Oh, god. And here I thought I had until 2007 on the timeline before I had to read any bad vampire romances.

 

"Masquerade" by Amanda Ashley, 1994

From After Twilight from Dorchester Publishing, 2001

Grade: D

 

Sigh. Oh, paranormal romance. You have become such a massive phenomenon in the last five or ten years that you almost parody yourself. Vampires that are also sex gods! Werewolves who can enlarge their penises, no supplements required! Tentacly things! Brooding, angsty love beneath the full moon, mystery wafting on the breeze! People eat this Laurell K. Hamilton/Stephanie Meyer/Anne Rice shit up with the largest, happiest of spoons (and I am not immune to occasional indulgence, so don't think I am).

 

But this is the problem with paranormal romance (or, at least, all the paranormal romance I've encountered lately): it tends to be terrible. Terrible, terrible, terrible. This is a huge generalization, and trust me, I have good ones kicking around my bookshelves, but almost every title I've seen in the last year has been utter shit. I cherished hopes for this story because it was written over a decade ago, and might not have succumbed to the "slap fangs and a penis on it and insert dramatic angst" trope.

 

Our short story opens with a deeply unimpressive and unimaginitive piece of poetry, which manages to be both distinctly un-lyrical and profoundly uninteresting in the space of only four short stanzas. In fact, let me just share it with you in all its spellbinding glory:

 

See me

the man I was

before the darkness

fell upon my soul

 

Know me

the monster

who hides his ugliness

in the shadows

of the night

 

Release me

from my lonely prison

let your light drive the bitterness

from my tortured heart

 

Love me

free me

from this endless

masquerade

 

Charming, I'm sure. I don't know which I enjoyed more: the random line breaks that were intended stylistically but actually added absolutely nothing to the flow or impact of the piece, or the presence of Evanescence-lyrics-esque phrases such as "let your light drive the bitterness from my tortured heart". But Ashley is not intending for this to be a piece focused on the poetry, so we can all, thankfully, move on.

 

Chapter 1:

 

Uh-oh. We have met the protagonist and he is a vampire. A vampire who is three hundred years old, yet massively enamored of Webber's stage musical version of the Phantom story and who mopes around the theatre watching it constantly and sympathizing with the titular character. I'm already gagging on my own bile and we've just started. His character is entertainingly (and by "entertainingly" I mean "excruciatingly") contradictory in his behavior; Ashley makes a huge point of letting us know early on that he uses blood banks to slake his thirst nowadays so that he no longer has to be omgsoEVIL and eat people and stuff, yet not four paragraphs later he has slinked off to ambush, eat and murder a panhandler, evincing absolutely no shred of remorse. The moral here, I suppose, is that homeless people are not actually humans, so no one is required to feel bad about their deaths and homeboy here is allowed to carry on as the hero in spite of having murdered someone a second ago. Ashley spends a lot of time doing this sort of thing in an attempt to make sure we know how seductively dangerous this dude is, mostly because he is a massive whiner and wussypants during the majority of the rest of the story. I am unconvinced, a state in which I spend most of the story (when not alternating between bored and exasperated, my other two home states).

 

Chapter 2:

 

This is set in Los Angeles, so there is some time devoted to repeated loving on Davis Gaines, who was the resident Phantom actor there for quite some time. Gaines is, of course, immensely talented (last I looked, he was doing Sweeney Todd in a series of concert dates for some people luckier than I), but he is also totally peripheral and part of a desperate campaign on Ashley's part to link her vampire and his angst issues to the Phantom story because omgitsaMETAPHOR, they're like the SAME, SEE?

