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juushikaTitle: Voice Of The Blood (Voice of Blood Book 1)
Author: Jemiah Jefferson
Published: Leisure Books, 2001
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 290
Total Page Count: 521,100
Text Number: 1896
Read Because: personal enjoyment, borrowed from OpenLibrary
Review: How I became a vampire by falling in love with four disparately sexy guys and having a lot of crazy sex: the novel. I've been an avid reader of idfic since, oh, forever, and never landed such a motherlode in trad publishing. Is it too much of a good thing? Absolutely. This is fanfic rules applied to OCs, ridiculous and masturbatory; it feels like it could have posted on LJ in serial installments. And it's great. The total commitment is eminently satisfying: love, bound up in weird psychic vampire mind control powers, examined in depth from radically different angles via multiple overlapping relationships. File this between Lost Souls and paranormal romance: not as gritty or amoral as Brite, but sharing Brite's aesthetics, plenty thorny as questions of vampire morality/mortality ought to be, and glossed by an indulgence of sex. I plowed through this and will probably try the sequels.
Title: Wounds (Voice of Blood Book 2)
Author: Jemiah Jefferson
Published: Leisure Books, 2002
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 360
Total Page Count: 525,030
Text Number: 1919
Read Because: continuing the series, borrowed from OpenLibrary
Review: Not long after the events in the first book, Daniel has rebuilt a life for himself as an artist in New York. Enter Sybil, an unusual young woman resistant to his various psychic vampire powers. Jumping into Daniel's PoV is a bold move, because he's a larger than life character even for this series, and maybe more tolerable and convincing as a supporting character. The answer is to pair him with someone even more unhinged. Sibyl, young and insecure and mortal, impulsive and vicious and immune to consequences, is an exaggeration of Daniel, speedrunning his violence with even less justification &, in doing, asking if there is such thing. She's awful, but I don't mind an awful character fulfilling such a complicated motivating role.
Except ... a lot of excepts. I want more longterm vampire relationships, instead of another falling-in-love, which the first book already had in droves. I want more of the trends revealed across Daniel's interpersonal relationships, loving and murdering en masse and with almost-sympathetic specificity, reliant on and secretly resenting his powers; Sibyl highlights his patterns, but her stranglehold on the plot also overshadows them.
This maintains the delightfully shameless vulgarity and perversity of the first book, so it's still a fun "guilty" pleasure even when unlikable. And it's interesting! But it's not the direction I would have picked for this series. I'll still continue on.
Title: Fiend (Voice of Blood Book 3)
Author: Jemiah Jefferson
Published: Leisure Books, 2005
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 325
Total Page Count: 527,695
Text Number: 1931
Read Because: continuing the series, borrowed from OpenLibrary
Review: This sequel steps back in time to explore the birth and early life of Ricari. It's a better read than Wounds in the sense that it's less intentionally aggravating; indeed, the lack of friction is glaring. Ricari is such a piece of work in the other books; here, he's too normal for too long, where normal still contains the convoluted, delightful, erotic tensions of Jefferson's vampires—and it's gratifying to see the Ricari-has-two-mommies backstory play out in full color. Unsurprisingly, Daniel is, again, the turning point. The slide into disaster isn't wholly convincing, but it's pretty good, and the later tableaux—vampires at an affected remove from volatile human spaces, politics, & ethics, out of sync but entangled, with the consequences sublimated into and thus destroying their interpersonal relationships—are striking. I don't like this as much as the first book, but I'm glad to still be reading the series.
Title: A Drop of Scarlet (Voice of the Blood Book 4)
Author: Jemiah Jefferson
Published: Leisure Books, 2007
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 370
Total Page Count: 531,550
Text Number: 1946
Read Because: continuing the series, borrowed from OpenLibrary
Review: Adrianne invents a psychoactive drug that can treat John; it also draws other vampires to congregate in search of the first drug that can work directly on their biology. This is an ensemble capstone to the series, rotating between various characters who were passing mentions or supporting characters in other books. It's concerned primarily with the future of the protagonist & of vampire kind, living within an increasingly monitored world—vampires can control human minds, but not security cameras. What are they capable of at their worst, especially when under the influence, and what are they obligated and able to control for everyone's safety?
Interesting enough; but, in practice, the ensemble approach makes for wider and less developed/intense interpersonal dynamics, and drug use overshadows everything, a lot of jonesing for & and use of drugs that doesn't do much to develop the characters except establish vampires are a) hurting and b) capable of great hurt, which other books and Daniel in particular had already established. I'm glad this series exists, so indulgent, so willing to be weird. But, having finished it, the first book remains the only one that really got me; the rest are an opportunity to hang out with the cast, and the repetitive, nihilistic tone is often intentional, sometimes effective, but still, well, just that.
