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Book News, Guests | December 14, 2009

How to Be a Vampire

4 comments By Amy Gray

Oh, hi. I'm Amy Gray. I like smoking, carbs, and words. I live in the (currently) sleek humidity of Melbourne, Australia. When not lying... Continue »

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1. 
   $10.49 Sale Hardcover add to wish list

   How to Be a Vampire: A Fangs-On Guide for the Newly Undead

   Amy Gray

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readerWPK, July 2, 2008

Excellent, Enticing, Enlightening,

This is the compelling, beautifully written story of Lydia, a modern day Alice who travels to Japan, believing herself well prepared, even eager, for her trip down a cultural and sexual rabbit hole --- and who nonetheless comes home altered, reversed. Compulsively readable, from the foreplay and foreshadowing of the first paragraph, through every increasingly complex and compromised twist of the story.

And there are so many clever writerly details to enjoy as well, if you can ever tear your attention from the story proper. I admire the author's masterful use of contrasts to help place us in Lydia's shoes, to inhabit her disorientation and exhilaration at the constant shattering and reforming of her expectations. I love the offhand, culturally enlightening details; corn flakes on ice cream sundaes, and "love suicide puppet plays". And I particularly appreciate the play of "story" in this story; the stories the characters tell each other, the fictions they create and overlay over their own lives, the fantasies that sustain Lydia at crucial moments, and the way the whole novel is itself wrapped in its own frame story. Not, I suspect, a coincidence, given the author's name.

In all, a strong, rewarding, and arousing first novel. Not surprising, as it springs from an author who has already established herself as the writer of similarly strong, rewarding, and arousing short fiction.

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