"Contemporary vampire short story"

THE HOLIDAY STALKING starts off with a blisteringly erotic bang: in Rome, AD 63, Immaculate vampire Vincent is indulging in a ménage with several female slaves when he receives a summons to join the emperor, Nero. Unfortunately, this scene is just about the only exciting part of this Quickie.

Let me explain. This story, though only 34 pages, alternates between flashbacks of Rome and shots of present day NYC. It involves not only Vincent, but also his centuries-old feud with Immaculate vampire Seraphimus, a feud started because of a love triangle with Vincent's wife, Nenet, who died because of their rivalry. That's just the flashback portion of the story. In present day NYC, we are introduced to a couple of handfuls of secondary characters as Vincent puts together a charity Christmas drive. At the same time, there is a menace loose who is stalking women. Could this menace be Seraphim? And how is Vincent to stop him?

Unfortunately, with all that is happening, what should be the main portion of the tale, the romance, actually becomes an afterthought. There is a conspicuous absence of reference to the heroine -- because she is not introduced until the last couple of pages! When we finally do meet Trixie, we really don't learn much anything about her other than she is also an agent -- oh, did I forget to mention that Vincent is part of the Network, an agency that fights crime among vampires? Whew, I'm getting tired just summarizing all that went on during this Quickie. Hill obviously had quite a few interesting paths she seemed to want to take with this book, yet because of the paucity of pages, she couldn't do any of her subplots much justice. I feel the majority of the problems I had with this tale stemmed from restrictions posed by the story length. My only other main problem was Vincent's constant "yo'ing"; he just could not seem to greet anyone with anything other than "yo", making him sound like an adolescent to me.

I thought the opening chapter was extremely erotic, very evocative, and the stuff of fantasies, but unfortunately, that was about the only part of the book I felt merited praise. However, I do feel that this Quickie had a lot of promise in it. It is a prequel of sorts to Hill's novel, DEEP RED. As DEEP RED is over 80,000 words, Hill should have plenty of room to develop what looked to be an interesting story. I most likely will pick up DEEP RED in hopes of a better read.

Sensuality: hard R/borderline NC-17 for group sex with slaves, oral sex.

Reviewed by Barb Chan for Sensual Romance.

Reviewed by Sensual Romance
Courtesy Sensual Romance
Posted June 18, 2003

Ellora's Cave

Summary

It's Christmastime and vampire Vincent Dilorenzo can't take much more of the good will and cheer. When he's drafted into helping with a church charity drive, he thinks his problems can't get any worse. Then an old rival appears to resurrect painful memories of a past love. Little does Vincent know that an even truer love awaits him during his most dreaded holiday season.

Sexual Content: Hard R/borderline NC-17. Genre: vampire. Length: Short Story.