Category Archives: vampires

Tandem By Tracey Bateman

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Tandem by Tracey Bateman

As obsession and loss become dark partners, how far must the people of Abbey Hills go to survive?

Six months ago, brutal murders shook the small Ozark town—murders that stopped after a house fire reportedly claimed the killer’s life. Lauryn McBride’s family auction house has taken responsibility for the estate sale of one of the victims—the enigmatic Markus Chisom. Submerging herself in Chisom’s beautiful but strange world, Lauryn welcomes the reprieve from watching Alzheimer’s steal her father from her, piece by piece. She soon realizes that centuries-old secrets tie Abbey Hills to the Chisom estate and a mysterious evil will do anything to make sure those secrets stay hidden. Even the man who grew up loving her may not be able to protect Lauryn from the danger.

When Amede Dastillon receives an unexpected package from Abbey Hills, she hopes it might be the key in tracking down her beloved sister, long estranged from her family. Visiting Abbey Hills seems the logical next step in her search, but Amede is unusually affected by the town, and when mutilated carcasses begin turning up again in the small community, the local law enforcement isn’t sure if they are confronting a familiar evil or a new terror.

Two women brought together by questions that seem to have no answers. Can they overcome the loss and darkness threatening to devour them—or will their own demons condemn them to an emotional wasteland?
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This book is the sequel to the novel, Thirsty. Lauryn is the owner of an auction house business. Markus, a vampire who was killed in a fire, has an estate that needs to be settled. Lauryn forwards some old letters found in Markus’s house to Amede, a member of an old family who has ties to Markus. Amede comes to Abbey Hills seeking more familial heirlooms, but, in reality, she needs to find her estranged sister, Eden, who did not die in the fire with Markus, as most of the town assumes.

I think I enjoyed Thirsty more than Tandem. I’m not sure why. It could be because Thirsty dealt with an alcoholic and that’s a theme that I like to read about in novels. I think the author did a great job with the characterization with Lauryn and her battle with caring for her ill father. As her father’s Alzheimer’s gets worse, it’s hard for Lauyrn to accept that she may need to let her father go if she’s not able to care for him any longer. The battle of caring for an older parent, for an only child, is something that lots of people struggle with, but I felt that the father in this story was a bit selfish. I sensed that he didn’t want his daughter to be happy with anybody…except himself. But, that could’ve just been my interpretation of the situation. I didn’t think Lauryn’s dad wanted to see her happily married with children, and that’s kind of sad when you think about it.

There’s a deep, dark mystery woven into this story as people and animals are killed, in an almost ritualistic way. The killings are being done by a vampire, but, it’s a mystery as to which vampire is doing the killing. I think it’s a bit hard reading about vampires in a Christian novel because such creatures don’t exist, but in the book, they do exist, yet, you know they’re not a true part of God’s creation.

The theme of unrequited love pops up when Billy, the preacher’s son, appears, complete with a bi-racial daughter who looks exactly like him. Lauryn has had a crush on Billy since elementary school and that crush has never developed into a full-blown romance. Billy abandons Lauryn on graduation night and she doesn’t see him again until his recent appearance. Bits and pieces of backstory are thrown into the book regarding Lauryn’s upbringing and her “romantic” moments with Billy.

Also, you’ll see the main characters in Thirsty make a few cameo appearances in Tandem, which was nice.

This is definitely a chilling, mysterious book and I recommend it to those who’d want to read a book about the supernatural with a Christian message.

~Cecelia Dowdy~

Twilight – Come Over To Writers’ Rest Blog!

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What’s behind all the vampires cropping up everywhere these days? The Twilight Saga, the True Blood series, The Vampire Diaries . . . all these stories, TV shows, and movies feature well-dressed vampires so cool, your kid might like to join them. Check The Writers Rest blog at Writers’ Rest and read Katy King’s article, “Vampires: A Love Affair.” Post a comment and become a follower for more reviews and articles.

~Cecelia Dowdy~

Breaking Dawn – A Secular Novel

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I’ve finally finished Breaking Dawn, the last book in the Twilight Series. Also, I’d read a short review of this book about a year ago in the now-extinct Today’s Christian Woman magazine. I did find the same review online on Christianity Today’s Kyria blog. I do agree with some of what the reviewer said in that post. From my reading the four books, the romance does seem to be more obsessive than a regular romance novel.

