Initial Thoughts: The teacher-vampire lurking behind the door on the front cover has set my hopes very high. Please be an actual vampire.

As usual, there are spoilers ahead.

Recap: We open with our heroine, Stacey Linden, putting on makeup in an unconvincing fashion. She uses the “blunt end” of her lipstick–as opposed to the pointy end? But wouldn’t the pointy end be the part that sticks up out of the tube? Anyway, what’s important (I’m guessing) is that, unlike her friends, she avoids the sun because she’s doesn’t want to “ruin her almost perfect complexion.”

Stacey is skipping school and doesn’t care much for academics, which I guess is why she’s never heard about sunscreen and hats? I don’t know; she isn’t a likeable character.

She eventually wanders into school, missing the “scholastic evaluation exam” the juniors are supposed to do, and pays Millie Johnson for a stack of math homework and a term paper. Millie, described by Stacie as a dweeb, dorky, and a geek, is obviously and dramatically poor: her dress is “ratty,” her sneakers are dirty, and she needs the money because her little brother has to have an operation. Central Academy is not a subtle place.

Stacey sits with Derek Barton, apparently mostly to torture him. He wants her to commit to him and stop dating other guys, saying he’ll stop seeing anyone else if she does, but Stacey twists this around to make it seem like she can’t trust him– but her interior monologue is a cold assessment that he might not make it in the music business, so she has no intention of being tied to him. He realizes he’s being jerked around and storms off, which she feels badly about only because other people in the cafeteria saw it.

She gets called in to the vice principal’s office and forced to take the scholastic evaluation test, a thing she has avoided doing at any point during high school. She scores 205 points out of a possible 750, so her parents are called in.

They find out she’s been lying to them (claiming she didn’t have to be in school on the day of the test, for example), paying someone else to do her work, and reads on a sixth grade level, and she’s embarrassed and angry about being caught.

“But I don’t want to go to college,” Stacey replied tearfully. “I want to be a model.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Mrs. Linden replied. “We give you all the advantages so you can act like some dumb mannequin. That’s rich, Stacey. Thanks a lot.”

p. 31

I loathe Stacey, but I still feel bad that her mother so obviously loathes her.

But Mr. Kinsley, the vice principal, has a solution: Stacey can attend night school twice a week with Chandler Carr, an expert in adult education, who can assess whether she has a learning disorder.

Stacey’s parents love this idea; Stacey hates it and cries, but they’re so mad at her she’s not going to be allowed to keep her car or go out at night, so unless she wants to run away she’s going to night school. Her father, who up until this moment has been the parent who didn’t loathe her, flat out tells her to go ahead and run away. Ouch.

By chapter five I’m beginning to hate her less, partly because her parents are doing the work for me, and partly because she’s more vulnerable.

Stacey had thought that she could do the lessons assigned by her teachers at Central Academy. But she had simply chosen not to study because she could get by with her cheating. Now that she had been forced to crack the books, Stacey felt lost, insecure, inadequate.

p. 37

Derek calls, admitting she “gets to him” and he’s missed her, so she jerks him around for a while and I’m back to not liking her. That was quick. But Derek’s just as bad, talking her into manipulating her teacher somehow so she can ditch her first-ever night class and go out with him instead. Can someone please start sucking in a non-metaphorical way?

Her mother drops her at the school. Stacey finds it creepy there at night, and then when she gets to the classroom everyone else is an adult. She’s a bitch about it, thinking of them as “inhuman creatures” and “neanderthals,” but I can see how it would be uncomfortable.

Chandler Carr shows up, and he’s handsome and aristocratic and has a rich voice and ruby lips, because of course he does, and she thinks he’s about twenty-one. Some huge guy named Elvin jokes crudely that he’d like to be the one giving Stacey a “special evaluation,” and Chandler vampire-hypnotizes him into leaving the class.

Chandler made his way to the desk, taking a slight, mocking bow. “A dubious candidate for higher education. But now, back to the business at hand. As I said before, this lovely young lady–“

He had called her lovely! Stacey felt her heart throbbing. She had never experienced such a sensation, at least not for a guy. It was similar to the rush that Stacey got from downhill skiing in the winter.”

pp. 53-54

He has shoulder-length hair and is cheesily smooth. But Stacey is enthralled. She gets so absorbed in the evaluation test that she doesn’t notice class has ended until he speaks to her again, so maybe he’ll be a good influence on her.

“Are you going to college?” he asked.

Stacey shrugged. “No, I want to be a model.”

