Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

Our intrepid narrator, shoe aficionado and newly-crowned Queen of Vampires, Betsy, is determined to lead as normal a life as she possibly can. To this end, she goes job-hunting, and manages to land a job right out of her wettest of wet dreams: shoe salesperson in Heaven (i.e. Macy’s at The Mall of America). Betsy’s all “Hell yeah, employee discount!” but as always, there’s bitter with the sweet. For one thing, termites decided her house was the perfect location for a spring break party and then figure ah, what the hell, might as well stay on through summer vacation. For another, there’s a new vigilante group in town whose mission is whacking as many vampires as they can get their stakes on.

The house problem is easily solved, thanks to her best friend Jessica’s unending supply of moolah: they just rent a huge mansion—one right across the street from the governor’s, in fact, and I find the thought of Betsy and Co. living across the street from a house once occupied by Jesse Ventura oddly amusing.

The second problem is a bit thornier. On one hand, Betsy is the Empress of the Undead and apparently one of her duties is making sure her subjects aren’t turned into vampire tartare. On the other hand, a lot of vampires are assholes and she’s had to yank off more than one belligerent undead headcase from their hapless victims, so what’s a staked vamp here and there? But once the thugs attack her friend Tina and make an attempt on Betsy’s own ass—well, in the immortal words of a thousand Steven Seagal flicks: This time, it’s personal. So with the help of the ever hot, ever well-endowed vampire Sinclair and the motley crew of sidekicks we met in the first book (Tina, Jessica, and Marc the Cute Gay Doctor) plus a fresh batch of new sidekicks, Betsy attempts to hold down her job and solve the mystery at the same time. Some righteous asskicking is handed down, but the villains would’ve gotten away with it all if it weren’t for those meddling kids and… Oh, wait. Sorry, wrong campy, insubstantial pseudo-horror comedy series.

The problems I had with the first book are all magnified in this one. The lack of substance, the lack of character development, the chip on Betsy’s shoulder that resembles a flourishing young redwood when it comes Sinclair—I mean what is WRONG with her? This guys saves her ass AGAIN and provides her with the most wonderful orgasms AGAIN and still she snarls and distrusts him, which makes me wonder if she has some kind of a permanent dent in her cerebral cortex from getting her head smashed by that Aztek (godDAMN that’s one ugly car—I mean, speaking of subcortical damage, what in the fuck were those designers smoking when they came up with that hideous hosebeast?).

Aside from a pretty neat plot development at the end that stems from the termite problem, this book is pretty much completely dispensable. You KNOW the plot is very, very light when even a long-winded bitch like me can summarize it in three paragraphs. Nobody grows, changes or learns much of note, and at the end of the book almost everything is returned to the status quo. Betsy is still shallow, sarcastic and not very pleased with being undead royalty, and she’s still totally pissed at her consort, Sinclair, for little to no good reason. Sinclair is still a mystery in many, many ways, but still TOTALLY FUCKING HOT. Etc.

What’s so frustrating is, there’s so much material that Davidson could’ve explored instead of just shooting out more one-liners. Why is Betsy so different from the other vampires? How exactly is a vampire created? There are various mentions of vampire laws and such—how are they enforced? Also, what happened to the vampires who were extremely loyal to Nostro in the first book? And more details about Sinclair, Tina and Marc would not have been amiss. Seeing Betsy interact more with her parents would’ve been interesting too; her dad wishes she was still dead, for Christ’s sake, a hint of conflict that was raised in Undead and Unwed but quickly glossed over.

But despite all my complaints, this book really is a lot of fun to read. Like the first novel, the zippy, snarky dialogue is probably its best feature. Shit, scratch that, it’s just about the only feature in this book. It made me chuckle out loud, though, and I can’t dislike something that’s this much fun, hence the B- grade instead of a C-.

If Betsy keeps going in this vein without growing or changing as a person, I’m afraid I’m going to get tired of her, and I don’t want to get tired of her; I really enjoy her voice. It’s just starting to resemble a one-note melody, and god knows I don’t want Phillip Glass in novel form.

Not that everybody and their dead dog don’t know the storyline already, but here comes my usual overlong plot summary anyway: Betsy (originally Elizabeth) Taylor is having a pretty tough time. A couple months back, a bunch freaks with bad breath, no sartorial sense and unusually sharp teeth attacked her just as she’s leaving Khan’s Mongolian Grill. But the dentally enhanced thugs are the least of her problems, especially when her thirtieth birthday rolls around. On that happy day, she’s late for work, gets laid off, and then receives a not-too-gentle cranial adjustment from the fender of a car (an Aztek, no less, which is quite possibly the assiest looking car in existence) while attempting to rescue her cat. And to add insult to injury, she rises from the dead a few days later with a mean case of drymouth, which is bad, but for that special hellish touch, she’s wearing her stepmother’s castoffs—including what seem like a pair of cheap shoes. CHEAP SHOES.

