I decided to wait until at least one character had entered Hell before I reviewed. It seemed fair to the author.

As I write this "Hell on $5 a Day" has entered its eleventh chapter.

The premise is that Alain, a vampire, needs to go to Hell, not just for the reason mentioned in the listing information (reuniting with his wife), but also because of issues relating to how he’d been turned.

I’m not much of a fan of vampire fiction. I particularly avoid the sort in which the primary issue for the main character is his/her guilt about how he/she remains alive vs. the need for blood. In short, I tend to avoid brooding, angsty vampires.

Fortunately for me, this isn’t that sort of vampire at all. I enjoy fantasy and science fiction in which things have a history, worlds in which you know that the main character had a past and the world itself had a past.

Alain, the main character has a past. Specifically, the U.S. Army turned him into a vampire as part of the war effort and he’s not the only one they turned.

For me at least, the origin alone makes it worth reading the rest.

Though the majority of the initial scenes are set in the 1940’s, the most recent chapters take place in the modern day. That being said, the way things are going at present it seems likely that we’ll spend much of the rest of rest of the story in Heaven and Hell.

From what I’ve seen so far, it looks like it’ll be fun.

According to the author’s blog, he started "Hell on $5 a Day" several years ago, but he never brought it to the point where he could send it to publishers. I don’t know the degree to which he’s spent time revising it, but the writing feels tight and doesn’t have spelling or grammar errors bad enough for me to notice them.

My only complaint isn’t with the story.

The author placed the story on his blog along with all the other stuff he blogs about. While that doesn’t prevent me from getting at the story, I do have to pay attention to the RSS feed to know whether the story updated or not. New updates are just as likely to be about food or email scams.

Mind you, this won’t affect a person when they start reading the story. Each installment includes a link to the next. It’s just that when they start waiting for the next installment they’ll sometimes discover that the most recent post is about bacon or something.

This isn’t a terrible thing, but it’s worth a mention.

In any case, outside of that, I’ve no complaints.

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I have Jim Zoetewey’s review to thank for introducing me to this story.  I probably would not have discovered it otherwise.  From the title I had the idea that it was about the credit crunch or something.

I shot over to the site hot on the heels of Jim’s review and [more . . .]

Reading from the beginning, you follow the story of one of the main characters, Alain, during World War II. We spend quite some time learning about Alain during this time, establishing his relationship with his fellow vampires and later, his soon-to-be wife, Marie. In large part, these chapters are flavor text; they’re meant to give us a connection to Alain’s [more . . .]

I found this story to be a very good story with elements of the supernatural, good vs. evil, lost love, redemtion and unlikely hero saves the world with a few laughs thrown in as well. It is very well written with lots of reference links that are not intrusive yet there if you wish to use them. It is written [more . . .]