"hilarious satire of modern politics - getting out the vampire vote!"

If Tom Leher, the satirical composer and lyricist of such ditties as "The Vatican Rag", "Smut" and "The Masochism Tango" had written romance, he'd have penned something like this.

Tiffany Golden is just one of an army of volunteers in the presidential campaign of Senator Felix O'Neill. A little plump, well-educated, and under-employed, she also suffers from a massive and hopeless crush on the handsome and charismatic and very sexy Senator. She's just another faceless drone, until the night she take a stroll past a cemetery and is accosted by a young man in a black suit. A quick-thinking and undaunted campaign worker, she immediately tries to win his vote for the Senator, but he bites her anyway. She is now a vampire, having been changed by a kid who does the worst Transylvanian accent she's ever heard, the result of seeing Bela Lugosi's Dracula one too many times.

But the tireless Tiffany sees a real opportunity here. It's a very close race where every vote counts, so she and her fellow Democrats decide to go after the one class of voters no one has bothered to try to win over — the undead.

I read this at the perfect time — after three long weeks of being pounded by a relentless sea of political ads all claiming their candidate has REAL family values (which, I guess means the other guy has unreal family values; I kept wondering if that meant he was one of the Munsters). Reading this hilarious send-up restored my sanity. My only complaint is that it's JUST a short story. It needs to be a novel. I wanted to see some of the scenes she mentions in passing, in all their gory details, especially the one where Tiffany takes on Bill O'Reilly, especially after catching a blushing Bill dealing with two porn stars who had written a sex manual (no, I didn't make that up, but it was the most polite I've ever seen him, and he really didn't know what to do because they were very good looking and he was desperately trying not to peer down their low-cut blouses at their bounteous breasts). I figure Bill paired with a cute vampire HAD to surpass even Bill and a star of X rated films. Please, Jackie, make this a NOVEL. PLEASE It's three more months till November, and unless I get to read this fleshed out, I may be carted off to the booby hatch.

If, like me, you are suffering from Campaign Overload 2004, buy this book. It's the perfect atidote. It will put it all in perspective. After all, we could have VAMPIRES voting. It's funny as all get-out and punctures the pretensions of both sides equally well. And Senator Felix O'Neill, while a conniving, adulterous twit, is also the sexiest pol since JFK.

Sensuality Rating: Read this one for the hilarious dead-on satire of politics; there isn't much sex at all, but there is an adulterous sex scene at the end.

Reviewed by Gillian Fitzgerald
Courtesy Sensual Romance Reviews
Posted September 8, 2004

Summary

Having endured the bite of the vampire (along with his really bad Bela Lugosi impersonation), Tiffany Golden is not about to take death lying down. Instead, she starts turning out (and digging up) the vampire vote, in order to put a sexy senator into the White House and herself into his bed.