Urban fantasy seems to be one of the more popular categories in contemporary fiction, judging by a visit to the local bookstore. The genre spans the spectrum from dark and broody, as with the Anita Blake series, to light and fluffy romance novels, such as the “Undead” series by MaryJanice Davidson.
Davidson’s “Undead and Unwelcome” is the eighth novel centering on ditzy, blond, shoe-addict, former secretary-turned-Queen of the Vampires Betsy Taylor and is the second in a new trilogy that finds Davidson trying, with mixed results, to turn the series in a darker direction.
This installment follows on the heels of “Undead and Unworthy” and sees Betsy, along with her vampire husband, Eric Sinclair, and best-friend-forever-until-death, Jessica (not a vampire) Wilson, taking the body of their friend and werewolf Antonia Wolfton back to Antonia’s pack on Cape Cod. The pack is none too happy that one of their own died in the service of the vampires and seems all too eager to blame Betsy for Antonia’s untimely demise.
Soon after arriving in Cape Cod, Betsy finds that she will have to appear before the Werewolf Council to explain how Antonia died. From the moment she steps off the plane, the pack treats her and Eric with a frozen cordiality underscored with simmering hostility. Until recently, the two paranormal species were unaware of each other’s existence, and they still mistrust each other. With the pack blaming Betsy for Antonia’s death, a war between the two species seems strongly possible, an event Betsy is desperate to avoid.
It can be hard for a new reader to jump into the eighth book in a series. Davidson starts “Unwelcome” with a short, two-page summary of the action so far. Just in case that isn’t enough, it seems that on every other page Betsy is summing up her thoughts on all that has happened to her in the three years since she, in her words, “woke up dead.” In fact, it seems that almost 10 percent of the book is spent recapping the other books in the series, and given that this is a short, fluffy, beach-read of a novel, it’s frustrating.
Davidson would be better off writing an expanded introduction and updating it at the start of each book, and then concentrating more of her novels on plot development, especially given that there are several ongoing major subplots in the series.
In this novel, one of those subplots — which involves Betsy’s half-sister Laura, who is the daughter of the devil and foretold to bring destruction to the world — finally gets expanded. It is told mostly through the use of journal entries from Betsy’s roommate, a doctor named Marc Spangler.
Given the dueling geographies of this novel, it is a somewhat unavoidable plot device but might prove distracting in future installments because the series, to this point, has been told solely from Betsy’s point of view. It does, however, give Davidson a chance to make fun of Twitter-speak when Betsy can’t decipher Marc’s increasingly desperate, acronym-peppered messages to her.
Betsy observes, “What the hell was it about e-mail that made everybody forget the stuff they learned in second grade, like capitalizing I and proper names, and using periods? Hello?”
Davidson has always propelled her novels with snappy dialogue, and this one is certainly no exception. Betsy’s narration also reads like dialogue, since it is told in an almost stream-of-consciousness style, as she vents, complains and curses about the things that are happening to her.
One redeeming factor to Betsy is that Davidson hints that underneath Betsy’s self-absorbed, fashionista ways, she is quite intelligent and may in fact only be pretending to be as ditzy as she appears.
Davidson brings the two converging plotlines to a bang-up conclusion that seems a little forced but leaves her plenty of room to expand upon in the series’ next installment. She cranks out one “Undead” novel a year; hopefully, she’ll take a little more time with the next one and make it more complete, instead of the admittedly entertaining but rushed “Undead and Unwelcome.”
Candace Horgan is a freelance writer in Denver.
FICTION
Undead and Unwelcome
by MaryJanice Davidson
$24.95
