Brief Encounters

Title: Claimed
Author: Jambrea Jo Jones
Length: 49 pdf pages, 12,000 words.
Publisher: MLR Press
Genre: m/m paranormal
Rating: D-

Blurb:

One taste isn’t enough…

Luke Shelton was down on his luck. He’d gambled away the family money and he needed to get it back–fast. Being a vampire meal couldn’t be all that bad.

Bussoe needed something to keep him tied to the world or he was going to walk into his final death. Something about Luke sparked his interest. Will the two be able to come to terms or will one of them die before the night is over?

Review:

A potentially interesting idea that suffered from poor editing, typos and utterly wooden characterisation.

I thought I would be safe with this unfamiliar author as I’ve come to rely on MLR authors telling good stories (even if their publisher can’t be bothered to hire decent  proofreaders). However, either this is an anomaly rushed through to fill a gap in the schedule, or I just haven’t been reading widely enough to realise that not all authors in the MLR stable are up to the same standard.

The premise of the story is interesting enough. Luke has signed a contract without reading it, promising himself to a vampire. He’s not just a bumbling moron, though—he’s done it to cover a debt incurred trying to raise money for a lifesaving operation for his mother. Now Luke is being paraded in front of the vampire in a darkened club, naked apart from fishnets, heels, and leash around his neck.

The rather sexy set-up made me hope for a steamy read. There is sex later, but first we have to get through the meat of the plot. Again, the ideas here were interesting and there’s some nice double-crossing and twists, but the characters were so wooden and the writing so pedestrian I found it hard to care.

Luke is a real problem. We’re meant to believe he’s a mall cop, but he shows absolutely no sense of how to handle himself in a dangerous situation. He’s vain, stupid and naive, and has managed to get himself into a dangerous predicament by gambling away his family’s money. We’re meant to forgive his stupidity, though, because he’s done it for the right reasons. For me, though, he never managed to raise himself above vapid, “too stupid to live” status.

Bussoe could have been an interesting character what with the hints we’re given of his back story, but it just doesn’t come together. He acts like a vampire cliché, and then there’s the whole “fated mates” trope which I hate with a passion. Here it seems to be being used as a shortcut so the author doesn’t need to show us any real chemistry between the characters. We just have to accept that they’re meant to be together so the plot can move on. Not good enough.

Now, can we have a word about typos? This book probably doesn’t have more than your average MLR offering, but they annoyed me far more because I wasn’t carried away by the story. How can a professional publisher let so many through? Do they pay their proofreaders with nothing more than a copy of the book they’re meant to be checking? I’ve heard this is the standard practice with certain epublishers. That’s not payment. That’s merely giving them the materials they need to work.

Not only were there grammatical issues (for example, a misuse of the word “whom”), but the punctuation left a lot to be desired: missing apostrophes, and persistent misuse of the m-dash. When using pairs of m-dashes to section off part of a sentence—like this, for example—they are being used as a substitute for parentheses and the sentence should still make sense if that section is removed. In this book that was never the case. The author uses them when commas or ellipses are called for, resulting in sentences that had me scrambling to try to make sense of what was being said.

I expect there are readers out there who aren’t as fussy as I am and who will enjoy this story for what it is. I think you’d have to be a real fan of the fated mates trope to do so, though. For me, it felt like an interesting idea that had been rushed, with not enough care and attention spared to the prose and characterisation, let alone the basics of sentence construction.

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