Suckers

Rating:
Summary: Bridget Jones, Vampire Hunter
Review: I picked this one up figuring it'd be a quick, superflouous read that would help me increase the hit rate this year and not spend too much time floating around in my skull. And that's exactly what I got, though I didn't expect it to be quite so good. Billson is a writer of the McInerney/Ellis/Janowitz stripe, and must have gotten this MS. in just before the cutoff for eighties-style fiction guillotined across the publishing landscape. However, Billson keeps the greed-is-good atmosphere to just that-- an atmosphere. When she needs to drop names, she makes them up rather than sounding like an overworked Sharper Image catalog, as most of her contemporaries do.

The story centers around Duncan and Dora, a not-quite-couple who, thirteen years ago, were part of a love triangle with a vampire. The vampire was found out, staked, dismembered, and scattered. Probalem is... she seems to be back, under another name and with a whole lot more power, as the head of a publishing empire. What's worse, the publishing empire happens to run a major fashion magazine... and so everyone starts dressing, looking, sounding, and otherwise behaving like vampires. It's comedy, but it's black comedy of the blackest stripe. Billson's publishers were going for the heavy-lit crowd, and so the blurbs on the jacket are from writers like Salman Rushdie instead of Stpehen King. And, oddly, despite this being a comedy/horror novel with a decidedly eighties bent... it might not be too out of place in the heavy-lit world. Billson's writing is crisp, while of that same easy-to-read stripe that distinguishes less heavily-marketed horror novels. Her satire, both of the vampire-novel genre and of the time, is spot-on.

If you like vampires, hey, it's worth a couple of days. ***

Rating:
Summary: Quite Pointless
Review: Okay, so while Suckers isn't the most inspired vampyre novel out there, it can hold its own. But i was especially disappointed in it, because while the auther didn't bring out the magificence of the vampyres, rather she made them look shallow and stupid. I've read a lot of better vampyre novels, but this is a pretty good flick, if you're bored. ...

Rating:
Summary: I was not impressed
Review: This book's saving grace was its incredibly witty sense of humor and internal dialogue. Dora is a twentieth century heroine, but that's all the good I can say about this book.

As a reader of many, many vampire novels, I was extremely disappointed in the way Billson made vampire existence out to be: shallow, carping, and empty with none of the rich and captivating drama that Anne Rice or L.J. Smith portrays.

Dora's whole existence seems to stem from her fruitless chase of a man completely unworthy of notice whom any woman with half a brain cell would have long since discarded. Her vampires are too caught up with their businesses, their "nips," and their petty day-to-day problems to come across as anything besides pathetic. Violet is made up to be a vampire Barbie doll, and just about as intelligent.

For a good read, try "Queen of the Damned" by Anne Rice. Best vampire book ever written.

Rating:
Summary: Vampirism = consumerism writ large
Review: Yuppiea as vampires in thrall to a multi-national corporation,gradually taking over London from their Docklands base.They wear black,drink blood from their local hostelry and supplement it by exsanguinating passing tourists in messy fashion.
While not short of the odd visceral shock with vividly rendered dismemberings the prevailing mood is dark comedy with a wit as black as pitch.
The narrator is Dora,a "Creative Consulatant" for advertising agencies(meaning she invents survey results and doctors the findings--something I suspect,indeed know, is done all the time).When she and her friend Duncan ,for whom she has long nursed a wholly unrequited passion where menaced some years earlier by an opera loving vampire named Violet they killes her and scattered the dismembered body to all parts of London.They are somewhat taken aback to discover that Violet has not only returned from the netherworld but is now the head of a multinational conglomerate which is taking over the advertising and media industries
Can Dora stop the tide of the designer nosferatu or will the whole land be taken over by people resembling extras from a Robert Palmer video?

Tghe real delight of the book is Dora and we see through her eyes aspects of metropolitan life that helped make the 1980's the worst post war decade by a country mile-yuppies,penniless and pretentious art students,self centredness on an Olympian scale,the growth of the century's most pernicious practices -marketing and saturation advertising.(The devil does not look like Liz Hurley in Bedazzled;the spawn of Satan being an ad man or woman with no language other than jargon)

The vampire code is efficiency and humanity must battle the accountants and number crunchers to maintain a toehold on the mountain of society.
Yes Dora is a real heroine.Cynical.Amoral.Dishonest.But with a spark of decency and brio.Van Helsing meets Cindi Lauper.

It is not a comfortable book and adherents of the traditional vampire fare may well not agree but I like its spirit and mordaunt edge.....