Twilight Hunger: Maggie Shayne

This may be the hardest review I've ever written. What do I write about a book that should never have been written? About a cliched plotline, poor writing, and transparent characters? What do I write about monotonous and tired dialogue, weak "surprise" twists, and thinly veiled erotica? To critique this book would mean to find something valid about it, which seems utterly impossible. Still, I will try.

Twilight Hunger is, predictably, a story about vampires. Morgan De Silva is a screenwriter with a bad childhood (shocker!). She hermits herself away in an ancient old New England house where she finds the journals of a vampire named Dante. Using those journals, she churns out three screenplays that make it big on the Silver Screen. Of course she thinks they are the mad rantings of an old inhabitant of the house, but Dante is in fact one of the undead. When members of the secret Government agency dedicated to finding vampires follow the leads offered in Morgan's movies, Dante's non-life is threatened. Suddenly his secrets are made public, forcing him to seek out the writer who is revealing his methods. What ensues is a predictable living/un-dead romance filled with the terror of being hunted. As if loving a vampire would bring anything less.

Maggie Shayne has written 393 pages of what reads like fanfiction meets vampire erotica. The characters all speak alike, beginning sentences with "God" as an exclamation like "Gawd", which is just offensive: especially coming from a vampire. Shayne spends more time describing the sexual relations than the characters.

This book was a pleasant reminder that, in general, I really don't like vampire fiction.