Review: A Vampire With A Conscience And Self Esteem Issues--It's A Good Story, But Needs Trimming
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 07 22, 2013
When someone can compel your emotions and actions, how can you trust that what you feel for them is real and not enforced?  Can you get past the resentment of being coerced into a relationship with someone rather than being allowed to get to know them and decide to take that step yourself?  Even with the painful example of his brother's marriage to warn him about the dangers of that kind of manipulation, the hero still makes the mistake of abducting a woman he has become fixated on to bind her to him regardless of what she wants.The action in Old Town Nights grabs you right away and it's a good thing because there is a LOT of excessive descriptive passages that almost choke the story line.  When you're holding an inner debate with what you see as the main problem between the protagonists while plowing through page after page of detailed descriptions, that's not good.  Your mind should be solidly in the story and flowing with it, not working to keep your focus while you navigate tangled thickets of excessive prose.  I know it's hard to slash away words you have labored over in crafting your work--that's why editors are useful, they can do the mean thing of deleting those many clever phrases that have lodged themselves in your heart, but slow down the story.  Thankfully there were no issues with numerous grammatical errors or questionable vocabulary that plague many indie offerings, and the writer's voice is good.  She can tell a story.The premise of Old Town Nights is interesting and presents vampires as just another variety of people who live, eat, and have regular life spans.  They just have an additional need to consume several ounces of blood once or twice a week in order to survive and the ability to secrete a narcotic in their saliva that allows them to immobilize their prey and the ability to control their victims and cause them to forget the encounter, compel them to fall in love, keep the vampires' secrets, become addicted to being bitten (a co-dependency as it turns out), or dance a jig if their captors so desire.  Past persecution has taught them to remain concealed and live quietly in the larger human community.  The fly in the ointment is that they need to marry regular humans if they want children since vampire to vampire pairings are sterile.  They say power corrupts and many of the vampire community are in the habit of compelling their chosen partners to accept the relationship.  This doesn't always work out well, since the human side of the relationship is prone to resent being forced on such a basic level and to fight their captivity, if only verbally.The hero, however, is a vampire with a conscience, and is appalled at his slip in doing to the heroine what his brother did to his wife.  Especially since that wife, who loved her husband before he bit her and compelled her to marry him, is now in a state of perpetual volcanic anger at having her choices taken from her.  He also has the example of what happens if you don't bite or control your spouse but keep your abilities secret instead of easing your partner into the truth until the birth of children who need small amounts of each parent's blood to thrive.  A major freakout is the usual result.  So, our hero is faced with a problem when the woman he stalked and bit turns her righteous anger on him and he is forced by his own conscience to agree he has done what he promised himself he would never do to another person.The heroine in this story has her own ghosts with abandonment issues from the father who deserted the family for the other woman leaving a broken, embittered wife and children who grow up reflecting that damage.  The heroine is aware of her tendency to become involved with uncaring, manipulative men like her father and is emotionally overwhelmed coping with her perpetually angry, unpleasant mother, a commitment-phobic brother, and a needy younger sister who reacted to the change from her father's most loved daughter to abandoned child by looking for love with men who tend impregnate and then abandon her.  The heroine's plate is already full and she has extra reasons to distrust her judgement in continuing to love the hero when he tries to step back and give her the space to make her own decision about their future.The hero needed more depth.  He remained this nobly sad person who hated who and what he was for most of the book, his hope for a happy resolution fading, fading and just when it appears to be gone--darned (I don't want to get this deleted for "naughty" language) if it didn't manage to fade some more.  I just wanted to slap him a few times.  He doesn't begin to develop from cardboard cutout to  believable person until almost the end.  The secondaries in the book, the brother and his wife, show more depth of personality and were more interesting than the protagonists for much of the book. They seem more like real people in trying to work past their issues and determine if they have a future given their turbulent history.  The heroine also veered off the already developed theme and never really resolved the issue of deciding if she could trust both her own judgement and the hero's good intentions in allowing her autonomy in their relationship by just accepting that she loved the hero, but could she bear to marry him and have.....EEEK....vampire children!?!  This goes on for much too long fueled by the unplanned and unwanted pregnancy of the hero's reluctant sister-in-law.The ending has all the angst and drama you could wish for going into the HEA, but given the length of the story leading up to it, almost seemed rushed.  The book is neither erotica nor a clean romance.  The sex scenes don't have a lot of heat or detail, but do flow well with the story.  While it needs pruning, there is a good story in there if you stick with it.