Vois - And Cream's Review of V3: The Vampire Vignettes ReVamped by G.L. Giles

When V3: The Vampire Vignettes Revamped arrived in my inbox for me to review, I was a little bit dubious. Firstly because I’m not an enormous fan of Vampire-themed books, with certain notable exceptions such as I am Legend, and Interview with the Vampire.Despite counting Stephen King high on my list of all-time favourite authors, I even find his own attempt at Vampire fiction – Salem’s Lot – to be a disappointment.Secondly, there are just SO MANY Vampire novels nowadays. The whole Vampire-fiction market has become, to an extent, saturated. There are literally thousands and thousands of Vampire novels out there, and the problem with this is: some of them are going to be bad. Probably very bad.So it was with a certain amount of trepidation that I set about reading G. L. Giles’ tale of Vampires (and Vampyres). Thankfully for me, my doubts turned out to be unfounded as this was an excellent read from start to finish, full of reaction-provoking characters and beautifully disgusting murder.One such murder sees the ruthless Vladina spike her victim’s head through the neck onto her sword’s blade so that she can drink the blood and gore as it flows down the weapon. It’s fair to say that Vladina is a pretty nasty piece of work, and a good job too because Giles’ portrayal of Charleston, South Carolina (which is both the setting of this story and Giles’ hometown) is filled with utterly contemptible people, and really it’s for the best that there is a bunch of bloodthirsty Undead culling them.You get the impression, throughout the story, that most of these unlikeable characters are people whom Giles has come across throughout various stages of her life. Mainly because you can see that she actually holds these characters in complete disdain and, more often than not, they are disrespectful to the more sympathetic characters (who perhaps represent elements of Giles herself). It is therefore with a certain amount of joy that Giles can have her ‘good’ characters come out on top of the ‘bad’ characters…usually with the bad guys meeting a particularly sticky end.This is no bad thing though, if anything it makes Giles’ words more believable, because you suspect that they are coming from real experience and memories – albeit exaggerated to the N^th degree – and so there is a weight of emotion behind them.The story-proper takes a while to get going, and the reason for this is that there is quite a large ensemble cast which Giles goes to great lengths to introduce to us, spending over half of the book simply setting the scene, so that when the latter part of the book happens, it happens quickly and brutally. It is to the author’s credit that the change in pace is almost unnoticeable as you get sucked in, especially when the story shifts over to a preferred character, such as the gruff and mutated (but very likeable) Kerry.One of the things that sets V3 apart from other works of Vampire-fiction is that, in addition to being a compelling story, there are also elements of the book that read like a reference book. Giles chooses to teach us a little about her own beliefs, coupled with more common Vampire “fact” or “folklore”, within the pages and, again, this is part of the author’s tendency to equip us with information in the earlier stages of the book, so that by the time we get to the later pages we feel like experts on the subject, so the pages just seem to fly by…From a personal point of view, Giles’ biggest achievement is to make me feel comfortable that there are still great writers and great stories floating around in a Genre that I’ve avoided for some years now due to many bad past experiences.It’s testament to Giles that, not only will I recommend this to my friends as well as And Cream’s readers, but I will also go out and pick up copies of Giles’ previous two stories in the Vampire Vignettes saga.

Matthew Waldram of And Cream Magazine

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And Cream's Review of V3: The Vampire Vignettes ReVamped by G.L. Giles

And Cream's Review of V3: The Vampire Vignettes ReVamped by G.L. Giles

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