 

This fell to the wayside for me when our vampire was finally named, and his name is... Jason Blackthorne. My uncontrollable guffawing (really? REALLY?) is not just based upon the fact that the name seems more than a little bit modern for a three-hundred-year-old vampire (yes, Jason is a classic name and Blackthorne could, conceivably, be an English landed surname, but REALLY?), but also upon the fact that I one knew a gentleman in a Vampire: the Masquerade game who named his vampire Jason Blackthorne. It's possible that he might have read this story, but he was a large, burly Irish man who liked his Guinness and wore a lot of leather, so I'm thinking it's unlikely. When your vampire's name is such a stereotypical vampire name that it parodies itself, perhaps it's time to rethink the naming convention. I can't be impressed by its sexy, mysterious vibe when I'm so busy laughing at it that I need a paper bag.

 

At any rate, Jason Blackthorne (hee!) meets Leanne, and falls instantly and madly in love with her, motivated in part (we must assume) by the fact that she's a dead ringer for his deceased wife of three hundred years ago. This could have raised all kinds of interesting concepts--how does Jason deal with, in effect, seeing a deceased loved one all the time? Does he have to struggle with separating his affection for his wife from his new affection for Leanne?--but it doesn't. Instead, he's just like, "Oh, hey, she looks like my dead wife, that makes my soul cry for her and enhances my boner." Well, good for you, bucko, but I think that it's probably not very rewarding being the object of your affections. Also, the "it must be fated love because you look like my dead wife" convention is an obnoxious one that I wish writers would stop using (Kay's novel is exempt because she did it for some truly Freudian mind-fuckery and I can respect that). It's like shorthand for The Author Is Too Lazy To Think Of a Reason Why These People Like One Another. Besides, am I alone in thinking that it's kind of creepy? Look, if your wife dies, I feel hella sorry for you, but I'm not going to be playing What's In My Pants with you just because I happen to look like her.

 

And speaking of pants, COULD SOMEONE GET LEANNE SOME, PLEASE? She keeps wearing shirts and tights, and nothing else. In public. I realize that Lindsay Lohan does this, but perhaps she is not the best model for your pure and virginal romance heroine. I informed John at this point in the story, and he threw up his hands and exclaimed, "Tights ARE NOT PANTS," the same way he does whenever we pass some girl who is unfortunately un-panted (often, he will roll the window down and dispense this wisdom at high volume as we speed by in the car, leaving the poor girl confused by the frightening reality of a John Drive-By Disapproval). This is probably more of a pet peeve of mine than an actual literary nitpick, but seriously. Wear some pants.

 

It's possible that I'm just focusing on Leanne's pants to avoid focusing on the rest of her. By page five, she has offered this gem of personal philosophy when Jason and his looming vampire angst, two individuals she has never met before, invite her out to dinner: "She knew she should say no, There were a lot of crazy people running around these days--obsessive fans, serial killers--and yet there was something in Jason Blackthorne's eyes that made her trust him implicitly." Implicitly? Really? Are you sure you don't mean instinctively or something?  Because you have some serious problems if you go around implicitly trusting people that you met five minutes ago. This would have been excusable if Jason had done some kind of vampire hypnosis or something on her, but no... he's just standing there, looking dead and soulful, or something. So off they go, la dee da, let's have dinner at a diner even though we met a few seconds ago and you've been stalking me at all the performances (Leanne is in the chorus of Webber's musical, in a further attempt to drag this wreck closer to the original source material).

 

Their dinner date, despite insistence that Jason is tortured by angst and Leanne is swept away by romantic bliss, could be used as a sedative in asylums, because it certainly put me to sleep the first couple of times I tried to get through it. The prose borrows shamelessly from Webber's libretto, but depressingly doesn't even make sense when it does--what, exactly, does it MEAN when you say that Jason's gaze was "soft as candelight"? Does Leanne have a problem with other peoples' gazes weighing physically on her (that must suck for a performer)? Were we expecting his gaze to be abrasive? The small-talk between the characters is miserable--stilted, uncomfortable, and mostly composed of a Q&A with the Vampire session that did nothing notable except inform us that Jason owns a horse, which is omgsoSPECIAL and Leanne is omgsoENCHANTED, because women LOVE HORSES. How delightful. I wasn't aware that they made a Vampire Ken Doll to go with Los Angeles Barbie, but there he is. Jason's speech patterns veer wildly from normal to anachronistic ("Have you a boyfriend? You have now."), which is not a huge thing when the dude is three hundred years old, but you'd think he'd be picking up modern vernacular as he goes. After all, it's not like he's speaking eighteenth-century English anymore, so it just seems like another half-assed ooh ooh he's so old attempt on Ashley's part. Yawn. By the end of the chapter, I think Leanne is dumber than a breadbox for not fleeing from this guy that takes her out to dinner and then talks morbidly about suicide all night, but I can't bring myself to care because I'm so bored.

