I’ll readily admit that I live under some kind of rock. A rock liberally decorated with cat hair, bookshelves and Sealab 2021 DVDs, but a rock nonetheless. Why do I say this? Until less than a month ago, I had never heard of MaryJanice Davidson.

OK, picked yourself up from the floor yet?

See, I suffer from a mild case of kainolophobia when it comes to romance novels. Almost every hot new breakout author I’ve tried in recent years has, well, bombed for me. It got so that I just about winced every time I picked up something that had generated a lot of buzz. So I quit paying attention to buzz entirely for years and just worked steadily through my TBR stacks, pictured below.

 

And as you can see, I still have miles to go before I sleep. The paperbacks are double-stacked so there are twice as many books as what are visible. I figured out that space-saving measure ALL BY MYSELF.

Then Sarah and I started this website. I started paying some attention to buzz again, and of course I encountered MaryJanice Davidson’s name almost right away. Then Sarah offered to mail me her copies of Undead and Unwed and Undead and Unemployed. How could I resist? (And of course, not resisting is exactly how my TBR stacks reached Death Star proportions.)

Anyway, with this author, my trepidation was unfounded. Y’all, Undead and Unwed is so much fun. It’s not really a romance novel despite being marketed as such, and it’s about as substantial as J-Lo’s love affairs, but it’s pretty damn hard to put down once you pick it up.

Not that everybody and their dead dog don’t know the storyline already, but here comes my usual overlong plot summary anyway: Betsy (originally Elizabeth) Taylor is having a pretty tough time. A couple months back, a bunch freaks with bad breath, no sartorial sense and unusually sharp teeth attacked her just as she’s leaving Khan’s Mongolian Grill. But the dentally enhanced thugs are the least of her problems, especially when her thirtieth birthday rolls around. On that happy day, she’s late for work, gets laid off, and then receives a not-too-gentle cranial adjustment from the fender of a car (an Aztek, no less, which is quite possibly the assiest looking car in existence) while attempting to rescue her cat. And to add insult to injury, she rises from the dead a few days later with a mean case of drymouth, which is bad, but for that special hellish touch, she’s wearing her stepmother’s castoffs—including what seem like a pair of cheap shoes. CHEAP SHOES.

Betsy decides this is some sort of weird fluke (and let’s face it, life with only Payless shoes to wear is not a life worth living anyway) and unsuccessfully attempts to off herself in various ways, none of which work because:

a) She doesn’t need to breathe any more; and

b) She heals at speeds that would make Wolverine swoon with envy.

She also finds to her complete horror that she now has a thirst for blood. Besides the major ick factor, her new fangs make her lisp whenever they make an appearance. There’s apparently no dignity to being one of the walking dead.

But there are a few benefits to being a vampire. People, especially heterosexual men, find her irresistible. OK, it’s kind of tiresome having to peel them off her leg every time they look into her eyes and decide WHOA SHE’S REALLY PRETTY, but it’s nice to finally have mojo. Her strength, reflexes and senses are supernaturally enhanced, and she doesn’t have to testify tearfully before Congress about how she got that way. She even makes a new friend when she talks a depressed doctor out of splattering the sidewalk when her supersensitive hearing picks up on his suicidal musings as she walks past a children’s hospital.

But those perks are pretty much outweighed by the assiness of the other vampires, who find her soon enough. There are two major vamp camps in town, and she has to decide whose to go with: the one headed by a preening Bela Lugosi-wannabe with a bad combover named Nostro, or the much-smaller contingent headed by a hot, hunky, terrifically built vampire named Eric Sinclair. (One of them ends up being the bad guy, and the other ends up being the love interest. Try not to let this puzzle confound you for too long.)

