Caden O'Brien's Website

What would real people do if they suddenly found themselves turned into vampires or other supernatural beings? Or if they met one of these beings in the course or ordinary or extraordinary events? Ever since I was a kid, I thought “I know these things don’t exist, but what if…?” I like to think of myself as somewhat grounded in reality, but I also have that “but what if” question in the back of my mind. I just really want to believe I guess.

My favorite books tend to be those that walk the edge of fantasy and reality. They deal with ordinary people in the ordinary world, but there’s a twist. Magical and supernatural elements abide alongside the mundane world. You might be an ordinary 9-to-5 person with no special talents, but your boss is a vampire. Or a werewolf pack lives on the edge of town and they run all the security and law enforcement operations. Or the evil government took special forces soldiers, and experimented on them until a variety of psychic talents were enhanced. Having things like this in your life can have a dramatic impact! The stories focus on real people dealing with extraordinary things, and they react much like you or I would do. The fantasy is realistic.

Jeri Smith-Ready does a fabulous job in blending the real with the supernatural. I’ve just read the first two books in her WVMP Series, Wicked Game and Bad to the Bone.

Here’s the storyline from the author’s website:

Recovering con artist Ciara Griffin is trying to live the straight life, even if it means finding a (shudder!) real job. She takes an internship at a local radio station, whose late-night time-warp format features 1940s blues, 60s psychedelia, 80s Goth, and more, all with an uncannily authentic flair. Ciara soon discovers how the DJs maintain their cred: they’re vampires, stuck forever in the eras in which they were turned.

Ciara’s first instinct, as always, is to cut and run. But communications giant Skywave wants to buy WVMP and turn it into just another hit-playing clone. Without the station—and the link it provides to their original Life Times—the vampires would “fade,” becoming little more than mindless ghosts of the past. Suddenly a routine corporate takeover becomes a matter of life and un-death.

Ciara is a tough gal. Twenty-four years old and trying to make it in the legit world by getting a college degree, she was raised by grifter parents who moved every two weeks. Relationships, honesty, and commitment are not part of her psyche. She’s got a dead-eyed cynical view of the world and its inhabitants, supernatural or not. Told from her viewpoint, she is foul-mouthed and funny, and I found myself laughing out loud at many of the situations she found herself in. For example, her first intimate encounter with future-love-interest Shane (a young grunge-era vampire) resulted in him taking a huge chomp out of her thigh, which caused her to viciously kick him in the head with her other leg. His resulting jerk-back causes a lot of flesh-ripping which causes a lot of bleeding, which requires stitches… Shane runs off into the night. Now, in a typical romance book, the assault would have caused her multiple orgasms and an instant bonding to her attacker, who would nobly turn her into a vampire so that they could have mind-blowing sex for eternity. But this isn’t fairy-tale land.

Smith-Ready’s worldbuilding is superb. She poses a unique view of vampire life, and it’s not happy-camperland for the vamps. Yes, they are beautiful, alluring, super-strong, super-fast, and super-sexual. But something bad starts happening after they are created, and it just gets worse as they age: they fade. Over time they become less human, while at the same time the vampiric traits get stronger. If they lose their connection to their Life Time, fading is even faster because they have difficulty connecting to the present time. They can’t learn new things or form real relationships. The world is so confusing to them, they develop obsessive/compulsive behaviors to try to cope with things they can’t control. They become extremely flammable, and they burn like paper (humans burn like wood). Even though they’re technically immortal, the average vamp only lives about 80 years after their turning. It’s heart-rending to see them struggle.

At first Ciara wants nothing to do with these freaks, but because she’s a good person at heart (and she really needs the job) she throws her lot in with the vamps and cooks up a scam, er, plan, to save the radio station and the sanctuary it provides the vamps. She re-brands the station as “The Life-blood of Rock n Roll” and promotes the Vampire DJ angle. Almost no-one believes they’re real, of course, but the campaign is a huge success. Her relationship with Shane is rocky – he’s young enough to be still quite human and he loves her, but she’s afraid of it. As they work through the difficulties, they have the inevitable fading problem hanging over their heads, except they don’t know how fast it will happen or whether Ciara’s efforts to save Shane will help avoid it. In spite of these unique problems, their relationship is like any other couple getting off to a tough start. It’s believable, and because we care about the characters, it pulls at the heartstrings.

The bad guys work hard to destroy the vamps and Ciara too, and there’s good action in both books. These are not strictly romance books, so there’s more character development and action to move the plot along. These books are on my keeper shelf and I can’t wait for the third installment, Bring On The Night, which will be out in August 2010.

Smith-Ready is an obvious musicphile, and the book comes with a lot of playlists of the tunes the DJ’s play. Her website includes a great music player with all the tunes from the books on it, and I was thrilled at how many of them were in my personal library. I also found a lot of tracks that I haven’t heard in years, so I happily added them to my collection.  Great stories and good music totally do it for me. If you also like books and music, check out Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty Norville series. She’s a DJ werewolf, and the books are also realistic fantasy. Rock on!

• Wicked Game
• Bad to the Bone
• Bring on the Night (August 2010)
• tentatively titled Lust for Life (early Spring 2011)