Author: Jemiah Jefferson
Published: Leisure Books, 2001
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 290
Total Page Count: 521,100
Text Number: 1896
Read Because: personal enjoyment, borrowed from OpenLibrary
Review: How I became a vampire by falling in love with four disparately sexy guys and having a lot of crazy sex: the novel. I've been an avid reader of idfic since, oh, forever, and never landed such a motherlode in trad publishing. Is it too much of a good thing? Absolutely. This is fanfic rules applied to OCs, ridiculous and masturbatory; it feels like it could have posted on LJ in serial installments. And it's great. The total commitment is eminently satisfying: love, bound up in weird psychic vampire mind control powers, examined in depth from radically different angles via multiple overlapping relationships. File this between Lost Souls and paranormal romance: not as gritty or amoral as Brite, but sharing Brite's aesthetics, plenty thorny as questions of vampire morality/mortality ought to be, and glossed by an indulgence of sex. I plowed through this and will probably try the sequels.
Title: Wounds (Voice of Blood Book 2)
Author: Jemiah Jefferson
Published: Leisure Books, 2002
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 360
Total Page Count: 525,030
Text Number: 1919
Read Because: continuing the series, borrowed from OpenLibrary
Review: Not long after the events in the first book, Daniel has rebuilt a life for himself as an artist in New York. Enter Sybil, an unusual young woman resistant to his various psychic vampire powers. Jumping into Daniel's PoV is a bold move, because he's a larger than life character even for this series, and maybe more tolerable and convincing as a supporting character. The answer is to pair him with someone even more unhinged. Sibyl, young and insecure and mortal, impulsive and vicious and immune to consequences, is an exaggeration of Daniel, speedrunning his violence with even less justification &, in doing, asking if there is such thing. She's awful, but I don't mind an awful character fulfilling such a complicated motivating role.
Except ... a lot of excepts. I want more longterm vampire relationships, instead of another falling-in-love, which the first book already had in droves. I want more of the trends revealed across Daniel's interpersonal relationships, loving and murdering en masse and with almost-sympathetic specificity, reliant on and secretly resenting his powers; Sibyl highlights his patterns, but her stranglehold on the plot also overshadows them.
This maintains the delightfully shameless vulgarity and perversity of the first book, so it's still a fun "guilty" pleasure even when unlikable. And it's interesting! But it's not the direction I would have picked for this series. I'll still continue on.
Title: Fiend (Voice of Blood Book 3)
Author: Jemiah Jefferson
Published: Leisure Books, 2005
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 325
Total Page Count: 527,695
Text Number: 1931
Read Because: continuing the series, borrowed from OpenLibrary
Review: This sequel steps back in time to explore the birth and early life of Ricari. It's a better read than Wounds in the sense that it's less intentionally aggravating; indeed, the lack of friction is glaring. Ricari is such a piece of work in the other books; here, he's too normal for too long, where normal still contains the convoluted, delightful, erotic tensions of Jefferson's vampires—and it's gratifying to see the Ricari-has-two-mommies backstory play out in full color. Unsurprisingly, Daniel is, again, the turning point. The slide into disaster isn't wholly convincing, but it's pretty good, and the later tableaux—vampires at an affected remove from volatile human spaces, politics, & ethics, out of sync but entangled, with the consequences sublimated into and thus destroying their interpersonal relationships—are striking. I don't like this as much as the first book, but I'm glad to still be reading the series.
Title: A Drop of Scarlet (Voice of the Blood Book 4)
Author: Jemiah Jefferson
Published: Leisure Books, 2007
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 370
Total Page Count: 531,550
Text Number: 1946
Read Because: continuing the series, borrowed from OpenLibrary
Review: Adrianne invents a psychoactive drug that can treat John; it also draws other vampires to congregate in search of the first drug that can work directly on their biology. This is an ensemble capstone to the series, rotating between various characters who were passing mentions or supporting characters in other books. It's concerned primarily with the future of the protagonist & of vampire kind, living within an increasingly monitored world—vampires can control human minds, but not security cameras. What are they capable of at their worst, especially when under the influence, and what are they obligated and able to control for everyone's safety?
Interesting enough; but, in practice, the ensemble approach makes for wider and less developed/intense interpersonal dynamics, and drug use overshadows everything, a lot of jonesing for & and use of drugs that doesn't do much to develop the characters except establish vampires are a) hurting and b) capable of great hurt, which other books and Daniel in particular had already established. I'm glad this series exists, so indulgent, so willing to be weird. But, having finished it, the first book remains the only one that really got me; the rest are an opportunity to hang out with the cast, and the repetitive, nihilistic tone is often intentional, sometimes effective, but still, well, just that.
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Date: 2025-02-18 10:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-02-26 11:34 pm (UTC)