“You should consider college,” he went on. “You know, Cindy Crawford studied chemical engineering.”

p. 58

Well, yes, and then dropped out to be a model. But he’s got Stacey interested, only to abruptly remind her that helping her is his job. She feels mortified, wondering if the chemistry she felt between them was only in her head and reflecting that he’s the first guy she’s ever been interested in who suddenly acted cold towards her. I guess those manuals by “pick-up artists” are available to vampires too? Or maybe they’re based on vampires.

On her way out of the school building someone grabs her. It’s Elvin, reeking of beer and blaming her for getting him thrown out of class. He monologues about how she’s probably a cheerleader (she isn’t), and he used to play football but he quit, and now they’re going to have some fun and she won’t tell anyone or he’ll kill her. It’s creepy, but luckily Chandler shows up and ruins the creepiness.

“You lout! How dare you accost this young woman!”

p. 63

Well, that was unexpectedly fedora-esque.

Chandler beats the much larger man unconscious “as if” he has super-human strength. Then he vampire-hypnotizes Stacey into feeling fine and not remembering that she was just attacked, and that’s almost creepier than the attack itself.

Stacey’s mom…

…shows up to give Stacey a ride home, and immediately succumbs to vampire-charm and invites Chandler to dinner. He declines because he’s on a special diet, and I am dying. This is going to hit every single vampire trope, isn’t it?

Stacey has a nightmare right out of a 60s gothic novel, and I’m here for it.

Thick white mist swirled before her. She was standing in her own backyard in Prescott Estates. Billows of fog rolled in from the direction of the Tide Gate River. But Stacey didn’t seem to feel the chilly night air, even though she wore only a flimsy nightgown.

p. 66

Chandler’s a wolf in the dream. I’m not here for that. No, wait, now he’s a man again, telling her to stop thinking of him because “it can never be.” He vampnotizes her to forget her dream (he does this at the end of every one of these dreams–yeah, sorry, there are several of them). She wakes up to find her bedroom window open, of course.

The next day at school Stacey is “relaxed, serene” and also raises her hand to answer a question–correctly–in class. Imagine being such a horrible person that a vampire attack improves you, jeez.

Derek accepts her excuse that she couldn’t get away from night school, and shares the latest news: some dead guy was fished out of the river last night. For a second Stacey thinks she recognizes the name Elvin, but then it’s gone.

Chandler shows up at Stacey’s home to inform them that she doesn’t have a learning disorder and can just be tutored in the afternoons by someone at the high school. Stacey and her parents begs him to tutor her–Stacey because she has a crush on him, and her parents because the change in her attitude after only one night in his class has been so dramatic.

She has another “dream” in which he tells her repeatedly that they can never be together because of the sacrifice it would require. But he also tells her repeatedly that he loves her, and calls her “my Stacey,” which is pretty much exactly how not to discourage a teenage girl. I can’t tell if he’s stupid or just likes playing with his food.

Derek shows up one night after her night class, accuses her of being hot for her teacher, deduces that she’s been rejected, gets slapped, and hits her back. It’s a lot of drama for two pages of interaction. He runs after her, is interrupted by the night janitor, and Stacey flees to her mother’s car.

For a moment, she thought she heard something above her head, a fluttering sound like the beating of wings.

p. 91

It’s painfully obvious that Derek’s about to get vampired for fighting with/hitting on Stacey. She’s been so absolutely manipulative and horrible to him that it’s difficult to see him as the bad guy here, especially since we’re given access to his thoughts:

He regretted having slapped Stacey. It had been a reflex after she hit him. But there was no excuse for it. It didn’t take much courage to slap a girl.

p. 91

Stacey has another, increasingly tedious dream in which Chandler Carr shows up, still moaning about how they can’t be together because sacrifice blah blah even though he kisses her. FFS, Chandler, are you in or are you out here? How can an immortal being be this indecisive?

The next morning she’s pale (why? he didn’t bite her) and cranky, and doesn’t remember her dream but wonders if she’s tired because she’s been dreaming about Chandler. So he’s fairly crap at the memory erasure.

Meanwhile her father is reading the newspaper:

“Stacey, didn’t you know a boy named Derek Barton?”

“Yes,” Stacey replied.

“He’s dead,” Mr. Lindon told her. “He hanged himself in Fair Common Park last night.”

Stacey’s brow wrinkled. “Derek?”

“Yes. He left a suicide note.”

Stacey sighed, oddly detached. “That’s too bad.”

“Didn’t you date him?” Mrs. Linden asked.

Stacey shrugged. “Yes, a little. But I haven’t seen him for a while.”

“Was he the type to do something like this?” Mr. Linden asked. “To kill himself?”

