Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Since I took a chance on Charlaine Harris's "Dead Until Dark" in an Audible "paperback" sale, I have been strangely hooked on supernatural female heroine books. This is a guilty pleasure which I am reluctant to admit, being a typical man. However, many of these books are well done, entertaining, and even hysterically funny (like Gail Carriger's Parasol Protectorate or Darynda Jones' Charlie Davidson series). I think that men who overlook them are missing out. Sure they all have romance novel elements, but I can fast-forward through that stuff if I have to. "Darkness Dawns", however, is different breed of cat. It had enough going for it that I wanted to see how it ended (and I did pay for it, dammit) so I was determined to slog through. But really -- this book is just sophomoric. The two main characters, Roland and Sarah, are just perfectly perfect. They are perfectly handsome or beautiful, perfectly built with rippling muscles or hourglass figure, have perfect skin, perfect hair, are incredibly sensitive, unbelievably self-possessed, -- and humorless, smug, shallow, vapid, and intolerant in that special way that only the terminally self-righteous can be. They eat only organic foods, wear natural fibers, eschew homophobia, drive Priuses and carefully recycle their cat food cans. (I only hope that Nietzsche the Wonder Cat -- the only character I really liked in this book -- gets to eat real tuna and not some vegan slop.) Our hero is an incredible fighter. He can beat twelve vampires at a single thrust and then cook perfect organic eggplant parmesan without missing a beat. He eats no meat -- except for that blood drinking thing. He is a perfect lover. He is a fabulous interior decorator who works exclusively in earth tones. Roland is also a Nobel laureate, physicist, neurosurgeon, test pilot, and rock star, out to save the world by defeating a band of inter-planetary vampires from the ninth dimension. OK -- that last sentence is not exactly true, but it would have been totally in character with the book. Dianne Duvall probably never got the memo that Buckaroo Banzai is parody, not role model. Sure, as a kid I fantasized about being a muscle-bound, square-jawed space jockey who could smite aliens while curing cancer and make the ladies swoon. But I outgrew pulp fiction when I came to realize that perfect is BORING. Perfect people lack character and dimension. This book is chock full of unimaginative and improbable fights, cheesy deus-ex-machina rescues (would you believe Amazing Healing Touch and teleportation?), gratuitous environmental correctness, tedious erotica (not sex -- as a typical man I have no objection to sex), and interminable "relationship chats" as Nicole Hollander might put it. Bleagh!