SPOILER BELOW:

In Breaking Dawn, Bella is still human at the beginning of the story. She marries her boyfriend/vampire Edward Cullen. They spend a romantic honeymoon on a remote island. Out of the entire book, I enjoyed the first section the best. I especially loved reading about their honeymoon days. The book got kind of weird for me when Bella gets pregnant by her vampire husband. The child makes Bella sick, literally. While pregnant, the child sucks all of the energy from Bella, making her ill, tired, and barely able to move. She drinks blood to nourish the child and once the child is born, it’s apparant that the little girl is advanced in development – she has a full set of teeth and she bites. The child grows several inches per day and develops mentally very quickly. Giving birth to the child kills Bella, so Edward bites her, giving her his venom which ultimately turns Bella into a vampire.

Having the werewolf, Jacob, around, with his pack made things kind of weird too. When Renesmee’s (Bella’s vampire/human child) life is in danger, the vampires, along with their cronies, and Jacob’s pack of wolves prepare to go to battle.

Jacob’s point-of-view dominates the second part of the book, and then the point-of-view switches back to Bella during the last portion of the story. When Jacob phases into his werewolf form, it kind of reminded me of watching The Incredible Hulk when I was a kid! He would rip his clothes when he’d go into werewolf form.

Out of all the Twilight books, I enjoyed the first one, Twilight, the best. It just had more of a realistic feel to it. The romance was strong and riveting and I just couldn’t put the book down I was so mesmerized by it!

The second book, New Moon, was pretty good for about 2/3 of the book but about the last 33% of the book was boring, so I skimmed that last section. I skimmed Eclipse last December and I didn’t like it very much. I read the first 80 pages word for word and that’s when I started skimming the rest of the book.

However, I did manage to read Breaking Dawn word for word. It’s over 750 pages, so it’s a pretty big book. So Twilight was the strongest book, and Breaking Dawn was the second best out of the series. I did think that Breaking Dawn was very weird and science-fictionish, too. Fantasy and sci-fi are not genres that I’m very fond of. I read those kinds of books sparingly.

These stories are not my usual reading fare, but I had to read them because everybody was making such a big deal about the Twilight Series that I just had to read it myself.

You can see my earlier posts about the Twilight series here, here, here, and here.

Have you read this series? If so, which was your favorite book and why?

~Cecelia Dowdy~

Coach And Eclipse

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I received my Coach items in the mail the other day. I’d take pictures to show them to you, but, I’m too lazy, plus, the items look exactly like the pics I borrowed from the Coach website in the above link.

Since I was snowed in most of Saturday and Sunday, I skimmed the third book in the Twilight series, Eclipse. I didn’t care for it. I read about 80 pages of it word for word before I started skimming. It’s a pretty large book, over six-hundred pages. Not sure why I didn’t care for it, but I didn’t. I enjoyed the first one, I also enjoyed about three quarters of the second book before I started skimming that one, the third one…well, I just felt there was something missing.

I have the last book in my to-be-read pile. Once I’ve read/skimmed that title, I’m giving them away on this blog. They take up too much space, and I don’t have room for them in this messy, book-filled house!

~Cecelia Dowdy~

Thirsty By Tracey Bateman

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Thirsty by Tracey Bateman

From the back cover:
There’s no place like home, they say.

“Hello, I’m Nina Parker…and I’m an alcoholic.”

For Nina, it’s not the weighty admission but the first steps toward recovery that prove most difficult. She must face her ex-husband, Hunt, with little hope of making amends, and try to rebuild a relationship with her angry teenage daughter, Meagan. Hardest of all, she is forced to return to Abbey Hills, Missouri, the hometown she abruptly abandoned nearly two decades earlier–and her unexpected arrival in the sleepy Ozark town catches the attention of someone–or something–igniting a two-hundred-fifty-year-old desire that rages like a wildfire.

Unaware of the darkness stalking her, Nina is confronted with a series of events that threaten to unhinge her sobriety. Her daughter wants to spend time with the parents Nina left behind. A terrifying event that has haunted Nina for almost twenty years begins to surface. And an alluring neighbor initiates an unusual friendship with Nina, but is Markus truly a kindred spirit or a man guarding dangerous secrets?