 

Leanne will not improve at any point in the story, despite my fondest hopes, so don't waste your time waiting. She thinks with awed sincerity at the end of this chapter, "She had been born for this man." Well. How nice for him.

 

Chapter 3:

 

In this chapter, Jason "warms" the blood in his wineglass with his gaze. Wait, what? When did vampires get Superman's heatvision? I suppose that comes in very handy when you need to... well, actually, Ashley makes a point of telling us that temperature no longer affects Jason. Oh, well. Even more magical, he can apparently teleport! Wheeee! If Jason is THIS magical, why is he eating street bums instead of just teleporting his ass to the blood bank whenever he gets hungry? I think the eternal angst saps his mojo.

 

And it's all about the eternal angst here. Apparently, all Jason does with his eternal life is spend it sitting in pretentious armchairs, sipping blood and weeping tears of emo over the woe that is his ostracization from the rest of humankind, even though most of said ostracization appears to be self-inflicted. His internal monologue is incredibly boring, except where it's unintentionally hilarious. For example, Jason refuses to use electric lights in his house (he feels they're too "harsh") and instead relies on gobs and gobs of candles to light his eternal sorrow, which, I would think, has to be messy, expensive, and kind of a fire hazard (which you'd think would be of some concern to a vampire). Yes, he hates modern things, and he won't use electric lights, but he WILL drive a car. With glee. In fact, he "[enjoys] being in command of a poweful machine". That's not penis-tacular or anything. No no.

 

Also, Jason is mesmerized by Webber's musical. It says so right in the prose, so many times that I've lost the affection that I once had for that word. He is also endlessly fascinated by it. Now, I like Webber's musical, but pardon me for a moment: this man is THREE HUNDRED YEARS OLD. And of all the culture available to him over his lifetime, he decides to fixate on on a British singspiel based on French penny-dreadfuls from the 1800s? Ashley even tries very hard to make sure we know how cultured and discerning his taste is, going through a litany of the artifacts and pieces of art he's amassed in his house (and, as a side note, what the fuck is a dude who is three hundred years old doing with "one of Shakespeare's original plays, signed by the Bard himself"? I shit you not. Shakespeare: born sixteenth century. Jason: born eighteenth century--don't ask where, because Ashley apparently doesn't think it matters much. Augh, my head).

 

Luckily, we're not supposed to care about this too much, and instead focus on how much Leanne wants to climb all over Jason's vampiric wang. Sigh.

 

Chapter 4:

 

I forgot to mention it earlier, but Jason's deceased wife, who died a little under three hundred years ago, was named Jolene. Apparently he also has time-travel on his list of mad vampire talents, so he can fetch a bride from the twentieth century, since the name was not invented prior to the 1950s or so. Jolene, when we occasionally see her in the backstory, appears to be from the same school of Stupid and Devoted that Leanne is.

 

Jolene: "I see. So you went out, got drunk, cheated on me, and the woman turned out to be a vampire who turned you during sex and now you're the bloodsucking undead and will never age as I slowly die. Okay. I'll cook your steak rare, then, honey."

Jason: "My life is such undeserved ANGST. Someone hold me as I wallow in the unfairness of it all!"

