giving voice to the Other, the marginalized with whom all of us adorers of horror can identify, Boyd should have done it from her perspective.
Ultimately, though, I give The Passion a Library rating.
On a side note: if you want a book truly worth it’s title, check out this from Amazon.com
The Fair One Speaks
While at the 1997 Vampire Con in Los Angeles, I was very interested to learn of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s pending series Sisters of the Night consisting of three books which would provide voices for Dracula’s brides. Yarbro would tell readers how the three brides came to be turned and their stories would be told. I was excited at this prospect despite that I usually dislike such vaults into poetic license (such as Alexandra Ripley’s Scarlett: The Sequel to Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind from Mass Market Paperback 1992 and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea 1996 from W.W. Norton & Company). I find they do not represent the vision of the original text, and, rather, operate in a direct affront to it (namely Marie Kiraly’s Mina: the Dracula Story Continues from Mass Market Paperback 1996—who, when I asked her what she did to prepare to write Mina, responded that she simply “thought” and did not even have the respect for Stoker or the character of Mina to read the original text. For shame, Ms. Kiraly! But, as we know, is reflected in the mediocre work that she produced). I had hopes that Yarbro, based on her Saint-Germaine series, would have a bit more panache than other similarly assuming writers.
The first of the series, The Angry Angel (Avon, 1998) is an interesting work. The writing is fantastic, with gorgeous landscapes and interesting characters. I thoroughly enjoyed the Romanian proverbs and quotes Yarbro offered at each chapter opening. However, to cast Dracula as a psychic, sadistic pedophile? Yarbro completely misses her mark in representing Dracula, and instead writes a fetish text with nice scenery. While I come to care about Kelene and her family, I am too distracted by the ill formation of Dracula to much care for the text as an elaboration of Stoker’s story.
One of the most detracting, annoying plot points that gives Yarbro away as having not truly read the text from where she hopes to leap is that she makes Dracula fatally vulnerable to sunlight. Dear readers, vampires withering into dust when struck by sunlight originated in our collective conscious in 1937 when Mr. Bela Lugosi penetrated to our hearts’ darkest corners as The Count to which all others would be compared. Stoker’s Dracula, as emulated in Francis Ford Coppola’s film representation, does not die when exposed to the sun. Vampires, according to Stoker, merely lose their superhuman powers during the daylight hours (they are weakest at noon and strongest at midnight). Vampires, during the day, are just regular Joes.
As for Kelene as a character, I’m not terribly impressed, either. She is marked as the blond vampire bride, about which Stoker’s Jonathan remarks, “I seemed to somehow know her face, and to know it in connection with some dreamy fear, but I could not recollect at the moment how or where” (p. 38, Bantam edition). Kelene, when we leave her, is incapable of scaring the servants, let along a proper Englishman. We are to believe Kelene as the first female vampire who will approach Jonathon and lick her lips “like an animal” after she finishes gloating over him? We are to believe that Jonathon Harker will find this slip of a woman-child “deliberate[ly] voluptuous” (p. 39)? I just don’t see it.
And if Kelene is perceived by Jonathon as voluptuous, are we then to see him as the same kind of perverted pedophile Yarbro casts Dracula? I think not. Kelene just doesn’t measure up and the fair girl who is “the first” vampire bride; the one who will respond to Dracula’s threats with “a laugh of ribald coquetry” (p. 40).
For as much as I enjoyed the mechanics of Yarbro’s text: the striking imagery, the creative mind which provides the “fair girl” a name, a history, a mind, I am even less impressed with Yarbro for sexualizing and erotisizing a pre-pubescent girl. Yuck! I can only hope that for the next two books in this series that Yarbro actually bothers to read all of Stoker’s text and does some forward thinking before writing the tales of the remaining two vamps who require more ritual and fanfare to kill than the Count himself.
Rating: Wait until this comes out in paperback.