Stacey took a deep breath and then exhaled like she was bored. “I don’t know.”

Her parents looked at each other. Their daughter seemed strangely unconcerned about the death of a classmate. And a suicide at that.

Stacey looked down at her scrambled eggs. She could barely remember what Derek had looked like, as if someone had managed to erase her memory.

p. 99

Okay, this is arguably the creepiest scene in the book. Mostly this thing has read like a pulpy indulgent romance novel, but there’s something genuinely scary about the idea of having your memories erased.

She’s come up with a plan, though. She visits the vice principal and tells him she needs Mr. Carr’s address because she forgot to turn in a paper, and he gives it to her, because teaching staff are always delighted to have students show up at their homes.

Just in case that isn’t inappropriate enough, he also 1) asks her if she knows of any reason Derek would have killed himself, 2) explains he’s not going to close the school for “something like this” because he doesn’t want to encourage any other students to “well, you know,” and 3) finishes up by urging her not to let this “horrible incident” sidetrack her own progress. Wow.

At Chandler’s house she thinks she glimpses an intruder trying to peer in the window, but decides it’s “a trick of the streetlight.” What? If there’s enough light for her to see that Chandler looks pale and drawn as he steps out of the house, how can she possibly not know if she’s seen a whole entire person?

In addition to looking drawn and pale, Chandler looks older; his hair looks grey and his voice creaks when he tells her to go away. He literally runs away from her, and she hears a sound overhead, which she remembers from her dreams. He is really utterly incompetent at memory erasing.

She starts to remember the dreams in which he came to her in the mist, but not before some teenage despair-wallowing on a grand scale:

He hated her! That had to be the answer. He hated her so much that he wanted to be rid of her.

With pearls of sorrow streaking down her cheeks, Stacey turned to leave the alleyway.

p. 109

A man accosts her in the alley, asking if she’s Stacey Lindon, and she hits him and runs for her car. She wonders if this is the guy who was hanging around Chandler’s house, and then immediately leaps to wondering if Chandler has done something “heinous and wrong,” and thinks about asking her father to help him. Help Chandler, I mean, because just because she magically senses Chandler is in trouble and at fault doesn’t mean she has enough sense not to be in love with him.

To underline that she’s an idiot and almost impossible to empathize with she goes to her room and cries for a while, and then goes back to Chandler’s house at night and breaks in.

She finds a coffin in his bedroom, and then Chandler comes home just in time for this bit of soap opera:

“Now you know,” he said to Stacey.

She could not speak. Until she looked into his eyes. The irises whirled and danced with the obscure, ink-black flow. Chandler had beauty beyond the world.

Suddenly, Stacey wasn’t afraid anymore. “Hello, my love,” she said in a breathy voice.

Chandler replied, “Welcome home.”

pp. 115-116

That is so exquisitely awful I’m breathless.

Chandler is still doing this crap:

“You are lovely, my Stacey. A creature of such beauty.”

She smiled. “Your Stacey?”

He sighed. “I wish it were so. But the sacrifice–“

pp. 117-118

Is the sacrifice that she’ll have to put up with your indecisiveness for all eternity? Because if so I agree, it’s too big a sacrifice.

He explains that he’s a creature of the night, that he must drink the blood of others to survive, and that he killed Derek and what’s-his-name, and then he gets mad at her when she calls him a vampire.

A sudden expression of rage came over his face. Stacey felt his temper. He shook her violently.

“Never use that word to describe me!” Chandler cried. “Do you hear me? Never!”

Tears welled in her deep blue eyes. “I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt you. I–“

He embraced her, pulling Stacey close to him. “My love, I didn’t mean to talk to you like that. I–there is so much mortals cannot understand.”

p. 122

Oh, I don’t know, I think rage-y men who manipulate the women they lay hands on into apologizing are pretty much within the range of mortal understanding. Yuck. All the “at least he’s trying to defend her by attacking the men who mistreat her” points just got erased.

Stacey really is a next-level idiot, though:

But he only smiled at her, a weird, otherworldly leer. Stacey took the expression to be an indication of his love and affection.

p. 123

I…what? She did what now? How? Why?

She kinda sorta wants to be with him forever, but also doesn’t, and struggles and repeatedly asks him to stop when he tries to bite her. He ignores this, of course, but then someone bursts into the room and…

“You!” Chandler cried. “You come to plague me again!”

“More than you know,” the male voice boomed. “More than you know, brother!”

p. 125

I am sincerely sorry to be quoting so much, but holy crap, there’s no way to capture the insanity of this book without showing you. I feel like I might go full-on Ancient Mariner and end out my days stopping every third person I meet to read them excerpts.

