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A Taste for Blood
- by Diana Lee
$13.97
ISBN 156023461X
available through
Amazon
Reviewed by Jean Roberta
(04/14/04)
Diana Lee's first novel takes up where Anne Rice's vampire
epics leave off: by focusing on strong, immortal women.
Ryan, a charismatic lesbian who was made a vampire in
Scotland during a time of clan warfare, passes for male and
is capable of seducing women sexually as well as drinking
their blood in limited amounts and leaving them with
pleasant memories. By the late Victorian age, she is 700
years old and has lost the ability to love. Painful losses
over time will do that to a person, even the walking dead.
Ryan is not looking for a victim or a lover when the
willful daughter of a successful factory owner rides her
horse into the woods where Ryan lives in solitude.
Carissa, the young lady, is looking for escape from the
limitations of her social role, and she is fascinated by
the woman in trousers who seems to have more freedom than
Carissa has ever known.
The mutual seduction of mortal and vampire is described in
passages which show blood-drinking smoothly combined with
other sexual activities. The BDSM implications of vampire
fiction are also explored in passages that recount Ryan's
sexual history in various historical eras. In
stories-within-the-story, Ryan tells her current lover,
Carissa, about her past lovers, most of whom were Carissa's
ancestors. In this way, Carissa learns about the community
she chose to join when she asked Ryan to "make" her. Here
the narrator describes a fourteenth-century seduction:
"Ryan kissed Glyn's face and down her neck until she found
the pulse point in the hollow of her throat. Her tongue
licked delicately, but she did not bite this wanton's neck.
Not until the girl surrendered would she take her...The
girl continued to struggle, but she did not call out. As
the chase had been, this was a game, and Ryan laughed when
Glyn pressed her crotch against Ryan's knee."
When Ryan informs Glyn of her "true nature" as a vampire,
she explains: "We can feed in different ways: we can take
life, or not. We can give pain, or pleasure." Glyn asks
why Ryan gave her both. Ryan responds: "Because, my dear,
you enjoyed it so much." Glyn asks: "Does that make me some sort of monster too?"
Ryan tells her: "It depends who you ask. If you spoke of
this night to your confessor, I suspect that he would think
you beyond redemption." Ryan's warning to her lover has a
clear parallel in the modern world.
After Ryan's dark hint about the danger of being
discovered, the reader is not surprised to learn that she
has been betrayed both by mortal and by vampire lovers.
The unfinished business from her past serves to move the
plot forward toward a grand finale in which Carissa is
finally given the last piece of the puzzle of Ryan's life.
Only then can she give or withhold her informed consent to
being Ryan's eternal "bride."
The differences between "the chase" or "the hunt" as an
erotic game and the real, nonconsensual violation of human
wills are raised in discussions between Ryan and her pupil
Carissa about rape and prostitution, about social control
by the Church, about the deadly political games in a
Renaissance court, and about the Victorian social Darwinism
(a belief in survival of the economically "fittest") which
results in urban slums and a high death rate among
children. Like a budding leftist/feminist reformer,
Carissa becomes indignant about the general status of women
and the working class in her time, and she becomes
attracted to a nightclub singer who has lived a hard life.
The issue of polyamory is raised when Ryan encourages
Carissa to seduce the woman of her choice, just as Ryan
intends to continue finding new "pets" (mortal lovers). As
she explains, a promise of monogamy which is actually meant
to last forever just cannot be kept, but multiple lovers
can be juggled in honest and respectful ways.
Morality, however, is shown to be subtle and complex. The
two lovers in the foreground of this novel continue to spar
with each other and themselves about what types of harm
done to other people can really be considered shameful if
the taking of blood (not only for survival but for
pleasure) can be morally justified.
Several threads are deftly interwoven in this novel,
although the author's tendency to show the historical past
in terms of the present makes much of the description look
oversimplified and lacking in period flavor. For those who
are drawn to vampire fiction because of its promise of a
guided tour through exotic times and places, the
consistency of style and world-view in this novel might be
disappointing.
The author's knowledge of Edinburgh, Scotland, where most
of the plot takes place, is shown to advantage, and the way
in which Ryan is inserted into the tragic life of Mary,
Queen of Scots, is both daring and plausible. In a genre
which, in some cases, has become stale, A Taste for Blood
has more depth and originality than its title suggests.
This reviewer hopes that Diana Lee's literary career has
only begun.
©2004 by Jean Roberta
Reader
Comments
Jean Roberta is the pen name of an English instructor at a Canadian prairie university. Her erotic stories have appeared in three volumes of Best Lesbian Erotica (2000, 2001, 2004) and two of Best Women's Erotica (2000, 2003) from Cleis Press, two Wicked Words collections (3 and 8) from Black Lace in England, in Shameless: Women's Intimate Erotica (Seal Press), now in its second printing, in Blasphemy: Erotic Religious Horror (Massacre Publications, Scotland, 2004), and many other anthologies, print journals and Web sites. Her BDSM novel, Prairie Gothic, is in the catalogue of e-publisher Amatory Ink.
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