Betsy decides this is some sort of weird fluke (and let’s face it, life with only Payless shoes to wear is not a life worth living anyway) and unsuccessfully attempts to off herself in various ways, none of which work because:

a) She doesn’t need to breathe any more; and

b) She heals at speeds that would make Wolverine swoon with envy.

She also finds to her complete horror that she now has a thirst for blood. Besides the major ick factor, her new fangs make her lisp whenever they make an appearance. There’s apparently no dignity to being one of the walking dead.

But there are a few benefits to being a vampire. People, especially heterosexual men, find her irresistible. OK, it’s kind of tiresome having to peel them off her leg every time they look into her eyes and decide WHOA SHE’S REALLY PRETTY, but it’s nice to finally have mojo. Her strength, reflexes and senses are supernaturally enhanced, and she doesn’t have to testify tearfully before Congress about how she got that way. She even makes a new friend when she talks a depressed doctor out of splattering the sidewalk when her supersensitive hearing picks up on his suicidal musings as she walks past a children’s hospital.

But those perks are pretty much outweighed by the assiness of the other vampires, who find her soon enough. There are two major vamp camps in town, and she has to decide whose to go with: the one headed by a preening Bela Lugosi-wannabe with a bad combover named Nostro, or the much-smaller contingent headed by a hot, hunky, terrifically built vampire named Eric Sinclair. (One of them ends up being the bad guy, and the other ends up being the love interest. Try not to let this puzzle confound you for too long.)

The problem is, Betsy doesn’t want anything to do with vampire politics, and her conviction that they’re all freaks with no lives (har) is only strengthened when they tell her she’s the Vampire Queen prophesied by the Book of the Dead. All she wants is to be left alone so she can lead a normal life. Well, normal except for that occasional uncontrollable-need-to-chomp-into-a-human-neck thing. But goddammit, Sinclair is offering her an unlimited supply of designer shoes for her allegiance, and she’s undead, not made of stone…

This book is narrated from a first-person perspective, and I dig Betsy’s voice. She sounds exactly like what she is: a shoe-obsessed, irreverent, street smart (if not necessarily book-smart), wisecracking Super Secretary. It’s to Davidson’s credit that Betsy embodies many things I find irritating in people, both in real-life and fiction, yet I like her anyway. Part of it’s how Betsy doesn’t take anything, including herself, too seriously. Everything’s fair game for her snarking, from vampires skulking around in graveyards ("Ooooh, the CARLSON mausoleum. How sinister! What’s next, a plate of lutefisk and square dancing?"), to her stepmother ("I could not forgive her for chasing my father while he was married, bringing him down like a wounded gazelle, and then marrying the carcass"), to her smarts ("I could have gone to medical school, except for all the math and stuff").

Then there’s Sinclair. Dude, he’s HOT. But there’s not enough of him in the book. At the end, I know certain basic facts about him (how he turned into a vampire, some bare basics about his background) but not much else. And he’s crazy about Betsy, of course, which is obvious to everyone except Betsy herself. Ultimately, though, he remains something of a cipher, which is a pity, because he provides such a nice foil for Betsy’s good-natured bitchiness.

The secondary characters are mucho fun. There’s Marc, the suicidal physician whom Betsy saves. Marc is gay, and it’s okay ‘cause gay means happy and happy means gay. No, scratch that, he has an anxiety disorder, but eh, he does much better once he moves in with Betsy and gets to be her Gay Sidekick. And hooray for Marc being a doctor—most fictional portrayals of gay men I’ve seen in the mass media involve them being in the arts, and usually the more flaming varieties at that.

Jessica, Betsy’s best friend, is also worth mentioning. She’s black, and damn, I cannot remember the last time I encountered a black person in a romance novel. (Actually, I can’t remember the last time I encountered a black person in ANY kind of fiction since reading Snow Crash three years ago. Hmmmm.) I got a chuckle out of seeing the two of them disagreeing over Gone With the Wind and cracking jokes about the race issue—God knows my friends and I have made some pretty tasteless jokes about the “yellow peril” I represent and my alleged affinity for calculus. I especially like Jessica’s obsession over her “best friend” status because it rings so true. I had a friend in junior high who was very much like that, and lemme tell you, it’s much more amusing to read about it in a book than to experience it in real life.

