Walk in Moonlight
Grade : D

Poor Christopher Marlowe. If being stabbed in the eye at the peak of his creative powers weren’t bad enough, the sixteenth century poet and playwright has now been transformed into the vampire hero of Walk in Moonlight by Rosemary Laurey. According to this novel, he’s been living in a little English village for four centuries, sucking the blood of cows and pigs and not writing a word. I think that if Marlowe became immortal, he’d do it with a little more style than that, don’t you?

Dixie LePage is an attractive American who inherits a British mansion from her two eccentric great-aunts. She loves the place and sets to fixing it up, but she keeps running into strange characters who all seem to want something. There’s a lot of things going on beneath the surface of this quaint English village. Dixie’s lawyer, Sebastian, controls the local coven of witches. He’s been sending his minions to search Dixie’s house. Dixie’s cleaning lady and the lady who owns the B&B are both witches who try to poison her. And then of course, there’s that good-looking Christopher Marlowe, who has no job, wears an eye patch, and avoids sunlight.

Dixie saves Christopher from the coven, they fall in love, and she earns Sebastian’s murderous wrath, which leads to an eternal transformation.

Dixie is not a bad character at all. She’s smart, brave, and doesn’t take a lot of guff from the various guys who hit on her. If she sometimes finds herself in bizarre and dippy occult circumstances, well, that’s hardly her fault.

Sebastian is another story – he’s the most reasonlessly evil villain I’ve read about in a long time. At one point he considers killing Dixie (and hundreds of innocent bystanders) by blowing up the passenger airline that she’s flying on. Why? Uh, because she accidentally got in the way of his ruthless quest for power and that made him mad, that’s why.

And I had grave problems with Christopher Marlowe, as he’s portrayed in this book. The real Marlowe was a man who managed to fill his short twenty-nine year span with enough brilliance, adventure and controversy to fill a dozen novels. I realize that four centuries would change a guy, but would they really make him such a dud? He has apparently done nothing for four hundred years. And what about the poetry? Marlowe wrote some of the most beautiful literature in the English language, but in this book he talks like this: “It’s simple. You’re mortal. I’m a vampire. There can’t be anything between us.” I just could not accept him. No way.

There are parts of this novel that I enjoyed, but what I saw as the goofiness of the whole vampire premise kept me from really enjoying the story. I kept wondering things like – if Christopher doesn’t have a heartbeat, how can he get an erection? Also, sometimes Laurey blends up an insalubrious sentence, like this one: “His hands seared trails of sensation through her hair and his tongue half-scrambled her brain.” I don’t know about you, but that sentence gives me a mental image of his tongue inside her cranium.

When Sebastian succeeds in killing Dixie, Christopher makes her a vampire. This throws her for a loop: how will she get her hair done if she can no longer see in the mirror? I swear, that’s her reaction. She’s an American and a Southerner, and most southern Americans have had strong Christian values pounded into them. Dixie is portrayed as an extremely moral person. But does she suffer an ethical qualm at the prospect of spending eternity feeding off hapless human victims like a tick on sheep? Nope.

I’m not a big vampire fan, and I probably wouldn’t have read this book if I had known that its hero was going to be one. There are vampire novels that have changed my mind (Steven Brust’s wonderful Agyar is one), but those are the ones that don’t shy away from portraying that vampires are the dangerous and unpredictable enemies of mankind. In her effort to make a vampire a good guy, Laurie portrays vampires as harmless creatures that sip at us while we’re not looking – parasites, in fact. I did not find it a romantic concept.

That, added to a ridiculous villain and a hero who was an affront to my love of history and literature, made this book a real dud. Lovers of vampires might enjoy it more, but I’d approach it with caution.

Reviewed by Jennifer Keirans
Grade : D
Book Type: Vampire Romance

Sensuality: Warm

Review Date : October 6, 2000

Publication Date: 2000

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Jennifer Keirans

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