Warhammer: The Vampire Genevieve Book

Not Recommended

I don't think I have ever been made to feel as disappointed- or cheated - by a book before. Oh - I've bought and not enjoyed books before. Sometimes I don't like characters, or just don't like the writing style. That's fine - the book just isn't for me. That's okay, I'll move on.

But The Vampire Genevieve was different. The Vampire Genevieve contains 4 books, though only two are novels, the other half being collections of novellas and shorts, and in my naivety i had assumed they would be about a vampire called Genevieve. Largely, they were not.

Book 3, Beasts in Velvet, does not even feature Genevieve as a character (She has a brief camo, but has no relevance to anything in the book) and should probably just be excised from the canon (Along with its associated shorts) on the grounds they have literally nothing to do with the title character, even the stories where Genevieve does appear, she is usually a secondary character who has little impact on the story, except to come in at the end to bash the antagonists heads in with her super vampire strength, absolving the author of comping up with a clever way for the protagonists to overcome the odds. I didn't really feel like I was reading a story 'about' Genevieve, or featuring her in some significant way, until the first short story of the Fourth Book in the series, Silver Nails. It was then I realised that, in the last 500 pages of the Omnibus, I had learned next to nothing about Genevieve as a character - I knew what she was, a vampire, how old she was, and what her full name was - but little else. She had no character - I didn't know her motivations, her desires. I didn't know what made her sad, happy, or angry. Previously, she had been a walking plot device, existing only to move the plot ahead on occasion, and then to fade back into the shadows until she was needed to beat someone's head in. For the title Character of an Omnibus, she shows up little, and has less of an impact.

Aside from the disappointment of the marketing setting false expectations, the novels and stories themselves are just not very good in their own right. Yeovil's writing is plagued many contradictions, one-dimensional characters, and trite plot-lines. Stories seem as if they were written backwards - starting with an idea of the climax or ending, Yeovil seemed to put characters in the places they need to be, resulting in characters constantly making stupid, contradictory decisions and conveniently forgetting facts that had been previously set-up. Both of the novels contain serious contradictions that surprisingly made it past an editor, with in one case a scene happening that was completely forgotten by all involved later in the book, neither the scene nor the plot advancement it contained to be mentioned again. Significantly, the scene would not fit in with the twist Yeovil wanted to pull at the end. Yeovil is enamoured with his unexpected twists and loves to throw red herrings. But a red herring is like a garden-path sentence - it only really works if it tricks the mind into learning one way, but is still explicable when the twist is revealed. When a red herring points one way and can't be accounted for by the twist, it's not a red herring, its rotten fish that spoils the show. Under this definition, The Vampire Genevieve collection contains a lot of rotten fish.

In other cases, the plot feels like it's being written by a dice-roll as the author realises he can't write his character's out of a mess without utterly pulling something from nowhere. In one memorable scene (Spoiler for the remainder of the paragraph), the antagonist is murdered by a serial killer who seemed neither to exist before the scene where he murdered the antagonist, nor after it - where he conveniently popped out of existence - At least until a few books later, where the author realises his mistake and writes a nonsensical short in an attempt to plug the hole that makes it all the more glaring.

Despite it all, I admit after almost 800 pages I did grow to be quite fond of Genevieve and Detlaf, her poet-lover who it the main character of the first book, and who shows up in several of the better Shorts. There were some enjoyable parts and, even, some genuinely interesting an exciting plot-happenings, but they were entirely focused on the Genevieve-and-Detlaf sections, while all the other shorts (and novel) that focused on others were fairly run of the mill. If the series was restructured to be entirely around these two - with the unrelated shorts and novel removed, it would have made a much stronger experience, despite its flaws, with the best parts, most of the worst offenders gone, and an overall emotionally satisfying character and romance arc. Unfortunately, it was not to be, and the baby drowns in the bathwater, for wont of it being thrown out.

There are also some fairly severe timeline issues - Chronologically, Many of the Shorts in Silver nails are prequels to the Earlier novels (both in terms of their setting, and when they were originally written) and book 3 takes place before book 2 - a significant misplacement, given book 2 contains in it, plainly and with no riddle, the big twist for book 3. In republishing the works as an Omnibus, it would have benefited greatly from some reorganisation.

Coming from the high of reading Ulrika the Vampire, Genevieve is a long way to fall. I would nominally have given this 2 stars (Two is certainly the rounded average of what I gave Books 1-4), but I felt I had to knock it down purely because the title, cover, and blurb sells the book as 'The Adventures of Genevieve the vampire' and, having read Ulrika and worked up a red thirst for more vampire femme fatale, that's why I bought it. The fact Genevieve is absent for a large minority of the book and a secondary character of little exploration or focus through the overwhelming majority suggests it should be rebranded as something else. Perhaps, 'The Adventures Occurring in the General Vicinity of Genevieve the Vampire, or Which Happened Once to Someone to Which she is Vaguely Acquainted, through at most 1 degree of separation.'