One aspect of the story has me scratching my head, and it’s Betsy’s antagonism towards Sinclair. OK, he’s pretty high-handed, and Betsy is not always the sharpest knife in the drawer so I didn’t expect her to realize that what she’s interpreting as asshattedness is an overdeveloped protective instinct, but I find her continued antipathy towards Sinclair kind of puzzling since he saves her ass more than once, and he’s hot, and he smells nice, and he provides the most excellent orgasms, etc., etc., etc. Frankly, the antagonism feels kind of forced; I get the sense Davidson is trying to drag on the antics and put off the HEA until later in the series. Nothing wrong with prolonging the sexual tension, but I wish she’d picked a less lame species of conflict on which to base it.

Much as I enjoyed reading this book and had a hard time peeling myself away once I started it, I feel absolutely no urge to re-read it. I think part of it is how it didn’t really engage many of my emotions apart from my sense of humor. It’s fun and fluffy, but just a little bit too fluffy. If the conflict between her and Sinclair had just had a little bit more bite to it (I SWEAR TO GOD I didn’t even notice that pun until I typed it), if I’d gotten a better sense of the other characters besides Betsy, if the resolution to their troubles hadn’t been quite as abrupt—in short, if the book had been a bit more substantial, I think I would’ve liked it even more than I did. As it is, if you’re looking for some funny-ass bitchiness and Snarkywood is down for some reason, this book is a pretty decent substitute.

* Screaming lady image shamelessly stolen and modified from the DVD cover for The Day of the Triffids, which was a pretty scary book that got made into a very campy movie.

The Carpathians are vampire creatures - only they don’t prey on humans to the point of killing them. Those that kill humans are considered vampires and their decision to kill their prey makes them into consciousless monsters. The Carpathians’ duty to control these “fallen” members of their race is to hunt them down and kill them.

They can only drink fruit juice and all other foods make them ill; they need blood to survive and they need to bury themselves in the earth during the day and draw from the earth for healing. They are all psychically connected to one another, and they rarely, rarely procreate, but not from want of trying!!! When they do manage to have an offspring, the baby is usually male, leading to a very lopsided population, and thus the family is dying out.

The first book is actually good - I enjoyed it, anyway. But it might have been good because I’d never seen the pattern of each and every book that follows so the novelty of it was interesting.

A quick summary of the first in the series: The leader of the Carpathians is going to kill himself because one of only two female Carpathians has been murdered and he’s distraught over his failure as the leader. He’s in tremendous psychic pain, and his anguish reaches a woman across town who is also psychic. She reaches back to him mentally, and they begin to talk telepathically. She stops him from doing the deed, he flies through the night to find her and see what she looks like, etc. He is very surprised to find out she’s a human, and not one of his kind at all.

The next day he arranges to meet her, romance and a lot of humping ensue, and there begins the predictable sequence contained in every other Carpathian novel written by Feehan.

1. Males lose their ability to see color at about age 21 and will not regain it until they meet their mates. It’s like Jude Deveraux’s thing where “you marry the one who can tell the twins apart.” It happens in every novel and takes the thrill out of initial attraction. Got color? Got mate!

2. Sex scenes are intense and involve blood sucking, blood exchange, and always, always, always the caveat that “Carpathians have sex in a more savage fashion than humans and thus cannot have sex with humans because their super duper strength and giant manhoods will kill the poor humans.” Further, there is always one doggie-style from-behind sex scene. It’s like clockwork. Once the couple are a-humpin’ in earnest, Feehan will throw in a rather spicy doggy style scene. Over a fallen tree, in a cave. Doggy style. Count on it.

3. Carpathians mate for life, and are entirely bound to each other, such that if the Carpathian male “goes to ground” during the day and is asleep and psychically unreachable by the female human, the female human is completely distraught and will try to kill herself rather than go on without her mate. Very angst. Tres drama.

4. Carpathians bind their mates to them with this Christian-vows-sounding oath that they recite in their own language while Doing It, and that binds their mate to them in self destructive manner described above.

5. The human females that are in some way “eligible,” i.e. through existing psychic ability, some demonstratable higher power or sixth sense, can be turned into Carpathians with an exchange of blood at three separate times. The conversion process is full of high drama and much soul-twisting angst on the parts of both the hero and the heroine, with lots of barfing and sickness for the converter.

6. The other Carpathians all have individual signature powers, and many of them focus on healing with herbs, candles, and chanting and singing, and there’s some weird dance involved with casting and uncasting a spell.

7. Doggy. Style.

So there you have it. You don’t have to read them now, because every single book follows this formula. Carpathian meets special human girl who is a misfit or special in some way, and suddenly he can see in color after centuries in black and white. They start knockin’ boots, and some blood exchange occurs, either deliberately or accidentally. She becomes Carpathian, and they overcome whatever danger is going to happen. There is a group sworn to kill them that pops up every so often, and then there’s other drama that can interfere. Usually the force keeping them apart is external, not internal. I mean, with all that come-from-behind sex, how could there be internal conflict? They are too busy humping.