Title: The Vampire’s Partner
Author: Benjamin Cole
Length: 9,000 words
Publisher: MLR Press
Genre: m/m paranormal romance
Grade: C+
Blurb:
Suddenly turned into a vampire, Tom struggles to understand the changes to his life and must control his new desire of bloodlust to avoid harming his partner, Jeremy.
Tom and Jeremy are young and in love. Their future is bright. Until Tom is changed into a vampire. Then all he has come to value in life along with his relationship with his partner is thrown into doubt. As he begins to lose the ties to his former human self, he explores new urges, trying to come to terms with life as a vampire. For Jeremy’s sake, Tom struggles to retain his human capacity for love in the face of a desire to hurt the person he loves most.
Review:
When his partner, Jeremy, goes away on a business trip, Tom visits a bar on his own, meeting a strange man. Three days later he wakes up in a motel room to find that he is now a vampire. At first Tom tries to hide this from Jeremy until he is forced to face up to what he is.
This paranormal begins well with a fairly clueless Tom accidentally becoming a vampire. The tone of the story is fairly light and I rather enjoyed seeing Tom bumble his way through working out what had happened to him and trying to work out how he was going to function now that he was a vampire. Tom spends most of the book this way, trying to see how the vampire thing works and making mistakes in this trial and error approach.
Another part which worked well was the romance between Tom and Jeremy. They are an established couple and the love between them shines off the page. The sex scene is well done, showing affection and teasing between them, and I liked that Tom spends quite a bit of time worrying about how Jeremy will react to his new situation and feeling morose that it might spell the end of their relationship.
The part which worked less well was in the way the story ended. There’s a crisis point where we are bombarded with information and then the story just ends. It was rather abrupt and I would have liked to see the two men work through the problems that they face rather than the story end with platitudes that everything will be fine, especially as it’s obvious that it won’t all be plain sailing. Perhaps there is a sequel planned.
Overall, then this story passed the time nicely but there wasn’t much to it. Tom is a decent character and I liked his strong feelings for Jeremy. However, the story wasn’t perfect and these flaws made it a C grade story rather than anything higher.