I’ve read novels about quirky female protagonists falling in love with vampires before and I’ve found them to be a huge mixed bag. On one hand, there’s Twilight and its sequels, which I find tenuous and unreadable. On the other hand, I like Sookie Stackhouse. I didn’t know what to expect going into Wicked Game, except that Sarah loved it and that Sarah, by virtue of the fact that we have a lot of geek traits and likes in common, has become a big influencer in terms of things that lie a bit outside my comfort zone. Like novels where quirky female protagonists fall in love with vampires.
I started Wicked Game on a Friday night and finished it on Saturday night. It took me about 22 hours to read the book, including sleep. It’s a fast book. Like, Harry Potter fast. It’s also a fun book full of likable characters. And it has a killer premise: A vampire radio station that plays the best music of each era because each of the undead DJs is actually a musician or DJ from that era.
If there were no meat tacked onto the bones of that premise, it’d be a shallow read that I’d think was a lot of fun, in the same vein (see what I did there?) as those forgettable, disposable sword and sorcery or horror novels that I’ll buy on vacations and read one per day while sitting on the beach.
The book is not a book about vampire DJs, though. Rather, it’s a book with vampire DJs in it that is, just like Smith-Ready’s stoic grunge DJ Shane, in it for the music. Like any good vampire book or movie, it is not about the condition of vampirism, but the metaphor of it.
Whenever I get asked by one of my younger, hipper friends about the affection that I still carry for Toad the Wet Sprocket or Seven Mary Three or Tonic or Better Than Ezra or the Gin Blossoms or et cetera ad infinitum, I remain unapologetic. It’s the music I was listening to when I figured out who I was and, yeah, I was also listening to a lot of Elvis Costello and jazz when I popped my own earbuds in, but the pop stuff represented the landmarks I navigated school dances and awkward dates by, the songs that my friends would play when we’d be hanging out at two in the morning, talking about how we were going to get out of our horrible little town and change the world. I remember the songs I would obsessively listen to the radio just to tape a copy of. We all have that music and we all need it to connect with our lives; Jeri Smith-Ready’s vampires just need it a little more than we do. The natural compulsive nature of vamps in the WVMP universe (which is one of my favorite bits of vampire lore, and one that most modern vamp authors seem to avoid because of Count Von Count) means that they cling to Their Music just like they insist on alphabetizing things or counting objects, as a mechanism to understand and order a world they cannot comprehend anymore.
Not long before Wicked Game, I read Arthur Phillips’s The Song Is You, another novel with a character who needs His Music to create meaning in his middle-aged life. Wicked Game communicates the theme much more fully. Hell, the book starts with a (great) playlist.
Smith-Ready also does vampires correctly, dammit. They are sexy and scary and anachronistic and feral and pitiable and, just like one of the songs that Shane plays for the author’s fully-drawn and remarkably flawed heroine Ciara Griffin, more human than human. Even the good vampires are palpable threats – beings that are ruled by inhuman urges – there are no ‘vegetarian’ vampires in the world of this book, as Ciara learns very early on.
There’s a moment in every book that I love where I know I’m fully on board with anything the author throws at me. In this case, that moment came when blues vampire Monroe made his first appearance and told the story of how he got turned into one of the undead. Smith-Ready nails the cadence and tone of his voice completely (just like she does with the other DJs, but Monroe’s voice is the furthest removed from our modern language). During his story about Robert Johnson’s cousin telling him which crossroads he could meet the devil at, Monroe says, “I went on a Tuesday, to avoid the line,” and it was at that point I became fully immersed in the book and literally couldn’t put it down.
Wicked Game and its sequel, Bad To The Bone, are both in stores now. Read them. Also, Jeri Smith-Ready is on Twitter and is an engaging, worthwhile follow.
RATING: Great.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Great review! I love this series! :)