As everything she loves hangs in the balance, will Nina’s feeble grasp on her demons be broken, leaving her powerless against the thirst? The battle between redemption and obsession unfold to its startling, unforgettable end.

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I purchased this novel because it was about two subjects that garner my interest: alcoholism and vampires. I’ve blogged about vampires a few times because of the Twilight series, and I’ve also included the subject of alcoholism in my own novels.

I thought Bateman did an excellent job of describing the difficult road to sobriety for an alcoholic. Nina has struggled with this addiction off and on for most of her adult life, and the addiction is in her blood – her father has suffered from alcoholism, too.

Thirsty also talks about familial disharmony: Nina’s relationship with her daughter is strained because of Nina’s abuse of alcohol. Nina’s relationships with her parents are strained because of her troubled childhood. When she returns home, she’s been gone for several years, and this is the first she’s seen of her parents in a long while. Plus, she’s recently divorced, although she still loves her husband.

Although two of the characters are vampires, I thought the story could have easily been re-written by portraying the two bloodsuckers as satanists or occultists or something?

Overall I thought the book was a good, suspenseful, intriguing read and it was a page turner.

~Cecelia Dowdy~

Christian Speculative Fiction

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I wanted to make a correction to one of my previous blog posts. I referred to Eric Wilson’s novels as a Christian vampire series. Here’s what Eric said about his novels:
My novels are not “Christian vampire” stories. They are stories from a biblical worldview that deal with the evil nature of vampires and their counterfeit method of finding life in blood (as opposed to our finding life through the blood of Jesus).

I wish more would give the series a chance, because such concepts are widely explored in the mainstream market. As Christians, we too often surrender the battle instead of dealing with the issues head-on.

I believe our discussion of vampires and creatures of the night would fall into the Christian Speculative Fiction category? Novel Journey recently posted about Speculative Fiction in the Christian market. If interested in this topic, then you should read this post.

I think I’m done with this subject for now. Soon, I’ll be posting a review for The List, a novel by Sherri Lewis.

~Cecelia Dowdy~

Vampires In Christian Fiction

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One of my blog readers was surprised that I’d mentioned Twilight on this blog because Twilight is about a vampire. Well, coincidentally, I was reading this article yesterday, and discovered that Thomas Nelson, a large, well-known Christian publisher, has a Christian vampire series called Jeruselum’s Undead Trilogy by Eric Wilson. How in the world do you Christianize vampires? I haven’t read these books because, as I stated on this post, I don’t read many vampire/creature-of-the-night novels. If you’ve read this series, I’d be interested in knowing if they’re good, riveting stories? Do the plots draw you in? Here are the book covers and the summary of one of the novels from this series. The covers look pretty scary to me! I’m not sure if I’d want to read this before going to bed at night! I might have nightmares. If you like scary stories with a message, then I think you might want to read these. I might read one of them and then decide if I want to read the other two:




Field of Blood – Jeruselum’s Undead Trilogy Book One
From Barnesandnoble.com
Synopsis

Judas hung himself in a place known as the Akeldama or Field of Blood.

But what if his death didn’t end his betrayal?

What if his tainted blood seeped deep into the earth, into burial caves, causing a counterfeit resurrection of the dead?

Gina Lazarescu, a Romanian girl with a scarred past, has no idea she is being sought by the undead.

The Collectors, those released from the Akeldama, feed on souls and human blood. But there are also the Nistarim, those who rose from their graves in the shadow of the Nazarene’s crucifixion–and they still walk among us, immortal, left to protect mankind.

Gina realizes her future will depend on her understanding of the past, yet how can she protect herself from Collectors who have already died once but still live?

The Jerusalem’s Undead Trilogy takes readers on a riveting journey, as imaginative fiction melds with biblical and archaeological history.

