Review: The Vampire Shrink

Title: The Vampire Shrink
Author: Lynda Hilburn
Publisher: Medallion Press
Original Date of Copyright: 2007
Genre/Sub-genre: Paranormal/Horror Romance
Part of a Series? I think so...there is a second book coming out which also features Kismet Knight as the heroine

This novel was okay, and I really like the premise of a psychologist who encounters vampires, but overall I thought the horror possibilities of this book were not sufficiently developed, and that both the psychology and the vampirism in this book were used as mere plot devices instead of becoming the meaningful explorations they could have been.

The heroine is way too narrow-minded to effectively practice psychology (two examples: she bashes psychics and thinks it's impossible to be sexually attracted to more than one man at a time), and she uses cliched psychological terms like "inner child" more than once in the novel. The hero is well-adjusted and nice instead of brooding and dangerous like I was hoping. The romance was developed too quickly so there was little of that satisfying tension I so love. Beyond all this, however, there was a light-hearted tone to the book that I found disappointing and at times almost offensive.

Certainly The Vampire Shrink discusses dark topics, but the first-person narrative of the heroine is plucky and discordantly chipper considering the things she goes through -- being attacked, harassed in gruesome ways, torn between two men, etc. I just didn't get the dark torture vibe I hoped for, and sometimes the lightness gets almost offensive. For example:

"Playtime's over. Let's go back upstairs."
The woman on the floor had stopped screaming and was clearly dead.
The crowd actually applauded.
Vampires suck. In more ways that one. (365-66)

A woman just died. I know it's fantasy, but is that really an appropriate or plausible response? I know people laugh at funerals and things like that, but this degree of flippancy just seemed stupid to me.

Think of the psychological complexity and darkness of the Thomas Harris novels (e.g. Silence of the Lambs) combined with the best of the paranormal romances (those by J.R. Ward perhaps) or even Anne Rice's novels -- that's what this book could have been, with an idea this exciting. I don't understand why someone would want to write a totally conventional romance novel that just happens to have vampires in it and completely ignore all the amazing emotional/psychological dimensions that the vampire myth can add to a romance. One thing that Anne Rice does brilliantly is bring religious and psychological issues such as guilt, damnation, loneliness, etc. to vampirism, and these really make the myth rich and meaningful. I feel vampires are misused in this book, especially since it uses the field/practice of psychology to distinguish itself. Vampires have so much more to offer than is available in The Vampire Shrink.