I just finished reading Gabriele Caccini: The Vampire Gene - Book 1 (The Vampire Gene) by Paigan Stone. This book won the silver Book of The Year Award from ForeWord Magazine ... beating out Cluck and Footfalls. While I'm sad that I didn't get the award (why isn't there an award for fourth place?) I'm pleased that the books that beat me are very well done. Well, so far I've only read two: the bronze and the silver, but I can assume by what I've read so far that the Gold winner must be pretty special.
On the surface, the story of Gabriele Caccini is a classic telling of the "Vampire Who Wants to be Loved." In place of the tired cliche of the vampire who wants to be human, however, we have a vampire who really is human: he's hardly a monster at all, obsessing more about love than blood. He starves himself to his own despair, allowing himself to feed only once a year in his quest to find the woman who can be both his victim and his lover.
The story is told in an interleaved style, folding back and forth between Gabriele's past and present. In the past, Gabriele becomes a vampire, a development which causes him to lose his first love. In the present, he continues his quest for the woman who can survive to become his eternal bride. His repeated failures, both in the past and present, shape a character ripe with despair. Both tales are wrought with love, lust, and tragedy. Without giving away the ending, there is also a convergence of the plot that leaves the book well situated for a sequel (a planned sequel is evident in the title, so you can look forward to it).
Now, vampire-romances are not my cup of proverbial tea, so I am no expert here, but I wasn't expecting to read a book about vampires where the vamps had such real weaknesses of character: self-confidence issues; not being able to fit in; unable to come to terms with their vampirism ... that kind of thing. I actually got irritated at the main character for not being bad-ass enough (I mean, come on man! You're four hundred years old ... grow a pair!). That may sound like a dig, but it is actually a compliment: any character that gets a rise out of me is a character written well enough that I'm thinking about them as a personality and not a plot mechanism.
There were plentiful doses of sex to feed the desires of those looking for a romance fix, though these scenes were more civilized that you expect from a romance novel (well, than I what I expect ... and I admittedly don't read them). Overall, the clear and colorful characters are what makes Gabriele Caccini: The Vampire Gene - Book 1 (The Vampire Gene) a book worth reading - and the silver medal that it earned.
Four-and-a-half Feathers from the Rooster King. Pros: strong character development, well structured plot. Cons: wussy vampire, too much romance, not enough horror.
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