 

One of the few things I did like about this story is that it touched on the religious idea of being cursed by God himself, which was present in Leroux's original novel. Jason, who has an astounding ability to mope about everything, takes some time to mope about the fact that he was a devout Catholic in his youth and therefore believes himself to be damned now that he's undead, and can't kill himself because he'll be consigned to the flames of hell if he does. It's a nice parallel to the original novel's ideas and Erik's antagonistic relationship with God, but, unfortunately, I suspect that Ashley probably thought that she was adding an original twist since this is a vampire protagonist. There's no evidence anywhere in the text to suggest that this story was based on Leroux's novel at all. This little picnic is all Webber-inspired.

 

Then blah blah blah blah, oh noes, Jason keeps wanting to drink Leanne's blood and is afraid he'll end up hurting her. Just like every vampire protagonist in a paranormal romance ever. 1994 is not long enough ago that Ashley can claim in any way to be even close to pioneering this idea, and she doesn't do anything even remotely new or interesting with it. Snooooooze.

 

But, oh, god, the unintentional comedy that is page twenty-one. You see, Jason, in addition to being a hunk of burning undead love with a horse and a house full of pretty stuff, is also a sensitive artiste and paints (in fact, Leanne has seen his paintings in museums, so he is apparently AWESOME)! And he has some of his paintings hanging in his house, just, you know, because. And the description of the painting (TOTALLY COULD BE OF HIMSELF, GUYS--IT'S SUBTLE) that Leanne is looking at on this particular occasion... well, it almost defies belief in its absolute embodiment of all the hackneyed things I hate in vampire romances.

 

"Leanne studied the largest of the paintings. It depicted a tall man with hair as black as midnight standing alone on a cliff overlooking a turbulent sea. A long black cape billowed out behind him, buffeted by the wind. Dark gray clouds hovered above storm-tossed waves. Just looking at the painting filled her with a feeling of loneliness, of emptiness."

 

Wow. It's like those exercises I used to do back in college, where they told you to write the most cliched example possible so you would know what to avoid in your actual writing. It oozes emo weepery so palpably that I am shocked that the pages of the story weren't actually soaked. And I bet Leanne does feel emptiness. I bet she feels it in her most secret of lady places, in fact. This scene is only made better by the fact that Jason apparently has Anne Rice's vampire books in his library. Gee, I wonder where Ashley's inspiration for the non-Erik-related bits of Jason comes from.

 

Oh, by the way, we also get to meet Jason's horse in this chapter. He is a stallion (of COURSE he is, because if he were gelded that might reflect poorly on Jason's penis, even though stallions make terrible riding horses) named Lucifer, because LOOK HOW DARK AND DANGEROUS AND BROODING JASON IS. HIS HORSE IS OF THE DEVIL. Naturally, said horse will eat anyone who comes near it except for Leanne, to whom it takes an instant liking and trots about the nighttime fields whinnying in bliss, or some horseshit (ha).

 

Oh noes! When they stop to neck in the woods, a random rottweiler attacks them and tries to eat Leanne! Where did this mystery Dog of Evil come from? Why is it determined to eat people? Stop asking these silly questions and let Jason manfully save Leanne with his Magical Vampire Powers, and then realize that doh, he used powers in front of her, oh noes, his secreeeeeet. Luckily, Leanne is so brain-dead that making out with her for a little while conveniently causes her to entirely forget that anything ever happened.

 

It is ironically entertaining that Jason makes such a big deal out of how morbid the traditional vampire sleeping in a coffin thing is and how he would never be so gauche. Again, it doesn't really look like Ashley ever encountered the original source material (Leroux's Erik, of course, does sleep in a coffin despite not being all pointy-toothed).

 

Chapter 5:

 

Oh, god, we're only at chapter five. That's only halfway through. I've found some Girl Scout cookies to help me power through this.

 

I'd like to know why Leanne is terrified of having sex with Jason. She doesn't know he's a vampire (somehow), and while I understand virgin jitters, I don't understand the constant making out until their brains explode from fiery passion and she must have him, she must! But then she says no and leaves. It doesn't make any sense.

