Vampire Book Reviews

Here, you can find my reviews of current vampire novels. I intend to do enough reviews to start a ranking of best to worst. I’ll judge each book as a separate entity, even if it’s part of a series, and will try to avoid major spoilers (unless they’re not worth covering up).

 

Review Technique

I’ll judge each book by five categories – the CROWS – which are:

Character

• Are the characters interesting?
• Are the characters likeable/dislikeable in the right ways?
• Are the characters human? Do they make mistakes?
• Do the characters develop over the course of the book?

Research

• Has the author done their research on:
  • The setting and its culture
  • The history (if applicable)
  • Science/Psychology
  • The vampire genre/mythology

Originality

• Does the author add something new to the vampire genre?
• Does the author invert/defy narrative clichés?
• Does the author poke fun at the clichés?

World-Building

• Is the world an interesting one?
• Is it a believable one?
• How detailed is it?

Story

• Is the story enjoyable?
• Does it have the right tone/pace?
• Does it hold your interest throughout?
• Is it just a good novel in general?

When that’s done, I’ll total up the score and give the book a blood group:

O Positive: 0-15

A Positive: 15-20

B Positive: 20-25

O Negative: 25-30

A Negative: 30-35

AB Positive: 35-40

B Negative: 40-45

AB Negative: 45-50

No offence to anyone with O Positive, A Positive or B Positive blood. I don’t mean by that scoring system that those blood types are inferior, just that they’re very common and bad vampire fiction is sadly common and only 1 in a hundred vampire novels are really good, which is about the same odds of a person having AB Negative blood.