First it has to be noted that this is one of the best titles to ever grace the cover of a book. It caught my eye when I was glancing through a library book sale and demanded that I take it home and read it right away. It’s just wonderful!
Unfortunately, the book itself does not come close to living up to the title and I really struggled with it. Vampires, in Jinks world, are not the creatures of most urban fantasy and horror literature. They are not superhuman in their abilities. They are not either terrifying monsters or seductively charismatic villains or antiheroes. They are, in fact, pathetic invalids who can barely function in the world. The support group was not so much about keeping them committed to not biting people and spreading their infection (although that is a part of its reason for existence) but was more about forcing them to come out of their basements one night a week to interact like human beings.
The action of the book gets going very early when one of the vampires in the support group is murdered. On the one hand, this is a good thing. This vampire escaped Europe to Australia and was directly or indirectly responsible for creating every other vampire in Australia. He had no self-control nor any desire to have any. Pathetic as he was, he came the closest to being an actual monster. Yet, he was staked through the heart and turned to ash and the other vampires have to worry that whoever did this would come after them next. So, they reluctantly begin investigate, discovering on the way that there are also werewolves and that life may actually be worth living even in their vampiric states.
It could have been a great book, but frankly it crawls tediously and the cast of pathetic vampires that began to grate on my nerves by the end of the first chapter is truly unbearable fifty pages into the story. And yet there was that great title and frankly a pretty good blurb, so I persevered. My three-star rating is a tribute to the wonderful title. The contents only merit a two-star rank.