Review: Blood Bites

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Blood Bites

By Charlotte Bromide

Deuteronomy Press, 569 pages 

Reviewed by Sally Putterman

I’m beginning to think vampire novelists aren’t even trying anymore.  If you don’t believe me, look no further than the latest installment of Charlotte Bromide’s thirty seven part “Sexy Vampires Series” to see what I mean.  Originally intended as a trilogy, Miss Bromide’s vamps turned into such a cash cow she hasn’t been able to stop herself from churning out a seemingly never-ending stream of tasteless drivel.

Don’t get me wrong.  I loved books one, two, three, five, seven, eight, nine, eleven, thirteen, sixteen, nineteen and twenty one.  And when Cindy Harlequin turned into an armadillo in book twenty three, my jaw dropped so far to the floor it took me a week to find it.  I was like, “How does Jack Bodswell think he’s going to bite through her reinforced shell?  He’s liable to break his fangs and then where will he be?  I’ll tell you where.  Down in the caves of Dungblossom with all the other toothless Impo-vamps, that’s where.”  And that surprise ending (Spoiler alert) where Quincy Trimmings turned into a bat while french kissing Lissa Sluttington, I almost had a stroke, a heart attack, and an orgasm all at the same time!

But with every sliver of tasty lemon Miss Bromide has served us, she’s also served up a plate of lemons seasoned with crap.  I’m looking at you, Book Fourteen.

And now, after three long months of waiting for book twenty six to come out, I have to report that Blood Bites is the worst tasting crap-flavored lemon yet.  You’d think that after something like fourteen million published words, Lissa would finally be able to choose between Jack and Quincy, but you’d be wrong.  That bitch is as fickle as ever.  Personally, I don’t see what’s so hard to choose.  Jack is rugged yet sensitive and he tries SO hard not to kill the people he eats.  Quincy isn’t even a vampire.  Would somebody please tell me what’s so special about this guy other than the fact that he can run fast and may or may not be descended from an ostrich?

Yet, you better believe I’m going to get a dump truck full of emails from the Quincy camp.  I could go on about this, but I’m getting side-tracked.  The big problem with Blood Bites is that Miss Bromide no longer seems to care about her characters.  She can’t even keep track of them.  I counted twelve separate times when she wrote the wrong character’s name.  In one twenty-page stretch dealing with Quincy’s escape through the woods from a pack of shape-shifting penguin men (known as Menguins) the author started referring to him Doug for some reason.  Did she mean Doug Darling, the Gollum Cindy had an affair with in book seventeen?  Hello, he died from Eucalyptus poisoning in book twenty two, remember?  Don’t these books have copy editors?

If that wasn’t bad enough, the book ended right in the middle of a sentence.  I mean, this wasn’t your traditional cliff hanger; she just stopped writing.  This is literally how the book ends:  “‘You’re nothing but a two-bit whore, Harlequin,’ Dirk said.  He spat on the floor of the cave.  ‘Now that we’ve engaged in conjugal relations, I will slowly absorb all your power.  Soon you will die!’  He laughed maniacally.  Cindy wiped her brow with the back of her hand and flicked the excess sweat into the eyes of Dirk McKendrick.  ‘You think you’re tough, you two-bit nematode, but’”

That’s it!  The book just ends.  But what???  I kept looking for more pages, but the rest of the book was blank.  What the hell happened???? Is Cindy’s sweat poisoned like it was in book nineteen????  Did she call on the Porcupine Gods of Mount Chilichili?  Is she really Early Thompson, the mimic-shifter from Salty Bottom Gorge?  For the love of God how does that sentence end??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? 

I guess I have no choice to wait another three months for the next book to come out, but you know what?  After another couple of books like this one, I’m liable to give up on the series.