My Love Lies Bleeding

This is a new addition to the burgeoning ‘vamp-lit’ genre. My local bookshop has a whole section dedicated to it, but I confess to being slow on the uptake: I’ve read chunks of my teenage daughter’s borrowed copy of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight with less than enthusiasm, but that’s about it. And I fully expected to groan my way through the reading of this title but, Reader, I didn’t…

Instead, I was hugely entertained. My Love Lies Bleeding is well constructed and well written – Alyxandra Harvey knows her Romantic literature. The book has a brace of refreshingly feisty heroines, Solange and her New-Agey human friend, Lucy, who recount the story in alternating chapters. Their friendship allows Harvey to smuggle in various undidactic messages about tolerance of difference.

Solange is a vampire Queen-in-waiting by virtue of her unique heritage and the prophecy that the vampire tribes will be reunited under a daughter of ancient lineage. She is one of the illustrious Drake clan who through a genetic quirk is a ‘born’ rather than ‘made’ vampire, while the majority of vampires are made or ‘turned’ from human nature through a vampiric bite. A rare female in the Drake lineage, Solange is both special and especially attractive to various vampire factions seeking to seize or retain control in the complex world of blood-politics.

Harvey has a great deal of fun with the crowd of young pretenders who attempt to court Solange with an array of vampiric gifts (anyone for a Ziploc bag of choice sanguinary liquid?) and her wit similarly enlivens the emerging double love-story which threads tantalisingly through the book, between Lucy and Solange’s vampire brother, Nicholas, and between Solange and Kieran Black. Inconveniently, Kieran is a human ‘operative’ belonging to the secret Academy, Helios-Ra, dedicated to avenging vampiric assaults on humans and in particular, a supposed Drake family killing of his own father.

The alarming Montmartre, former lover of the reigning Queen Natasha, is just one of Solange’s determined suitors, making Natasha herself a powerfully envious rival. To complicate matters further, Montmartre’s ‘half-turned’ followers, the Host, together with his renegade forces – the Hounds and the still more sinister Hel-Blar – provide a variety of threats. The dynamic in the book is provided by Solange’s approaching sixteenth birthday, a suitably fairytale device, when she must negotiate the delicate and dangerous blood changing rite of passage, before she can metamorphose into a full vampire.

While the romantic tension and dizzying twists and turns of the plot will draw in readers, it is the determined female protagonists, humorous play with history and wisecracking humour which promise to set this title above the vampiric competition.