OK, right from the start let me say that Mario Acevedo and his signature character, Felix Gomez, are not for everyone. Even the names of his four novels are off-setting; "The Nymphos Of Rocky Flats", "X-Rated Bloodsuckers", "The Undead Kama Sutra", and this, his fourth installment, "Jailbait Zombie." Yet make no mistake about it, Acevedo is a craftsman who grows and matures with each new effort. Imagining his work as a movie would conjure images of Quentin Tarantino doing George Romero.
Acevedo has created a plausible world of modern vampires that rivals that of Charlie Huston (see "Half The Blood In Brooklyn"). Both series portray the vampire world as coexisting in our modern world but in highly secretive fashion, with Gomez governed by and assisting, at times, the Araneum, a governing council for vampire behavior. While the texture and mood of their modern day vampire worlds are clearly different in the renderings of Huston and Acevedo, the vampire/human relationships and interactions and the philosophy, "laws", and governing structure underpinning their worlds are fun to unravel. For example, Felix is an enforcer for the Araneum whose main objective is to prevent any revelation that vampires or zombies or anything other than normal human beings exist on the planet. Felix is both enforcer and clean-up man for the governing council.
In "Jailbait Zombie", Felix is sent to the Denver area to ascertain who is reanimating dead beings into zombies and destroy all evidence of them, and, concomitantly, to find who or what is the source of flashes of psychic energy emanating from the area that may be disturbing the astral plane. No sooner does he arrive in the area, than he is beset with mafia minions, unexplained zombie attacks, and a dying 16-year old, Phaedra Nardoni, who wants him to turn her into a vampire to escape the ravages of Huntington's Chorea. Turning an innocent violates both Felix's and the Araneum's code but this young lady has the psychic ability to read his thoughts and to punish him with powerful and humbling blasts of psychic energy.
Felix is investigating the undead and seeking the reanimator when he is captured, tortured, and toyed with by the proverbial "mad scientist" behind it all. Before the novel winds down, Felix and his fellow enforcer and sometime lover, Jolie, do some serious [...] while Felix is forced into making life changing decisions for Phaedra as well as for himself. Actually, the psychological aspects and demands on Felix's character are an intriguing underlying current in Acevedo's novels.
I enjoy reading the details of the rules and procedures for vampires living among the humans in Felix's life. For example, his joy at eating hot Mexican food laced with whole blood, or the various outcomes of his "fanging" a human along with how he controls the enzymes that have various functions in the process. Vampires can exist in sunlight as long as they wear sunblock and make-up, vampires enjoy making love and having sex, and vampires are not affected by religious symbols (crosses, holy water, etc). Acevedo creates interesting fully fleshed characters and his plots are often unique to this genre. I heartily recommend this series to fans of vampire literature or of supernatural noir.
