Jeanne C. Stein

The Anna Strong Chronicles — (2004-2011) Publisher: Anna Strong is trained for anything — until she's attacked one night, only to awaken in a dark world that exists between the living and the dead. Here, Anna struggles with her love for the two men who inhabit the realms of each: Max, a human DEA agent, and Avery, a Night Watcher who joins Anna in pursuit of the vampire who changed her life. Now, as her two worlds collide, fate plunges Anna into the ultimate battle between good and evil where survival is not just for the living.

The Becoming

If you don’t think about it too hard, The Becoming could be a fun book for the beach. It’s short, fast-paced, and suffused with a sun-drenched California atmosphere that’s unusual in a vampire novel. (Jeanne C. Stein’s vampires have evolved to tolerate the sun.) It's also nice that it's self-contained; there are sequels, but The Becoming is a complete story in itself. Unfortunately, there are all sorts of things about it that bothered me or fell flat with me.

Bounty hunter Anna Strong becomes a vampire after being raped, bitten, and left for dead. At first, she doesn’t remember the attack, but before long she’s having flashbacks. She remembers suddenly that, in the end, she enjoyed what was done to her. What’s creepy is that she seems to accept her supposed "consent" a little too easily and doesn't spend much time being upset about the whole thing. Grant Avery, the vampire doctor who treats Anna and later becomes her mentor, seems to think she consented too: “It’s frightening you because you realize you were a participant, not a victim."

Maybe this is just meant to show us a difference between human psychology and vampire psychology. Maybe it's supposed to show that Avery has an insensitive side (which he certainly does). To me, though, it looks like an example of a trend that’s been bothering me in urban fantasy lately, starting with Laurell K. Hamilton’s ardeur. There seems to be this idea that if someone uses magic to force someone else to feel pleasure, it’s not really rape. I don’t see how it’s any different from using a date-rape drug.

Anna is evidently not that bothered, though, and the plot goes on. Anna seldom thinks about the assault again. When she does finally get good and angry at her attacker, it’s because of something else entirely. Anna believes he’s behind a series of violent acts that threaten to bring her new "unlife" to a very quick end.

Meanwhile, she begins an affair with Avery, despite the fact that she has a long-term boyfriend, Max. Sounds like a recipe for conflict, but there really isn’t any. Max is barely in the story. I’m not sure why he is in the story, unless there's a rule that an urban fantasy requires a love triangle. (Max is not the only wasted-potential character, either. While Anna is in the hospital, she has a lengthy argument with her bounty-hunting partner David about her friend Michael. Michael never actually appears. Why all the page space devoted to bickering about him?)

The Anna/Avery sex scenes are kind of weird: vague and purple rather than either explicit or fade-to-black. Also, these scenes tend to come out of nowhere. Anna and Avery will be talking about something completely non-erotic, and then suddenly they start having sex.

There are some minor awkwardnesses, too: proofreading mistakes, an injury that randomly switches from the left leg to the right and back again, that sort of thing. These are issues that would be almost invisible in a great novel but loom large here.

The essential problem is that, in a subgenre as glutted as the “tough girl kills and dates vampires” one, a novel has to be special to stand out from the crowd. There isn’t anything stellar about The Becoming that distinguishes it from the rest of what’s on the shelves, and if it does stick in my memory, it won’t be for the right reasons. —Kelly Lasiter

Chosen

I read the first ANNA STRONG novel, The Becoming, some time ago and didn’t like it. Because of this, I haven’t kept up with the series. When I received a review copy of Chosen, however, I was curious. Now that I’ve read it, I will say that Chosen is superior to The Becoming, but that this series will probably never be one of my favorites.

Anna Strong is approaching the first anniversary of her transformation into a vampire. Rumor says she’s the Chosen One, and according to legend, the Chosen One’s powers will fully manifest on that anniversary. Needless to say, Anna is a little freaked out when she does start developing new traits, such as an ability to sniff out “evil” followed by the overwhelming urge to kill the person she has identified as evil. Then an attempt is made on her life, which doesn’t do much to assuage her worries.

She dispatches the assassin, though, and then has sex with her boyfriend Lance at the scene of the fight. Lance is a fellow vampire who is also a male model and the scion of an old, wealthy family. Anna is smitten with him, and in the early chapters of Chosen, they have sex... a lot. The sex may pose a problem to some readers, not because it’s there but because of the way it’s handled. The frequency of the sex scenes is consistent with an erotic novel, but the style of these scenes is not. There’s very little description of the buildup of tension, of foreplay, or even of the act itself; the scenes are brief and sort of come out of nowhere. So, readers who aren’t looking for an erotic novel may get sick of the sex interrupting the plot, while readers who are looking for an erotic novel will probably find these scenes lacking in sensuality. Indeed, there’s much more sexual tension between Anna and an ex-boyfriend who is only a platonic pal in this installment.

Things pick up when Lance is compelled to introduce Anna to his sinister sire, Julian Underwood. Underwood has teamed up with an old enemy of Anna’s, Warren Williams, to try and force her into accepting her role as the Chosen One. This leads into a suspenseful plot filled with action and backstabbing. There are a few glitches here, particularly one scene in which Anna really should have caught on to someone acting suspiciously and didn’t, but for the most part the plot works. I enjoyed the poignant scene where Anna has to kill someone she once cared about, and her flash of insight about why she in particular would make a good leader of vampires.

So, in the end Chosen held my attention and had some high points, but my experience was marred by the rocky early chapters in which there’s simply too much sex, too often. The series has improved but still doesn’t really stand out in the overcrowded vampire field. —Kelly Lasiter