Forever Knight, The Trilogy Part Two

Haunt of Jackals – Book Three

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I watched the Twilight movie On Demand yesterday. Surprisingly, I wasn’t intending to watch it. I was going to watch another movie – a foreign film about a cult, but the movie I was hoping to see wasn’t listed On Demand anymore. I’m off from work this week, my husband and child were both out of the house, so I was guaranteed watching a movie with no interruptions. I’d already made my popcorn, and was bummed when I couldn’t find the movie that I wanted to watch. So I decided not to let this movie-watching opportunity to pass me by, so I chose to watch Twilight. It pretty much stayed with the story-line in the novel with a few exceptions.
1. Bella, the main character, is a vegetarian in the movie and her and her dad eat at the diner every night. In the novel, Bella cooked for her and her dad. I don’t recall any scenes at a diner. I kind of liked how they had her cooking meals for herself and her dad. I guess the scriptwriters made her a vegetarian because Edward, the hero, eats animals instead of people, which kind of makes him a vegetarian vampire? This makes both Bella and Edward to have a common bond?
2. The trio of evil vampires don’t appear in the novel until about half or three quarters of the way into the story; when Edward, Bella, and his family are playing a baseball game. In the movie, they added a thread where the evil vampires are killing people in town, eating them. This thread of murders is not included in the book.
3. In the movie, Edward’s family are foster kids to the doctor and his wife. In the book, I don’t recall their being known as foster kids. Everybody was under the impression that they were a natural family?

Those are the main differences that I can recall. I preferred the book over the movie, though. The book drew me in more, and I guess that’s because reading leaves more to the imagination.

If you saw Twilight, and read the novel, which did you prefer, the book or the movie? If you had a preference, could you tell me the reasons behind your preference?

This blog post about vampires has got me to thinking about stories I’ve read in the past that had vampires, but, I’ve come up empty! Vampires and creatures of the night just don’t make my regular list of reading material! Maybe it’s because I used to get scared when I was a little kid when people mentioned vampires! My father, if he came home from work early enough, used to watch a soap opera about vampires called Dark Shadows. I used to cringe when he’d watch it and I hated it when he came home early enough to watch! I wanted to watch The Flintstones, but he’d turn the channel to Dark Shadows! Barnabas Collins (not sure if that’s spelled right) was a vampire in Dark Shadows. This show was on a long time ago, back in the early seventies. I was about four or five at the time.

I also read a novel called Frankenstein by Mary Shelley several years ago. That novel wasn’t very scary, and I recall that the writing was strong, and it’s considered a classic. Frankenstein isn’t a vampire, though, he was a monster.

That’s about all I can say about vampires. The other things about vampires that I’ve been exposed to is stuff you see on TV and in the movies; like using garlic to ward off vampires – weird stuff like that…
~Cecelia Dowdy~

Twilight

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If you’ve been reading this blog long enough, you’ll know that once in a while I’ll post about a secular title. When I logged onto AOL yesterday, I saw an advertisement that Twilight was coming out on DVD today. I never saw the movie, but, months ago, while I was visiting my parents, I had a conversation with my sister about the book. I asked her, “What’s up with this book Twilight? Why is it so great? It’s about a vampire, right?”

My dad piped in, before she could respond. He said, “It’s a love story, that’s why it’s selling so well.”

My sister nodded and said, “He’s right, that’s why it’s selling so well.”

Since I’d been hearing so much about this book, my sister, myself and my husband drove over to Walmart so that I could purchase Twilight. I was glad it was mass-market paperback, so I paid less than ten dollars for it.

I read it a short time later and was shocked that I actually enjoyed the story! I know I’d read on some website that Stephen King said that Stephenie Meyer can’t write herself out of a paper bag, but I disagree. I loved the story and the teens never had intercourse.

Although I enjoyed the story, I thought it was kind of sad, too. I mean, he’s a vampire, he’s not a real person, and he stays seventeen forever! How can you live happily ever after like that?

I saw a write-up about the series in Today’s Christian Woman magazine, so I do know they end up together later on. So I purchased the rest of the titles, but have not had the opportunity to read the rest of the novels. When I do, I’ll blog about them and give them away as a set. As I pointed out yesterday, I have TOO MANY BOOKS in this house, and that’s part of the reason why our home is such a mess!

Any of you read Twilight? If so, did you enjoy it? Hate it? What did you like or dislike about it?
I didn’t bother posting the book summary here since I assume most people already know what the story is about.


~Cecelia Dowdy~