Enemy of Entropy

Review: Blood Oath by Christopher Farnsworth

7 June 2010, 5:32 pm. 1 Comment. Filed under Reading.

Blood Oath Blood Oath by Christo­pher Farnsworth


My rat­ing: 4 of 5 stars
Blood Oath is an inter­est­ing and fairly refresh­ing vari­a­tion on the vam­pire riff. Most of the cur­rent tales give us a suave, sexy preda­tor who mes­mer­izes his or her prey, leav­ing humans pin­ing for their pres­ence. They might even fall in love with a human. Nathaniel Cade, how­ever, refers to humans as food, say­ing, “Would you have sex with a cow?” That makes much more sense to me. It’s a good thing he isn’t inter­ested, either, as the typ­i­cal reac­tion peo­ple have to encoun­ter­ing him is utter panic, often involv­ing the loss of blad­der control.

Cade is def­i­nitely a preda­tor, though — an extremely effec­tive one. Farnsworth attempts to explain his abil­i­ties sci­en­tif­i­cally, rather than mys­ti­cally (I’d clas­sify this book as sci­ence fic­tion if I had to choose a genre, whereas most books fea­tur­ing vam­pires and sim­i­lar crea­tures are fan­tasy or hor­ror). The same is true of the ene­nies he faces.

While I’m not gen­er­ally inter­ested in socio-​​political thrillers (which is what this book was, other than a story about a vam­pire who works for the pres­i­dent), I did enjoy the fresh take on an old trope. While I nor­mally groan when I see the first book from a new author billed as the begin­ning of a series (do pub­lish­ers even buy sin­gle books any more?), I’m some­what pleased this time. I do wish they’d been a lit­tle more care­ful with the name of the series (The President’s Vam­pire), as there’s another book with the same name: The President’s Vam­pire: Strange-​​but-​​True Tales of the United States of Amer­ica by Robert Damon Sch­neck. Then again, if Farnsworth’s book or series takes off, I sup­pose there’s a chance that sales of Schneck’s will as well. I’m sure he wouldn’t com­plain about that at all. I’ve put it on my to-​​read list, after all.

I hope to talk my part­ner, Sam, into read­ing Blood Oath. If I do, it’ll be fairly mirac­u­lous, as I don’t recall him any­thing with drag­ons or were­wolves in it other than (Jim Butcher’s Dres­den Files) for most of the time that I’ve known him (12 years as of this writ­ing). After his years at White Wolf, I think many books seem more than slightly deriv­a­tive. He also did so much research before work­ing on books he wrote for them (like The Book of Nod) that he got a lit­tle burned out on cer­tain sub­jects. Farnsworth’s approach really is dif­fer­ent enough that I think he might give it a chance. Will you?

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1 Comment »

  1. avatar ben d. 21 June 2010, 12:06 pm

    well writ­ten review. What’s up with the sud­den spurge of vam­pire romance sto­ries? This fad is over-​​doing itself way too much.

 

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