Title: Bound By Blood
Author: Leigh Savage, Kain Savage
Source: author giveaway on goodreads
Rating: ★☆☆☆☆
Review Summary: A collection of short stories with an unacceptable number of typos, underdeveloped and unoriginal plots, and reliance on shock factor to make things creepy which really didn’t do it for me.
This book is a collection of short stories by Leigh Savage and her late father, all about vampires and other creatures which need blood to live. I won a signed copy on goodreads and had high hopes for the book, until it showed up and I discovered that the excerpts chosen for the bookmarks had typos. Unfortunately, this was indicative of the quality of the editing throughout the book which was filled with typos as large as having sentences repeated and words missing or inserted.
Each story is quite short, approximately 20 not-very-dense pages, and I think this was the cause of a couple of problems I had with the stories. First, all the vampire stories were very cliche and lacked any novel development of the vampire mythos. The vampires drink blood, change into bats, and fear crucifixes but have no powers beyond the stereotypical. Their powers are also not explained in anyway. This might be acceptable in a longer story with a more well-developed plot to focus on instead, but these plots were incredibly predictable. There was also never any feeling of awe at the vampires powers, no terror for the characters facing the vampires. The only emotional impact in these stories was delivered by crude language and graphic violence. This may be a personal thing, but I actually found the graphic sex and violence too sordid – it really decreased my enjoyment of the stories.
At the end of the day, I would love to be able to recommend these stories but I just can’t. Even for the most ardent lover of vampire stories, there isn’t much new here and the more original stories are still ruined by graphic language and excessive typos. I read it to review it, but was relieved to be done.
