Bernice Summerfield and the Vampire Curse
Apr. 22nd, 2009 09:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
purplecatI know I keep saying I'm going to stop buying the Bernice Summerfield books but they keep putting ones out with strong author line ups: in this case Mags L Halliday, Kelly Hale and Philip Purser-Hallard. I remain unconvinced by the three novella format. I would have welcomed more depth and complexity to each of the three stories here. But I think this is, nevertheless, the strongest Benny book I've read for a while.
The three stories here are very loosely linked and benefit from the fact. The first story The Badblood Diaries by Mags L Halliday is set early in Benny's career and is a tale of Vampirism on a Wuxia inspired colony. I associate Mags more with detailed and thoughtful historical writing than with world-building but her talent for description went to good use here in fleshing out a world of floating cities - endlessly chasing the sunlight so that the inhabitants never have to venture into the dark. I was frustrated that the story didn't have more space to flesh out the characters so that the reader became a little more invested in the cannon fodder of the story but that was my only real gripe with it.
Possum Kingdom by Kelly Hale told a more complex tale drawing on, I think, native American mythology. Benny, as a character, has relatively little interaction with the plot which, to a great extent, unfolds without her intervention. It's a well-written tale with an evocative sense of place and period but I found it the least engaging of the three novellas.
I've raved about Philip Purser-Hallard's world building in Of the City of the Saved before and he pulls of a similar trick in Predating the Predators. In this case the world building isn't as in your face, but the novella contains a dense background on the nature of Vampirism, the water-world of Lavelle with its hyper-rational native population and the interactions of both with Christianity and Catholicism in particular. In the end PPH opts for the Dr Who canonical explanation that faith, any faith, however ill-founded, is sufficient to hold back vampires without undermining the personal faith of his viewpoint female priest. While all this world-building is going on, he also manages to tell an engaging tale of vampiric infiltration of an academic conference attended by an aging Benny whose personal idiosyncracies actually seem a lot less irritating than normal - I'm not sure if that is because outrageous eccentricity is more acceptable in a 60-year-old or just that her quirks become charming in more assured hands.
In fact Benny is considerably less annoying in all three novellas than she frequently can be. I continue to think she works much better away from the world of the Braxiatel Collection (as in all these stories) and generally is a more attractive character when author's restrain the impulse to play her for laughs too much.
I believe this is possibly the last Bernice Summerfield book to be produced. I'm not I shall entirely mourn the passing of the line, but it is a shame that it is being shut down just when it seemed to have found something of a new lease of life.
The three stories here are very loosely linked and benefit from the fact. The first story The Badblood Diaries by Mags L Halliday is set early in Benny's career and is a tale of Vampirism on a Wuxia inspired colony. I associate Mags more with detailed and thoughtful historical writing than with world-building but her talent for description went to good use here in fleshing out a world of floating cities - endlessly chasing the sunlight so that the inhabitants never have to venture into the dark. I was frustrated that the story didn't have more space to flesh out the characters so that the reader became a little more invested in the cannon fodder of the story but that was my only real gripe with it.
Possum Kingdom by Kelly Hale told a more complex tale drawing on, I think, native American mythology. Benny, as a character, has relatively little interaction with the plot which, to a great extent, unfolds without her intervention. It's a well-written tale with an evocative sense of place and period but I found it the least engaging of the three novellas.
I've raved about Philip Purser-Hallard's world building in Of the City of the Saved before and he pulls of a similar trick in Predating the Predators. In this case the world building isn't as in your face, but the novella contains a dense background on the nature of Vampirism, the water-world of Lavelle with its hyper-rational native population and the interactions of both with Christianity and Catholicism in particular. In the end PPH opts for the Dr Who canonical explanation that faith, any faith, however ill-founded, is sufficient to hold back vampires without undermining the personal faith of his viewpoint female priest. While all this world-building is going on, he also manages to tell an engaging tale of vampiric infiltration of an academic conference attended by an aging Benny whose personal idiosyncracies actually seem a lot less irritating than normal - I'm not sure if that is because outrageous eccentricity is more acceptable in a 60-year-old or just that her quirks become charming in more assured hands.
In fact Benny is considerably less annoying in all three novellas than she frequently can be. I continue to think she works much better away from the world of the Braxiatel Collection (as in all these stories) and generally is a more attractive character when author's restrain the impulse to play her for laughs too much.
I believe this is possibly the last Bernice Summerfield book to be produced. I'm not I shall entirely mourn the passing of the line, but it is a shame that it is being shut down just when it seemed to have found something of a new lease of life.