The problem is, Betsy doesn’t want anything to do with vampire politics, and her conviction that they’re all freaks with no lives (har) is only strengthened when they tell her she’s the Vampire Queen prophesied by the Book of the Dead. All she wants is to be left alone so she can lead a normal life. Well, normal except for that occasional uncontrollable-need-to-chomp-into-a-human-neck thing. But goddammit, Sinclair is offering her an unlimited supply of designer shoes for her allegiance, and she’s undead, not made of stone…

This book is narrated from a first-person perspective, and I dig Betsy’s voice. She sounds exactly like what she is: a shoe-obsessed, irreverent, street smart (if not necessarily book-smart), wisecracking Super Secretary. It’s to Davidson’s credit that Betsy embodies many things I find irritating in people, both in real-life and fiction, yet I like her anyway. Part of it’s how Betsy doesn’t take anything, including herself, too seriously. Everything’s fair game for her snarking, from vampires skulking around in graveyards (“Ooooh, the CARLSON mausoleum. How sinister! What’s next, a plate of lutefisk and square dancing?”), to her stepmother (“I could not forgive her for chasing my father while he was married, bringing him down like a wounded gazelle, and then marrying the carcass”), to her smarts (“I could have gone to medical school, except for all the math and stuff”).

Then there’s Sinclair. Dude, he’s HOT. But there’s not enough of him in the book. At the end, I know certain basic facts about him (how he turned into a vampire, some bare basics about his background) but not much else. And he’s crazy about Betsy, of course, which is obvious to everyone except Betsy herself. Ultimately, though, he remains something of a cipher, which is a pity, because he provides such a nice foil for Betsy’s good-natured bitchiness.

The secondary characters are mucho fun. There’s Marc, the suicidal physician whom Betsy saves. Marc is gay, and it’s okay ‘cause gay means happy and happy means gay. No, scratch that, he has an anxiety disorder, but eh, he does much better once he moves in with Betsy and gets to be her Gay Sidekick. And hooray for Marc being a doctor—most fictional portrayals of gay men I’ve seen in the mass media involve them being in the arts, and usually the more flaming varieties at that.

Jessica, Betsy’s best friend, is also worth mentioning. She’s black, and damn, I cannot remember the last time I encountered a black person in a romance novel. (Actually, I can’t remember the last time I encountered a black person in ANY kind of fiction since reading Snow Crash three years ago. Hmmmm.) I got a chuckle out of seeing the two of them disagreeing over Gone With the Wind and cracking jokes about the race issue—God knows my friends and I have made some pretty tasteless jokes about the “yellow peril” I represent and my alleged affinity for calculus. I especially like Jessica’s obsession over her “best friend” status because it rings so true. I had a friend in junior high who was very much like that, and lemme tell you, it’s much more amusing to read about it in a book than to experience it in real life.

One aspect of the story has me scratching my head, and it’s Betsy’s antagonism towards Sinclair. OK, he’s pretty high-handed, and Betsy is not always the sharpest knife in the drawer so I didn’t expect her to realize that what she’s interpreting as asshattedness is an overdeveloped protective instinct, but I find her continued antipathy towards Sinclair kind of puzzling since he saves her ass more than once, and he’s hot, and he smells nice, and he provides the most excellent orgasms, etc., etc., etc. Frankly, the antagonism feels kind of forced; I get the sense Davidson is trying to drag on the antics and put off the HEA until later in the series. Nothing wrong with prolonging the sexual tension, but I wish she’d picked a less lame species of conflict on which to base it.

Much as I enjoyed reading this book and had a hard time peeling myself away once I started it, I feel absolutely no urge to re-read it. I think part of it is how it didn’t really engage many of my emotions apart from my sense of humor. It’s fun and fluffy, but just a little bit too fluffy. If the conflict between her and Sinclair had just had a little bit more bite to it (I SWEAR TO GOD I didn’t even notice that pun until I typed it), if I’d gotten a better sense of the other characters besides Betsy, if the resolution to their troubles hadn’t been quite as abrupt—in short, if the book had been a bit more substantial, I think I would’ve liked it even more than I did. As it is, if you’re looking for some funny-ass bitchiness and Snarkywood is down for some reason, this book is a pretty decent substitute.

 

* Screaming lady image shamelessly stolen and modified from the DVD cover for The Day of the Triffids, which was a pretty scary book that got made into a very campy movie.