 

This is the first time Jason dumps Leanne for her own good, but it won't be the last. He dumps her! Then they are making out! But he dumps her! So they ignore one another and mope! But then they're making out! But then he dumps her and goes to commit suicide! I couldn't take the constant pendulum swings in this relationship. If Jason REALLY wanted to save Leanne from being stuck with his ebil, ebil self, he'd go away and STOP COMING BACK, and if Leanne REALLY thought their love could overcome the odds, she'd stop saying OH NO HE DOESN'T REALLY LOVE ME and fleeing (possibly boating down the river of Jason's emo tears). In case there were any readers remaining who didn't think that Jason was an enormous pussy, he spends the first period after dumping Leanne sitting sadly in his house, listening to the soundtrack of the Webber musical over and over again in the dark, all night, every night. Shall I fetch you a dull razor, sir, and an attractively weathered journal with lines for the woeful beat poetry of your tortured soul?

 

When he finally gets tired of weeping the music of his dark, lustful manliness into his fireplace alone, Jason goes back to stalking Leanne by going to the theatre to watch the Webber musical over and over again. Much attention is devoted to how much her beautiful voice (which he can pick out of the chorus with his magical vampire hearing despite the implausibility of this) drives him to madness and tears, etc., and to how the torture in her soul is clearly audible to him. The only interesting point here is that Jason says in his internal monologue that "just once he would like to see Christine turn her back on the handsome Vicomte de Chagny and and give the Phantom of the Opera the love he yearned for, the love only she could give." I've seen this idea crop up time and time again: the Phantom should get Christine's love because, dammit, he's earned it with his misery and devotion and she owes it to him because otherwise it's just not fair. The idea is always annoying to me, even when it's done better than it is here, but seriously, Jason, you just sound more like a whiny-ass putz to me the longer this story drags on. It's a remarkably solipsistic view of the characters' relationships--the Phantom should get his happiness, but apparently you don't give a shit if Christine gets to make the choice that will make her happiest, or if Raoul ends up having to be the one who cries emo tears in the corner (the implication in Jason's statement is that only Christine's love can save the Phantom, but Raoul could date any bitch? I don't get it). I could go into the same tired spiel about how we identify with the Phantom's hardships and want him to have a tangible reward, but instead I'm going to have more cookies and move on.

 

This chapter is home to the only major grammar snag, which means that the rest of the story was remarkably well-composed, something that I've only seen in one (the Ashe) out of the last six romance versions of the story. I am very grateful for Ashley's copy-editors, because if there had been painful formatting and errors in this story as well as its mad amount of inanity and rampant stupidity, I might have given up on the Girl Scout cookies and moved on to liquor.

 

Chapter 6:

 

Oh, by the way, Leanne is a virgin. I know, right--it's a shocker. Romance heroines are NEVER virgins, because it's just not sexy to hear about a painful, mildly traumatic, at the very least uncomfortable and definitely less than spectacular sexual encounter that--

 

Oh, right. Carry on with your earth-shattering multiple virgin orgasms, then.

 

This chapter is just one long endless "I must let her go! But I don't want to! But I must!" And it's repetitive, and boring, and painful, and god, just DO IT ALREADY.

 

Chapter 7:

 

And did I mention there was a lot of shagginating, all of which is fantabulous despite Leanne's virgin status and the fact that she's sleeping with a dead guy? The concerns of yesterday are apparently irrelevant for Jason now, because he's getting laaaaaid, so never mind all that "leaving her innocence intact lest I sully it with my evil vampire ways" crap. Even sadder, the actual sex scene is ho-hum and bland, failing to keep my attention despite the supposedly steamy hot vampireness of it all.

