Killing Me Slowly

So, backstory time: I requested this book from LibraryThing back in December, because I mean come on. Vampire stripper? Colonizing Mars? Cherry frickin' Cordial? it sounded like the most excellent, campy shit this side of the Beautiful Creatures movie. I gleefully told my friend Shiori about it, because she digs the camp and sci-fi romance is her genre, and we kicked back, eagerly awaiting vampire strippers IN SPACE.

Cut to four months later, and still no word from LibraryThing. I'd won a copy, but none had turned up, so Shiori, goddamn her, bless her heart, bit the bullet and bought a copy. Our precious Cherry Cordial was finally in our grasp!

And then we read it.

The basic idea is that this stripper vampire, Cherry, and a sexy stranger she's met once, Ian, are framed for the death of the Vampire Queen, and to avoid the wrath of the Queen's daughter (who is most likely the true culprit), Cherry's sire drags her and her entire vampire family into the "Undead Space Initiative", some random space exploration program that just happens to be going on at the same time, and seek undead volunteers - with no specialized training or experience necessary - to colonize Mars. Which they do. With a sentient space ship. And a crew of "revenants" and zombies. And then it turns out that all three races are secretly ancient aliens. I am not making this up.

Sounds fucking AMAZING, right? LOL NOT SO MUCH. The dream of campy stripper Cherries in space was crushed by a book that played itself waaaaaaaaaay too straight for a premise that bizarre, and a plot whose events seemed determined by dartboard. The thing is, when you take away the bizarre premise, what remains is pretty much your standard paranormal romance novel, with pretty much your standard Paranormal Romance Issues (with worse editing). And I mean, you've heard me complain about that before, surely? MISOGYNY, RAPEYNESS, BITCHES, MAN. Been there, done that.

So in the interest of keeping this short, but mostly because there's no way I could review this book without Shiori's input, You're Killing Me presents:

The Undead Space Initiative: a review in Tweets


*some tweets are repeated to keep the conversation understandable. IT HAD MANY THREADS.



Read the entire review at You're Killing.Us.

You can also see Shiori's less Tweet-y review here.