Review: Mr. Darcy, Vampyre, by Amanda Grange

Those of you who stop by here frequently know that I love the new genre of classic-horror hybrid novels. They're witty, wry, and a fun way to catch up on the classics without losing the real story-as-intended by the original author when used as a basis for the new story, or, when written as an entirely stand-alone entity, as Seth Grahame-Smith's Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, an entertaining way of turning history on its head.

Not this time.

Mr. Darcy, Vampyre, is indeed a tragedy, and not in the usual literary fashion. It starts out with some promise, but quickly turns into a sort of harlequin romance, with Elizabeth Bennett Darcy playing the part of the idiot heroine, a complete departure from her 'actual' generally intelligent character. Mr. Darcy is shown to be a man-with-a-secret, brooding and semi-tortured. Grange manages to reduce the entire story of their romance to the Twilight series status; indeed, the book might have been more enjoyable had I gone through the entire thing and whited-out everyone's names and replaced them with those from that lesser series! At least then I wouldn't have had my hopes up.

To spare you from reading the thing yourself, here is a quick synopsis: right from the wedding day, Elizabeth notices that Darcy is acting strangely unhappy, and begins to feel that she herself is somehow to blame. When Darcy leaves her alone on their wedding night, and every night thereafter, she miserably writes letters to her sister, Jane, lamenting her predicament. Because the two have just married, they are on their honeymoon tour, traveling in Europe, and Darcy introduces Elizabeth to hundreds of people, all of whom have a strange, sinuous, overtly sexual presence, and who make many exclamations over their marriage, declaring that it will never work, so on and so forth, while never saying completely out loud that the problem is not Elizabeth's lack of personal fortune, as she assumes, but rather that he is a vampire. The troubles culminate when Darcy drags Elizabeth to a remote castle, on a road that is surrounded by red-eyed wolves and strange noises, to see a 'relative' who will help him with a 'personal matter'. Upon entering the castle, the staff all start screaming and carrying on in a 'strange language' because an axe falls off the wall just as the couple walk under it, almost killing them. This castle, which has no mirrors, does, however, have a painting of two men who look suspiciously like Darcy and this relative, from long ago. Within days, there is an angry mob storming the castle with torches, and the hapless Bennett, still cluelessly lamenting her virginity, is dragged through an underground tunnel, and over mountains, on a mule to escape. She STILL has no idea what's going on. Seriously. Her main role, all this time, has been to internally freak out, a la Twilight's Bella, about how to get Darcy to come into her bedchamber at night and 'make her his wife'.

I'm not going to tell you any more, because it's too depressing and, frankly, boring. The only reason I finished the book at all was so I could come here and say with honesty that it gets no better. The eventual resolution is no better than the rest. The only use for this novel would be as the basis for one of those Scary Movie series films; that would actually be pretty good. This author has written several other classic literature sequels, which I have not read, that focus on the male character's diary and seem to have been better received according to their reviews on Amazon; my thought is that she threw this particular tale out there in an attempt to cash in on the classic-horror genre as well without first thinking whether she should, or more importantly, *could*.

Rating: Bleh.