Review: Blood, Torture and Traditional Romance
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 10 8, 2012
As a genre, erotica has been around a long time. Although over the years the setting and superficial form may have changed, its purpose remains the same: to titivate the reader.Amatory vampires are the classification's latest pin-up children. They come with the added advantage that, being non-realistic beings and therefore free of the inherent limitations of the human body, they allow for more extreme forms of sexual encounter.This perverse potential is certainly fully explored in `Mia'.In one particularly wayward section of the book, a female vampire is subjected to the most horrendous acts of carnal degradation that decidedly no female human could survive. The pages of the novel are, as one would expect, awash with blood, viscera and enough predator semen to fill a large bucket.But for all this gore, the cross-species romance at the heart of Anne James' story has a touching and old-fashioned feel to it. The eponymous hero is a handsome Byronic type, the heroine a plucky little soul and the villain an irredeemable sadist - in this case also endowed (if you will permit the pun) with superhuman powers. James works hard to breathe life into the love interest and, in spite of the rising body-count and tsunami of plasma, pulls it off.The non-violent sex scenes - which of necessity sit at the heart of this kind of work - are well handled, and the link passages between them show a writer striving to produce a genuine narrative trajectory.It is obvious that Anne James has the writing skill to produce a more auspicious romance than `Mia'. I for one should like to see it