Review: Jailbait Zombie – An Emo-Erotica Free Vampire Tale!

Filed under: Cracked Spine, Reviews 

I. Hate. VampiresVampires reviews. Present tense. But I might be softening up a bit thanks to my new hero, Mario Acevedo. The shame is that I used to really like vampires. I thought they were much more cool back when they were less cool. Back when their existence was considered tragic. A curse that offset the thrill of immortality. Then they became a clique of badass goths. Now the trend seems to be progressing through this phase and into emo erotica. Pardon the pun, but what the undead really needs is a bit of new life breathed into them. Someone should come along and re-think vampire lore from the ground-up. Actually, an author has already done this. Meet the hero I mentioned above, Mario Acevedo.

MarioMario reviews has taken the standard vampiric recipee of blood-sucking night owl and kicked it up a notch, Emeril-style.  Some of his tweaks are lore-based.  His vampires see auras and each has a psychological beast stirring within them that Mario dubs the kundalini noir. They have a unique heirarchical structure to the clan, and they can slather on enough SPF 50 to do their business during the day. But Mario’s real magical tweaks are harder to spot.  He makes vampires interesting again by presenting them as tragically flawed.  His characters are humorous and accident-prone.  They respond to one another with familiar trappings.  You will pull for the protagonists as you would in any well-written book, but you probably won’t be inspired to don a trench coat, powder up, and pretend to be a creature of the night.

Which is a good thing.

In addition to bending what it means to be a vampire, Mario also makes some bold moves to shatter the genres in which they are normally found.  Everything is fair game in this series of books.  AliensAliens reviews, psychics, and zombies inhabit the same world.  And recent scientific studies have shown conclusively that everything is better with zombies.

With his latest book, Mario Acevedo explores the greater zombie threat and the danger they pose to vampires.  Namely, the shuffling morons do not know how to be discrete.  The maggot hostels will just wander around in broad daylight and start nibbling at people’s brains.  This lack of tact threatens to expose the entire mystic world to human eyes, and once humans are aware of zombies, they will start looking for vampires.  And find them.  And hunt them down.

Which means that vampires can’t sit around drinking O Negative while they wait for a war with mankind.  They need to be pro-active.  So they take it upon themselves to police the entire paranormal world in order to keep their own existence on the down-low.  It’s like Men in BlackMen in Black reviews without the ridiculous guns and Will Smith.

In Jailbait Zombie we follow Felix Gomez, vampiric detective extraordinaire and problem-solver for the vampire horde. When a zombie outbreak threatens to expose all of the undead, Felix is dispatched to find the source and terminate it. Things get complicated, however, when a young clairvoyant (the one that has been tormenting him with psychic visions) offers her help–but at a price. The girl-psychic is dying. Something she would really, really like to stop doing.  Felix really needs her help with the zombies, but it can only be purchased by Felix turning her into a vampire.  A duty he does not take lightly.

I highly recommend checking this book out.  There are a ton of gripping action scenes.  The interplay between the variety of undead is much more interesting than reading about two bat-men flying around, clawing and hissing at one another.  And the characters in this book are extremely memorable.  If you go into the novel with an open mind, I just don’t see how you can not love it.

Except, of course, if you are looking for emo-erotica.  There is none of that here.  Thankfully.

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