Simon may be a “good” vampire (he doesn’t kill his human prey, and makes the experience pleasant for them–more on that anon), but there is still a darkness to him. Nicely enough, while Klause’s vampires can subsist on animal blood (as Simon does), they are all too admitting of the fact that they take pleasure from drinking human blood. Klause actually utilizes vampire mythology, which I get a huge kick out of: her vampires are sensitive to light (yeah, we thought this was standard until they started sparkling), they are burned/blinded by crucifixes, can transfigure into mist and bats (and do this often), have to wait to be invited into someone’s home, and so on. However, I have to admit, once the character/plot establishing is out of the way, the book vastly improves and I really started enjoying it. (Oh, and at one point he “mark his territory like a wolf, and urinate on the back steps” of Zoe’s house, later leaving a trinket for her which she picks up not so long after that we’ve forgotten the whole peeing there thing.) So no points at the beginning.
Zoe over-articulates her struggles with her mother’s terminal illness in effort to get the backstory out, and Simon describes her from afar as “Pale as the milk of death, thin and sharp like pain,” which, well, is almost cutely dramatic, but mostly just sounds like the way vampires talk in really horrible movies.
The story starts awkwardly, with neither Zoe (the teen love interest), nor Simon (the terribly named vampire stalker cum pining boyfriend) seems entirely fleshed out in the first chapters, which jump back and forth between their respective narrations.
When I started Annette Curtis Klause’s The Silver Kiss, I was definitely skeptical.
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