That’s about all the plot that Vampyres of Hollywood can boast of. As more and more people around her turn up slaughtered (and usually sliced, diced and julienned), Ovsanna puzzles over the motive for the killings. Meanwhile, Peter King interviews various individuals without getting much closer to a resolution of the case. Finally, Ovsanna “follows a hunch” to another city and a possible explanation that is never foreshadowed in any way. Detective King trails after her to enable him to be part of the pull-out-all-the-stops-and-sit-on-the-keyboard climax.
I don’t care for first-person narrators, as a rule, and Vampyres of Hollywood has two of them. The chapters alternate between Ovsanna and Peter, with an icon on the chapter heading to identify who is talking. The icons are useful, because except for the content, there is absolutely nothing to differentiate the two characters’ narrations. Ovsanna and Peter think alike, talk alike, appear to have identical attitudes, moods, and outlooks on life, and their narrative voices are indistinguishable. They even are both currently celibate with a preference for female partners. I had to pay close attention to keep track of whose adventures I was following in the chapter I was reading.
Because of the skeletal storyline and the dual narration, the chapters are stuffed with expository padding. Ovsanna constantly cuts to a sidebar to explain to us readers details about Vampyrism in general and her past specifically. Peter King rambles off only slightly less often on tangents about his mother’s connection to the film industry and his experiences as a Beverly Hills cop. There are a lot of clever jokes - Ovsanna seems to have known everyone who ever wrote literature or made movies even slightly related to vampires and had a front row seat for every major historical event. She even tells us something we didn’t know about the real fate of Jack the Ripper. But all the explanation becomes tedious, and I found myself skimming chunks of digression to get back to the story.
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