Rainbow Reviews

BOOK BLURB:
Diana Lee’s first novel takes up where Anne Rice’s vampire epics leave off: by focusing on strong, immortal women. Ryan, a charismatic lesbian who was made a vampire in Scotland during a time of clan warfare, passes for male and is capable of seducing women sexually as well as drinking their blood in limited amounts and leaving them with pleasant memories. By the late Victorian age, she is 700 years old and has lost the ability to love. Painful losses over time will do that to a person, even the walking dead.

BOOK REVIEW:
Ryan is not looking for a victim or a lover when the willful daughter of a successful factory owner rides her horse into the woods where Ryan lives in solitude. Carissa, the young lady, is looking for escape from the limitations of her social role, and she is fascinated by the woman in trousers who seems to have more freedom than Carissa has ever known.

The mutual seduction of mortal and vampire is described in passages which show blood-drinking smoothly combined with other sexual activities. The BDSM implications of vampire fiction are also explored in passages that recount Ryan’s sexual history in various historical eras. In stories-within-the-story, Ryan tells her current lover, Carissa, about her past lovers, most of whom were Carissa’s ancestors. In this way, Carissa learns about the community she chose to join when she asked Ryan to “make” her. Here the narrator describes a fourteenth-century seduction:

“Ryan kissed Glyn’s face and down her neck until she found the pulse point in the hollow of her throat. Her tongue licked delicately, but she did not bite this wanton’s neck. Not until the girl surrendered would she take her ... The girl continued to struggle, but she did not call out. As the chase had been, this was a game, and Ryan laughed when Glyn pressed her crotch against Ryan’s knee.”

When Ryan informs Glyn of her “true nature” as a vampire, she explains: “we can feed in different ways: we can take life, or not. We can give pain, or pleasure.” Glyn asks why Ryan gave her both. Ryan responds: “Because, my dear, you enjoyed it so much.”

Glyn asks: “Does that make me some sort of monster too?”

Ryan tells her: “It depends who you ask. If you spoke of this night to your confessor, I suspect that he would think you beyond redemption.” Ryan’s warning to her lover has a clear parallel in the modern world.

After Ryan’s dark hint about the danger of being discovered, the reader is not surprised to learn that she has been betrayed both by mortal and by vampire lovers. The unfinished business from her past serves to move the plot forward toward a grand finale in which Carissa is finally given the last piece of the puzzle of Ryan’s life. Only then can she give or withhold her informed consent to being Ryan’s eternal “bride.”

The differences between “the chase” or “the hunt” as an erotic game and the real, nonconsensual violation of human wills are raised in discussions between Ryan and her pupil Carissa about rape and prostitution, about social control by the Church, about the deadly political games in a Renaissance court, and about the Victorian social Darwinism (a belief in survival of the economically “fittest”) which results in urban slums and a high death rate among children. Like a budding leftist/feminist reformer, Carissa becomes indignant about the general status of women and the working class in her time, and she becomes attracted to a nightclub singer who has lived a hard life.

The issue of polyamory is raised when Ryan encourages Carissa to seduce the woman of her choice, just as Ryan intends to continue finding new “pets” (mortal lovers). As she explains, a promise of monogamy which is actually meant to last forever just cannot be kept, but multiple lovers can be juggled in honest and respectful ways.

Morality, however, is shown to be subtle and complex. The two lovers in the foreground of this novel continue to spar with each other and themselves about what harm done to other people could really be considered shameful if the taking of blood (not only for survival but for pleasure) can be morally justified.

Several threads are deftly interwoven in this novel, although the author’s tendency to show the historical past in terms of the present makes much of the description look oversimplified and lacking in period flavor. For those who are drawn to vampire fiction because of its promise of a guided tour through exotic times and places, the consistency of style and world-view in this novel might be disappointing.

The author’s knowledge of Edinburgh, Scotland, where most of the plot takes place, is shown to advantage, and the way in which Ryan is inserted into the tragic life of Mary, Queen of Scots, is both daring and plausible. In a genre which, in some cases, has become stale, A Taste for Blood has more depth and originality than its title suggests. This reviewer hopes that Diana Lee’s literary career has only begun.

Review by Jean Roberta.

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