 

Chapter 8:

 

Despite all my whining and bitching, I do think that Jason's constant fight with his bloodlust (he has a powerful urge to eat Leanne whenever she's being all defenseless in his general area) is believable; the back-and-forth is written well, and I think a good balance of sympathy and fear is achieved for the character. It's a damn shame he didn't spend more time battling his vampiric nature instead of getting in touch with his weepy, tantrum-prone inner child. The revelation, in this chapter, that Jason is a vampire was way too easily approached and accepted for the characters, and I just wanted to beat my head against a wall (or possibly beat Leanne's head against a wall for being a stupid little twit).

 

My mirth was nearly uncontainable when Leanne mentioned Herter in passing, in the same breath with Rice as a vampire author. Lori Herter, of course, is the author of the stunningly rapine tour-de-force "The Phantom of Chicago", without which no aficionado of the Phantom story's education is complete. Herter also writes a series of vampire romance novels, though I can't assess their quality since I haven't read them (but, after the sample of her writing I have read, I don't think I'll be giving them a shot).

 

Chapter 9:

 

Intriguingly (and this is one of the reasons that the story didn't ultimately make my fail list), I am actually pretty invested in Jason's and Leanne's relationship by this point. God knows why I want it to work, but I do. I want these crazy kids to make it. Probably mostly because I dread the thought of how much MORE painfully emo they could get, but seriously, I wanted them to hurry up and stop wasting my time with dithering and finish their goddamn love story. I don't know how this happened, but I suspect it's the reason that Ashley (also known as Madeline Baker) has such a devoted following in the romance field.

 

Chapter 10:

 

All that goodwill dissipated abruptly in this chapter, however, when by tasting one of her tears Jason is CURED BY THE POWAH OF HER LOVE, Y'ALL. I'm not even kidding. He licks a tear off her cheek and wham, bam, thank you ma'am, he's not a vampire anymore! And they can live together in the sunshiiiiiine, glorious sunshiiiiine, and everyone lives happily ever after! Jason, as the Phantom figure (which Ashley beat into our heads with a huge wooden bat), has just miraculously lost his deformity! And since that was his only problem, we can all have a party! Yay! Rainbows and puppies! Oh, god, the saccharine ridiculousness and total undercutting of all the characters made me cry on the inside, and rant at John on the outside.

 

Chapter 11:

 

Why is there even a chapter 11? We're done! Dammit! Well, because Jason has to come back from the dead with a suitable amount of drama. I'm a little concerned for Jason now. What will he find to weep the pure syrup of melancholy over now? I'm sure he'll think of something. He is nothing if not resourceful when it comes to sustaining angst. All I could think throughout this entire period of falling action is that Jason is about to sustain an almighty wicked sunburn after not going outside for three hundred years. It's okay; I'm sure Leanne can probably heal that with the power of her pure innocent sparkly diamond-like tears, too.

 

And then everyone accepts this miracle at face value and they live happily ever after (no one is even remotely concerned that he might turn back at some point and barbecue himself, or anything else that might cast a pall over the sunshine-filled meadows in store)! And everything's fine and dandy with God, now, too, because Jason is no longer damned, and apparently murder no longer counts as a mortal sin so he's off the hook!

 

This version has no Raoul figure at all, which is pretty rare; most versions do include him, even if they make him a villain as in the Allen novel or a totally peripheral character as in the Stuart book. The options, when I consider the reasons for Raoul's omission, are none of them particularly attractive; it seems like Ashley chose one of the following:

 

A) There is no Raoul because that would be unfair competition for poor, angsty, depressed yet sexy Jason.

B) There is no Raoul because Leanne isn't the kind of girl who shares her affection with more than one man... unlike that skanky ho, Christine.

C) There is no Raoul because I combined Raoul and the Phantom, see, so that they're like this awesome package of safety and danger, because that doesn't undercut Christine's original choice at all.

 

In the end, there are practically no surviving themes from Leroux's work in here, and there's not even any particularly good homage to Webber's musical being paid. The story is just being used in order to effect a tired retread of a zillion horrible vampire romance stereotypes, and I want the hour of my life that I spent reading this tripe back.

 

At least there were no spelling errors.