Killing Kiss by Sam Stone

Trade Paperback: 9781906584078

If Dracula and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Count Saint Germain mixed you’d have Gabriele, the lead in Sam Stone’s throwback vampire novel, Killing Kiss. Stone takes readers on a ride back to when vampires were ageless, alien creatures only pretending to be human, where they mourned or celebrated their liberation from the species, found themselves constantly drawn to it and they didn’t sparkle.

Gabriele was a well-off Italian singer who fell prey to a woman, who quite accidentally made him a vampire when she fully intended to kill him. After his own tragic attempts to maintain a human life Gabriele gives up and instead once a year he ventures into the human social world to find and attempt to change a woman to become his mate. Four hundred years, and four hundred failures later sees Gabriele assuming the life of a college student, and almost given up on finding an equal, intent just on surviving.

As his new persona Jay, he runs into shy, quiet, bashful Carolyn, exactly his type of victim. For he must be a serial killer, even if he’s only killed once a year, for leaving such a trail of lost loves behind him. Then there’s Lilly, who is most definitely not his type, until spiked drinks from a frat party cause Gabriele to drop everything, his identity, his game and his defenses to whisk Lilly away.

Killing Kiss could never be dismissed as mere “vampire porn”. While the plot is foresee-able it’s also a return to vampires as predators on humanity, yet creatures utterly charmed by and weakened to us. Flashbacks are mixed in with modern events, giving the book the feel of slowly backing away from a painting to see the full picture.

Vampire fans, especially those feeling left behind by romance’s siege on the genre, will find Killing Kiss (the first in a trilogy) has a lot to offer and shouldn’t be missed.