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Fat White Vampire Blues

Andrew Fox

Published 2003          334 pages

Synopsis

Jules Duchon has lived in New Orleans his whole life (and his all his death too) unfortunately a century or so of easy living dining off the inhabitants of the fattest city in America has taken its toll upon his health.  Jules has had his pick of easy victims from the streets of New Orleans for years, the homeless, the poor, street hoods – all people who are never missed - he has had no shortage of food.  Weighing in at 450lb of prime fat white vampire, Jules is three times the man he used to be. 

However, a new vampire has moved into his territory.  Young, cocky, thin, and black, Malice X warns Jules that the black street people he has been dining off are now off limits and he must stick to drinking white blood from now on.  This gives Jules several problems – white victims are much harder to catch and people notice when they go missing - for a start.

Jules has a cunning, if lazy, plan to catch health-freak white victims, as a bonus their blood will be low in fat and maybe it will help with his diet…. Unfortunately for Jules everything he tries to do just ends up going wrong in humiliating and embarrassing ways. 

When Malice X burns Jules’ house down, Jules leaves New Orleans and manages to reach his lowest ebb in Baton Rouge.  Miserable, Jules returns to New Orleans where he finds that he might just triumph over Malice X with a little help from his friends.

The Review

Jules is an antidote to the sexy vampires of the paranormal romance genre.  He is fat, lazy, unattractive, stupid and generally repulsive.  Everything he plans goes wrong for him because he comes up with stupid plans that are the easy (or lazy) answer to his problems.  Humiliation, upon humiliation is piled upon him in this book and usually it’s his own fault.  You would think that these factors would not make for an engaging lead character that you can empathise with but oddly enough that is not the case.

At the start of the book Jules is hungry so he picks up a victim, who he wines and dines before drinking her blood and killing her.  You would think that this behaviour might repulse you but oddly enough you can’t help yourself from liking Jules.  Maybe it’s his very ordinary human flaws, a lack of self esteem, being lazy and eating too much for example, that make it easy to like him.

This book is humorous, with most of Jules exploits being good for a laugh.  It has a semi-serious message buried in it that self-esteem and self-belief are just as important if to a vampire as they are to a human.

Fat White Vampire Blues is unusual for a vampire novel, no sexy, super evil or powerful vampires here, but it is an entertaining lightweight story that is well worth reading.

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