Dark Lover

My local library's fantasy/scifi section has an awful many books from someone going by the name of J.R. Ward. I was curious since I had never heard of the author before. A quick google search revealed it to be one of Jessica Bird Blakemore's pen names. Under her maiden name, Jessica Bird, she writes contemporary romance novels and as J.R. Ward too -- just with a paranormal twist. And more specifically: vampires.

Essentially her Black Dagger Brotherhood series that I was eyeing up thus seemed to be a Twilight type of thing -- or True Blood rather, as it's not in young adult category: the book had no problems with depicting sex scenes. Regardless, it didn't seem like something I usually look for to read but I thought I might check out the first one, Dark Lover, just for the sake of it.

The book's vampires live peacefully and unseen as a shadow society among humans. They don't have any reason to prey on humans because human blood is barely nourishing for them. Instead they suck on each other, which appears to happen in agreement and is necessary for survival purposes only rarely. That's kind of a different take on vampires and it doesn't stop there.

Vampires are also born the usual human way and are even able to procreate with humans at times, which results in weaker half-blood vampires. In their mid 20s, a vampire goes through a (sometimes fatal) transition that gives them fangs and makes them susceptible to sunlight (though not always) and other good stuff.

While humans aren't a threat to vampires, there's someone or something called Omega who wishes for their destruction for whatever reason. For that purpose, Omega recruits humans and turns them into lesser. To stop these lesser, vampires in turn have put together a group of their strongest, called the Black Dagger Brotherhood.

The warriors of the Brotherhood have the silliest names: their half-blind leader and the king of vampires is called Wrath for instance. Then there is Phury, Zsadist, Tohrment, Rhage... Why? Why would you ever name your characters like that? It's impossible to take the novel seriously.

One of the viewpoints, and the main female protagonist of the novel, is Elizabeth. She's a half-blooded vampire though is unaware of it at the start as she has not gone through her transition yet. Big part of the book is her and Wrath's immediately blossoming relationship. I guess that is to be expected from a romance novel.

What could have saved Dark Lover for me, were the vampires having cool powers or something. I liked in Twilight (the film adaptations -- I have not read the books) how vampires have special abilities and how the powers interact with each other. That's the reason I liked the Heroes tv show so much as well. The Brotherhood vampires have their little quirks but nothing really interesting. I predict I won't be returning to this series in a while.