The Last Vampire by Christopher Pike

[vox_mortem]

I vow to review more and finally finish with this friggin list. I admit it's become easier with each review. This one's a bit lackluster since there wasn't all that much to say about this book.

I wanted to like this book. The premise seemed very intriguing and a welcome deviation from from all of the "OMG Hot supernatural guy!" *swoon* I was reading. Though there was a romance, it still sounded like my kind of book. Plus the cover looked pretty cool (although the designer needs a smacking because the girl on the cover is most definitely NOT in 300dpi, hence the pixelation *eyetwitch*). I got the first volume of Thirst thinking I'd drink it up (no pun intended) but when I was halfway through The Last Vampire I was thankful this was a collection of 3 books and I wouldn't have to stomach 300 additional pages of this.

The Last Vampire is about Sita, a 5,000 year old vampire (she met Krishna!) who is quite literally the last of her kind, or so she thinks. The book opens with her talking to a private investigator who had been tracking her. The conversation ends with her killing him; a rather stupid move since he had some important information on her in his files, which are (obviously) locked and encrypted, making her go through the trouble of enrolling in high school and befriending his teenage son in order to find out the password. *sigh* She could have just threatened his and his son's lives and killed him after he told her what she needed to know, but whatever.

The detective's son, whose name is Ray, proves to be slightly more difficult to crack than Sita anticipated, since he has a girlfriend and she gets a case of nostalgia because Ray reminds her of her husband from when she was alive. Nevertheless, she gets him, because she's so hawt that no one can resist her. He lets her into his dad's office, logs in, and while she sent him out to check on something that wasn't there, she locked the door and collected the file. With it, she tracked down the guy who hired the PI, and arranged a meeting, which was followed by a kidnapping and a pretty badass action sequence as Sita escaped into the woods by exploding one of her guards' heads and breaking the wall in gas station bathroom. But it turns out the kidnapper was working for someone else, someone Sita previously thought dead.

The narrative is interspersed with flashbacks to Sita's past. She explains how vampires came to be, and I actually find Pike's take on the myth pretty interesting. Basically, the first vampire came to be in India, from an exorcism went wrong and the demon Yakshini jumped inside of an unborn child. The villagers wanted to kill it, but Sita, who was wise beyond her years at the time or something, stopped them and they let the boy live and named him Yaksha, after the demon. He had sort of a Renesmee thing going on, seeing as how he grew rapidly. By the time Sita was 16, he was already mature enough to flirt with her. All seemed well until Yaksha disappeared, and one by one the men who were present at his birth disappeared as well. One day, after Sita had already married and birthed a child, Yaksha appeared and forced her to join him in exchange for her the lives of her family. Why couldn't Sita have taken a page out of his book instead of killing that PI so quickly?

Sita, Yaksha, and their sirelings wandered around India, until they met Krishna. Yaksha challenged him, and Krishna won, so they struck out a deal to put and end to all of the vampires he had sired, except Sita for some reason. Sita developed a worshipful crush on Krishna, and remembers him quite fondly. Yaksha did as he was told and the vampires were slowly wiped out, and by the time they hit the middle ages, it was just him and Sita, which makes no sense since vampire hysteria goes as far forward as the present day. Two vampires who did their darnedest to hide their nature could not have sprung the myth. Like most vampire authors, Pike needs to do a little research on how the vampire myth came to be. I'm all for creative liberties, but this fails at logic big time.

Back in the present day, Sita decides to off Yaksha once and for all. Before she does, she heals Ray's psychic best friend of AIDS, because he helped her escape from Yaksha's goons and the police before. Then she goes off to sleep with Ray. Yaksha chooses the morning after to show up unexpectedly, and manages to badly wound Ray. But instead of killing them both, he pencils it in on his calendar. Ray's hurt too badly, so Sita's forced to change him because it turns out she loves him. He helps her build a rocket launcher type thing to kill Yaksha by tricking him into thinking she wants to die too, but it doesn't work or else there wouldn't be more books.

This book was highly disappointing. I thought I was going to like Sita; that she was going to be a badass vampire with actual brains and an intriguing personality, but she was just jaded and impersonal. I'd usually let it slide as a part of her character that would probably develop in the future, but the entire story was cold and emotionless. Whenever I sympathized with characters it was because of good old morals, not because I found them interesting. Ray's girlfriend, whom he so unceremoniously dumped for the hot undead chick; Ray's father, who was so unnecessarily killed; Ray's best friend who got AIDS from a blood transfusion. Ray himself was totally bland, and the only reason why Sita liked him so much was because of the whole husband doppelganger deal. He was a really boring character.

Pike's prose is pretty good. Sita's voice actually sounds somewhat like I'd imagine a cold, emotionless 5,000 year old vampire would sound. But the man is allergic to contractions. I wouldn't really bat an eye if it was just Sita since she's old and all, but EVERYONE in the book talks like a robot. The audiobook should be read by Microsoft Sam. This is probably where the coldness of the story comes from, and that really killed this book for me.

Verdict - 2