The Vampire Viscount cover, The Vampire Viscount

The Vampire Viscount

Karen Harbaugh

If a 4 star book (in the romance category) has a sublimity approaching Jane Austen, then anything dropping below two stars means I skipped to the end; and this book barely escaped that fate. Bad books frustrate me for two reasons---one, of course is that good ones are more fun to read and two is that I have not yet developed enough skill as a reviewer to precisely pinpoint a story's weaknesses. As an example, it took me most of this book to delineate its problems, but I do think I finally more or less managed.

Nicholas St. Vire desires a willing virgin on his wedding night as the prerequisite to break the spell of his vampirism. Leonore Farleigh, lost to him by her abusive, alcoholic father at cards, is glad to escape to a life promising luxury, safety and kindness, dismissing with barely a thought the fact that her fiancee can't go out during the daytime and faints during his own wedding. She hopes to turn her marriage of convenience into a love match and obtain a happy life for her younger sister.

Vampires as seductive lovers, rather than as monsters, must date back at least to Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's series about the mysterious, romantic Comte de St. Germaine, whose elegance, compassion, and history unite in an extraordinarily appealing character, though the books occasionally border on tedium. At any rate, he's the earliest of the ``good'' vampires I know about in modern popular fiction, and my sense (nevertheless very possibly incorrect) is that the sf and fantasy genre explored this concept first. Nicholas St. Vire is another of the breed, but the author adds some interesting variations, the most intriguing of which is that his vampirism dulls his appreciation of the pleasures in life to the point of incomprehension.

Stories of this type, naturally, are variations on my favorite fairy tale Beauty & the Beast, so I was prepared for an enjoyable read. I spent most of the book totting up plot inconsistancies and sighing over heavy handed cliches. Why, if Mercia Lazlo was such a danger to him, his wife and society in general, did St. Vire take most of the book to conclude he should murder her? Why, if at the end of the book he was complaining about the loss of his emotionless demeanor and lack of any of the human kindnesses which previously constituted his makeup before his magic-breaking wedding night did he feel compelled to treat Leonore with such kindness during their courtship? It doesn't sound as if he should have been able, let alone willing, to do so. Why, if the solstices and equinoxes were so important to the spell did they never enter Nicholas' considerations when he set his wedding date? And so on and so on.

The cliches were just as bad: it never occurs to Leonore, even though the signs are obvious, that Nicholas might have another reason besides a prior romance in courting her rival, Mercia; instead she sheds all the evidence of intelligence she exhibited as a governess in the first (and most interesting chapter), and immediately flies into a jealous rage. I take it back---she does finally come up with an alternative scenario, on page 208 (out of 224 pages total)---a good hundred pages too late, if you ask me. We won't even discuss the anachronism of wives and husbands expecting to spend their whole time at a party together. That's still considered bad manners today at social gatherings (though increasingly it is deemed acceptable, as resisting the tide of our society's presumeably fast disappearing marital fidelties), let alone back then, when couples were expected to attend social gatherings primarily to mingle with others, not stare soulfully into each other's eyes, unlikely behavior in an era of marriages of convenience. That Nicholas and Leonore attend two parties back to back which are masked balls also strikes me as improbable.

Mercia, as a villainess, can't even qualify as cardboard, because cardboard is at least consistant. Sometimes her powers outrank Nicholas' ---and so they should, since she made him, and sometimes not. It is never explained to the reader, let alone Nicholas, why she suddenly shows up on the scene after years of ignoring him, or why she's jealous of a mere mortal. Given other vampire novels I've read over the years, and their conventions, my assumption is that Mercia has divined that Nicholas' intentions to become human again, thereby freeing himself of her yoke (though it doesn't seem particularly strong) and that she is jealous of a mere human, who has aroused affection in Nicholas where she, Mercia, has not. These are guesses only, however. When the author was not leaving me to guess how the characters felt or what motivated them, I felt instead bludgeoned by their simplistic feelings, dealt with often unimaginative prose.

The minor characters either suffer from so little distinction, as for example when I mistook St. Vire's valet for his best friend; neither can I recall Leonore's mother having a single line of dialog from first to last, though her `megrims' are frequently mentioned---or from the same illogic that plagues much of the rest of story, as when her father conveniently is ``gone'' from the house without ever overtly moving out, merely to make her childhood home a bearably acceptable alternative to St. Vire's household.

Finally, given the copyright date, I cannot avoid a deep suspicion that the author lifted some of the parameters of the spell which might free Nicholas of his vampiric nature from the strictures in Walt Disney's Beauty & the Beast---certainly all other spells mentioned in the novel are completely without structure, creativity or any kind of logic I could detect.

The story does have a few redeeming features: despite Leonore's tiresome jealousy and stupidity, Nicholas has the ingredients for an appealing male protagonist; and the story shows the most wit when period vampires, of which the author apparently made some study, or the works of Mozart, especially his operas, come up. Pity the lack of additional period research, (so salutary to sharp examples as opposed to vague generalities) and flat prose fails the remainder, or the tale would be quite a worthwhile read. Two stars, barely.

Sylvus Tarn

Last modified: Sun Sep 13 00:46:32 EDT 1998

Sylvus Tarn