So the premise is that vampirism is something like a contagious disease--one which somehow turns people into things which manifest all the classical (meaning Eastern Europe via Stoker) signs of being vampires. Problems are Villareal fails to convince on the science--for example: "radiation that prevents all cameras from working" seems as though it might screw up a CCD, but that sort of radiation seems unlikely to have any sort of effect on a camera with film, using a mechanical shutter--and fails to convince on the sociology and psychology--there'd be little incentive for someone whose fame and social cachet were derived from performances that were captured on film/video/compute to choose to become that sort of vampire (one of the sub-conceits) and his POV characters fail to convince as actual people. The fact Villareal has chosen to present the novel as a modern-day epistolary novel--all the narratives are presented as transcripts of various testimonies and interviews, from several different people who seem to have little to no connection with each other--means whatever narrative there might be in the novel comes across as fragmented. Maybe that would be more like "kaleidoscopic" if I could be bothered to finish it, but I tapped out after ~150 of ~400 pages.
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Episode Thirteen by Craig DiLouie
This is labeled as an epistolary novel, but that's not entirely right. There are entries that could not possibly have been written, fr...
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I read this book like thirty years ago (ack!) when I was in college, and I remembered liking it, and when my wife picked it as a classic-i...
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The cover text calls this something like "one of the most important novels" blah blah blah. It's not a novel, it's a disc...
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Not a novel, which ... well ... some of the events described in the book would stretch credulity in fiction. It's a book about the lie...
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