Ahahahaha, intruder-guy (it’s the same guy from the alley, of course) has a gold cross ringed with garlic. Subtle. I’m dying.

Stacey, having caught a glimpse of Chandler’s face in non-handsome mode, willingly flees the scene with Will Carr, Chandler’s younger brother.

Will provides a much-needed dose of reality, or at least as close an approximation of reality as can be shoehorned into this book.

“I–I love him,” Stacey replied. “And he says he loves me. Like no other person he’s ever known.”

Will chortled derisively. “You think so, huh? Do you know how many girls like you have bought that line?”

pp. 129-130

I don’t usually like characters who chortle, but in this case I’m willing to overlook it. I like him for the space of, oh, three pages, during which he patiently explains all the things Stacey should already know, like that Chandler killed Derek and that other guy, and that Chandler can change into a bat or wolf, and that Chandler’s been hypnotizing her and showing up at night. JFC, Stacey, where have you been for the entirety of this book?

Then he slaps her to bring her back to her senses. Look, Stacey is the most annoying character in a series dripping with annoying characters, but I’m still uncomfortable with the way every man she meets grabs her or slaps her or both.

Will turns out to be seventeen, the same age as Stacey, and tells her Chandler is twenty-four. He’s twenty-four and has grey hair when he doesn’t feed? Okay, sure.

“He really is a vampire,” she said sadly.

p. 133

Holy freaking shit, Stacey, pay attention. It’s like trying to have a conversation with a goldfish.

“I know he had you, honey, but he’s left a girl like you behind in every town he’s visited. This is his fifth stop on the trail.”

Stacey scowled at him. “What do you mean, a girl like me?”

Will exhaled and looked at the dark road. “Five towns, five girls left in lunatic asylums. Mental hospitals.”

p. 133

Will drops her at home, where the police have shown up because Millie Johnson has been found dead. Since Millie used to do Stacey’s homework, and Derek was Stacey’s boyfriend, they want to know where she’s been all night. She claims to have had a flat tire, but they point out her hands aren’t dirty. Will Carr then knocks on the door holding a tire iron, says he changed her tire, introduces himself as her teacher’s younger brother, and generally saves the day.

Why does he talk like an old-timey gangster, though? Aside from calling her “honey” every other line, he also gives her a wooden cross and garlic, and when she objects to the smell he says it’s “better than taking a dirt nap.”

Stacey agrees to help him kill his brother. She hears Chandler-bat outside her window that night, but holds up the cross and repels him. In the morning she wakes up stupid…

Had she actually agreed to help Will slay his brother? What if Chandler wasn’t a vampire?

p. 141

This is like Fifty First Dates but with vampires.

They spend a few pages arguing about the necessity of killing Chandler, and then sneak over to his house to leave him a letter in which Stacey pretends to have changed her mind about being with him for eternity. They tape the letter to his coffin. Why don’t they kill him while they’re there? Because he locks his coffin from inside. Why don’t they burn the house down, then? Because they’re both idiots.

They wait for Chandler in the gym, where Stacey is supposed to be the bait. But of course she’s under his spell again as soon as she looks in his eyes, and nearly gets bitten. She resists enough that they manage to catch him in a net; he turns into a bat, and then back into a human, and I feel like I’ve seen this somewhere before.

Chandler gets away, but they’ve injured his arm and he can’t fly, so they follow him to the pool. Along the way Will confesses that he can’t swim and he’s in love with Stacey. FFS, why?

Naturally Will ends up in the pool, but Stacey saves him, and they get out of the pool long enough to try to corner Chandler–who promptly throws Will back into the pool. They’ve been at this for pages now and it’s ridiculous. Stacey manages to stake him–Chandler, not Will–and he tells her he loved her (“I loved you, too,” she says, just in case her heroics have made you forget she’s an idiot).

Chandler dissolves; Stacey drags Will out of the pool again and revives him; a week later, Will shows up at Central Academy as a student and asks Stacey out. The end.

Final Thoughts: That was entirely ridiculous, but fun to read, at least until the endless tedious pool scene.

I’m disappointed that it didn’t turn out that Chandler had been twenty-four when he died, and that Will had been seventeen and was ALSO dead, because that would have explained why Chandler sounded so try-hard-gentlemanly in the first chapters and also why Will sounded like an old-timey gangster. Like, I thought maybe Will was a ghost, or a good vampire, fated to hunt down his older brother. But no. There’s no in-book explanation whatsoever for the weird way they talk.