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

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.