Whaddya Get When You Mix Nymphomaniacs and Vampires? Here's a Hint: "Yaaaaaawwwnnnn..."
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Author: Mario Acevedo
Title: The Nymphos of Rocky Flats Genre: mystery If there really are vampires roaming the world, then I’ll bet they wish they could get royalties on all the press their… what: race? species? is getting these days. My little local library positively groans under the weight of thousands of VampRom novels, and there must be six or seven vampire-themed TV shows scattered around the dial, not to mention a couple of blockbuster big-screen epics. Though to hear it, vamps are passé and zombies are the up-and-comers this year. What-ev-uh. I’ve dipped my toe in the world of VampLit a tie or two, most recently the debut novel by Denver author Mario Acevedo: The Nymphos of Rocky Flats.¹ That experience did little to convince me that I’m missing much… Felix Gomez went to Iraq a soldier and came back a vampire, along the way developing a psychosomatic aversion to human blood (not a particularly healthy disinclination for a vampire). Back in his native California, Gomez becomes a successful private eye: his superhuman strength and ability to hypnotize a human with a glance are great aids to his career. When a high-school bud asks him to investigate an outbreak of “heightened sexual nervosa” (nymphomania to non-shrink types) among the female staff at the Flats, Felix is more interested in the money than the sex. Huh? The nympho trail leads him to some weird supposedly secret military basis in Nevada: Stalag 17? Apartment 3G? Oh, yeah: Area 51. So are aliens causing this outbreak? But before Felix can investigate, a posse of eastern European van Helsings shows up and starts going through the Denver vampire community like a hot knife through coagulated pigs’ blood. Oops: better get cracking, Felix! Like every one of the other million or so authors of vampire fiction, rookie author Mario Acevedo finds it necessary to invent his own vampire lore, complete with concocting (or borrowing) terms to describe the undead’s “fire in the belly” (kundalini noir) and the tapetum lucidum (a real thing in the veterinary world) that makes their eyes glow and imparts the ability to hypnotize with a glance. Add in the requisite vampire council (“Araneum”) and almost everything you need for a by-the-numbers vampire novel is there. All you need now is some sex, and, well, the book is about nymphomaniacs – so you see where that leads… (or at least you think you do). While Acevedo, thankfully, sidesteps the urge to throw the hunky vampire into an orgiastic nympho-feast, that’s about the only VampTrope he passed up. Though fans of VampRom fiction may not be familiar with it, male vampires seem to be private detectives as often as not – think Alex O’Loughlin in TV’s “Moonlight,” or Charlie Huston’s Joe Pitt series (well, they’re not “vampires,” they’re “vampyrs,” but you get the picture). So the upshot? No new ground broken here and an awful lot of old ground “re-plowed.” About the only original aspect is the presence of a single supernatural being who isn’t a vampire, and – wonder of wonders – she’s not a werebeast; she’s a dryad. I repeat: huh? Regardless of who’s whom in The Nymphos of Rocky Flats, the operative word is “flat” (character-wise, that is, can’t speak to the nymphomaniacs themselves). It’s a pastiche of a whole bunch of semi-scifi and semi-fantasy tropes that looks more like bad fusion than literary goulash. Recommended for dyed-in-the-wool vampire addicts who will read anything they can find about the undead. For mystery fans or just fans of the good stuff, you might as well skip it. ¹ Rocky Flats is the site between Golden and Boulder, Colorado, where a defense contractor made nuclear weapons during the Cold War era. It’s called “rocky flats mainly ‘cause it’s flat, and it’s rocky. It’s out of business these days… Confidential to MA: I kinda doubt that someone who works at Rocky Flats would live in Littleton. The commute would be pretty wicked in winter. all content copyright © 2014 by scmrak
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