Stake Through the Heart: New Exploits of Twilight Lesbians [Paperback]

It's surprising that Bella After Dark has come up with three successive good collections of themed novellas using only four authors. In each of the collections, I have had a favorite story. In the first one Karin Kallmaker's re-telling of the Little Mermaid was my favorite; she also topped the list in BELL BOOK AND DYKE. In this collection, Barbara Johnson out did herself. I was afraid that the stories would be unable to find new territory to explore, but Johnson's pre and post atomic disaster tale did it for me. I hope these women can come up with yet another theme and do as well with it.

I read this book and I had alot of mixed feelings about it.

Castle Wrath was really disappointing. It had me curious until the end and I almost thought about selling the book back I was so angry. But I decided to read on.

Running with Stone Ponies is what saved me the time to through the book aside. I thought that was a good story and it really had me on edge. I think if there was a director reading this I think he or she should make a movie out of it. It would really be good.

Elsewhen I really couldn't get into it. I half went off into another world while reading this. I don't know if thats possible or either I'm just weird. But I think it could've been better.

We Recruit I can see this as a movie as well. Unlike Running with Stone Ponies where the situation was serious, this one was more comical. But it was good.

Overall it was up and down emotions of disappointment, sadness, unimportant, to just plain funny. So I'm not really sure how to rate this one.

I hate to say this, because I really like the authors in this anthology and I love the vampire genre, but I was really disappointed by the stories in this collection. Maybe my expectations were too high given the above.

Castle Wrath by Karin Kallmaker started off really promising. I was chuckling out loud as the character narrated the start of her adventure and I was really enjoying the humorous writing in a style Ms. Kallmaker doesn't normally use. But I dunno, somewhere things shifted and it almost became an entirely different style of story. I think it either should have started differently to fit the later portion, or the initial tone should have been maintained throughout. In the end, aside from that, the story itself just didn't interest me at all. The idea of inheriting a castle in a vampire story had the potential to go in all sorts of wonderful directions, but the direction that Ms. Kallmaker chose wasn't where I wanted to go. By the end I just wasn't interested in what happened to the characters.

Running with Stone Ponies was another story with a lot of potential, but I feel it fell really flat. This time mostly due to what came across to me as amateurish writing. Which I suppose takes a lot of gall for me to say, since my attempts at writing are quite pathetic, but there it is all the same. I felt the relationship between the two main characters developed ridiculously. More that there wasn't really any development at all, it was just suddenly there. At various points while reading I was actually cringing at parts of the plot, or specific phrasing choices. If I'm cringing at the writing, I'm not being swept away into the fantasy.

Elsewhen by Therese Syzmanski was a solid story and one that I did enjoy. But the writing at times was disjointed in a way difficult for me to describe. I felt like characters were all over the place at various points in what they were thinking or feeling, making it difficult for me to follow along as well as I should. That's not to say that characters shouldn't be muddled or confused about what they think, but it needs to be written in a way so that as a reader I'm empathetic, not irritated and taken out of the story.

We Recruit by Julia Watts was okay. I can't really think of anything negative to say about it. It just didn't really grab me either, at least not the latter part. Maybe because they wimped out as vampires. Heh. While being a vastly morally superior stance to take, drinking bottled blood just ain't sexy!

I gave the anthology 3 stars. To me that means it's average, and if you're strongly interested, probably still worth buying and reading. I didn't feel it was a total waste of my time. But I'm still left with that disappointing feeling of being disappointed by an anthology that I had been anticipating with a great deal of excitment. (For context, I own almost all the published novels and anthologies by Karin Kallmaker, Therese Syzmanski, and Julia Watts, so normally I really am a fan!)

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 3 reviews  3.7 out of 5 stars