I decided to read this story despite the fact that vampire is spelled with a ‘y’ in the title.  That spelling makes me twitch and after reading the story, I’m wondering why it’s just not spelled normally since that spelling doesn’t appear once in any of the chapters I read.

I was definitely excited at the beginning because the voice was fresh and interesting and it’s nice to read a vampire story where it’s not some vapid girl being chased by a hot, pale vamp.  No sex between the MC and the vampire and that’s certainly a deviation from the standard vampire tale.  However the story became redundant very quickly.

By the second chapter I just wanted the vampire to shut up.  All she seemed to talk about what her existence as a vampire and the ins and outs of the undead life.  To me it read more like a way to info dump the information from the world into the story instead of just working it into the plot naturally.  Each chapter is set up in the same fashion: the MC gets up, goes to give blood, vampire doesn’t kill her, she goes home and goes back the next week to repeat the process.  I’m just amazed that she had the energy in the first chapter to fight off those vampires after giving blood.  My understanding is that you need to lie prone for an hour afterwards or risk passing out.

At the initial set-up of the story, I thought the entire thing was going to be set up so that this MC was running from the vampire as she tried to figure out how to kill her but the flaw in woman’s design is found out, I believe, in the third chapter and it’s just a repeat process of blood-donor visits after that.  I have no idea where it’s going since that’s already out of the way.

As for the MC, after 5 chapters I still don’t know her name and didn’t know she was a she until chapter 3.  I know introducing the MC in first person can be difficult but considering she was at a blood bank and knew the technician’s name, you’d think the tech would have asked her her name in return.  Unless I missed something.

I didn’t feel any sense of urgency in the writing, nothing that would make me care about this girl’s well-being.  Each chapter was formulaic with nothing new added aside from more life chatter from the vampire.  That became very old very quickly.  By the end of chapter five, I was ready to push the MC aside (that just couldn’t bring herself to kill the vamp numerous times, another redundancy) and behead the chick myself.

With that being said, the writing is certainly good.  Sonja definitely doesn’t lack in that department.  I think the voice of the MC started off very strong and then just tapered off to blend in with the rest of the scenery in the story.  It just wasn’t as bold as the story carried on, not to mention she kept repeating herself as well, especially in the first two chapters.

For the site itself, if you look quick, you’ll miss the next chapter links at the bottom of the posts.  At least I did.  The blue of the link kind of blends with the background.  Of top of that I don’t know how long the story actually is since the only way to get from one chapter to the next is via the links at the end of each post.  It’s something that could get cumbersome in terms of returning to a chapter in the middle of the story and having to click through each one first.

I think this story has potential and I’m loving the whole concept of being chased by an indecisive vampire that can’t even decide what she wants her name to be let alone whether or not she wants to kill the MC.  It’s certainly a fresh take but I’m looking for something to break the formula that was established very early on and to have this vampire be something more than a walking encyclopedia of her world’s vampire lore.  I don’t see it as developing the characters any nor does it advance the plot beyond it’s already established cycle.  I’d like to see what Sonja can do with this because I know she has it in her to make it something great.

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The vampire genre features many different kinds of vampires. Some will bite you to death, and some will claw you to death, but the vampire in this story only wants to talk us to death. "Blah-blah-blah . . . not going to kill you this time, but come back next week and maybe I’ll kill you then."

There are also many different kinds of human protagonists in these stories—the kind who befriends a vampire and keeps their secret, or the kind who unwittingly encounter a vampire and have to fight or flee for their lives, or the kind who prowls the cemeteries looking for undead monsters to slay. The hero in this story knows that vampires exist, has encounters with one every week, brings weapons of the slay-trade with her each time, but usually just ends up making small talk about flowers. Or the nature of names. Or what it means to frolic.

This is the seemingly endless cycle of "The Vampyre Diaries." There was potential early for this story to be something new and different, with a narrator charged with solving a supernatural puzzle in order to keep her vampiric tormentor at bay, but the solution was mundane, anticlimactic, and most importantly, didn’t lead to a resolution of the standoff between vampire and potential vampire-snack.

Character inconsistencies began to pile up as the chapters go on. Our protagonist is so perpetually broke that she’s forced to sell plasma to afford a new t-shirt on Day 1 and she has to steal a crucifix rather than buy one on Day 2—and yet, on Day 3 she’s buying a decorative sword inset with gemstones. Have you priced decorative swords inset with gemstones? They’re not cheap! In one chapter she borrows a friend’s collection of Buffy and Angel DVDs to bone up on vampires because she’s apparently never watched the show before, and by Day 6 she’s quoting obscure lines from Firefly like any old big-time Joss Whedon fangirl. The vampire is also inconsistent in that she doesn’t use the same name from one chapter to the next, but at least her inconsistency is consistently inconsistent and makes her seem the more fleshed out of the pair (no pun intended).

The writing itself is good so there’s still a chance for this story to break out of its rut and present us with more action, more mystery, and hopefully a lot less chatter.

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