REVIEW: Hotel Transylvania by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

Well, I knew when I picked this up from the library and saw the cheese-tastic cover that I would be in for an interesting read. Unfortunately, it can be interesting in a bad way too. This novel is about a vampire named St. Germain who is actually a good guy. He falls in love with human 19 yr old Madelaine de Montalia who is the object of desire for a bunch of Satan worshippers who wish to sacrifice her to gain power from the devil. Whaa?? you say-yeah that's what I said too. The premise is interesting enough but this book really dragged for me in the first half. I read a few reviews on amazon as I like to do when a book just isn't capturing my interest right away to see if others thought it was a worthwhile read. I agree with those who said that the author spends way too much time describing what people are wearing and dwelling on mundane things in the book when she could have focused on other things.

Parts of it actually left me confused. For instance Madelaine discovers St. Germain is a vampire but I don't remember the book explaining exactly how she came to that discovery and also the automatic acceptance of St. Germain after finding out this information like it was an every day occurrence was a little jarring. The villain, St. Sebastien (evil leader of the Satan worshippers) was definitely well fleshed out. You could feel his evilness oozing from the pages. Some of the content in this book is not for the faint of heart. It contains rape, sexual torture, other methods of torture, orgies etc so if you cannot stomach reading about any of those topics this book is not for you (although the book is not too graphic or descriptive about any of it, it may still be disturbing).

It does pick up a little bit in the second half when the Satan worshippers finally manage to kidnap Madelaine and St. Germain has to go after her. Still you can see it coming that this will eventually happen. Also there is some back story going on about a group of alchemists and their knowledge of how to make jewels but I never really got what that was about.

Surprisingly (to me anyway) many people must have liked this book because it spawned about 15 other books with the newest one, Burning Shadows coming out in hardcover today. Maybe its because this is not something I would normally read so I was inclined to dislike it or maybe its just me and I'm missing the key points that would make this a really great book, but this was just not my cup of tea. I'm debating on whether I'll eventually give the 2nd book in the series a try to see if I like that one any better or if I should just give up on it now.

If the FTC is wondering: I got this book from the library