'Vampyres of Hollywood' Review + 'True Blood' Season 7 Discussion, Pt. 1

Vampyres of Hollywood by Adrienne Barbeau

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I would have been slightly disappointed if the lovely and talented film actress Adrienne Barbeau hadn't written a fabulously entertaining book with her co-author Michael Scott of The Alchemyst fame. Fortunately, this vampyre fantasy/murder mystery set in modern-day Hollywood IS fabulously entertaining. Horror, humor, and suspense are deftly blended into this unusual boy-meets-ghoul story reminiscent of the best of Charlaine Harris's Southern Vampire Mysteries series (if by Southern we meant SoCal). True Blood aficionados will appreciate this stand-alone novel.

If Lady Gaga were ever to decide to star in a movie, she would be perfect in the role of vampyre heroine Ovsanna Moore. I also like that Hollywood classics like Rudolph Valentino, Orson Welles, and Mary Pickford make appearances, and the fictional timeline also plays with history. Let's just say that Dan Brown's explanation of the original Friday the 13th in The Da Vinci Code isn't the full story in Ovsanna's telling.

I bought this book for $1 at a library used book sale. I was not obligated to review it in any way. All the opinions stated here are my own.

View all my reviews on Goodreads

Now, I can't let the opportunity to mention True Blood pass without discussing the Season 7. If you want episode-by-episode recaps of the final season of True Blood, I direct your attention to the blog Fangs, Wands, and Fairy Dust. Fair warning, Steph also recaps Outlander and Masters of Sex, so beware of spoilers:

Season 7 Episode 2
Season 7 Episode 5
Season 7 Episode 6
Season 7 Episode 7
Season 7 Episode 8
Season 7 Episode 9
Season 7 Episode 10

I didn't see episodes 1, 3, or 4 on Steph's blog. She may have missed a few.

(Sidenote: I wish my parents had Showtime so we could watch Masters of Sex. Not only do I find Masters and Johnson terribly fascinating, but I also love Michael Sheen because he plays creepy Aro in the Twilight Saga films.)

Tara Thornton

So let's talk about the ultimate fates of some of my favorite characters from the series. My #1 problem with this season is the fate of Tara Thornton, the kickass vamp played by the gorgeous Rutina Wesley.

Tara dies. In the first episode of the season. Offscreen.

Look, it's bad enough that Season 6 gave barely even a flicker of screen time to the Pam-Tara romance. That was on top of all the previous sufferings of Tara's character: an abusive, alcoholic mother; having her mind held hostage by the maenad; losing Eggs; being kidnapped, raped, and tortured by the evil vampire Franklin; getting shot in the head by that psycho Debbie Pelt, and then turned into a vampire against her will; and then being locked up in nutty Sarah Newlin's vampire prison camp. Just when you thought Tara had suffered enough and deserved a happy ending, though - BAM! An undignified off-screen death.

Creative Commons image by Ronald Woan

She appeared a few more times throughout the season, as a V-induced hallucination/ghost - crucified, no less. Dear TV: is it too much to ask that we have some African-American female characters who survive, thrive, succeed, and excel?

So that writing pissed me off, as did the fact that Pam barely brought up Tara's name the entire season. Because (so the writers seem to think) why would Pam grieve for her woman of color lover when she could just as easily obsess over Eric's pasty white Viking ass?

See Also: "Stick a Fork In It" on Dorothy Surrenders

Ginger (No Last Name)

One of the most enjoyable sequences (the beginning of it, anyway) this season was a flashback to the '90s in which Eric and Pam acquired the building that would come to house Fangtasia. The vampire night club of the '00s started life as a humble video store. As Pam stood in it, bewildered by being ordered to manage such a mundane center of human activity, who should pop in but Ginger (played by Tara Buck), searching for vampire movies.

Ah, but this is not the Ginger we've come to know over the past six seasons, the clueless human pathetically and hopelessly lusting after the lanky blond vampire. This Ginger is smart!Ginger. See, she's wearing glasses! She's a student at Tulane! She needs those vampire movies for her thesis on the vampire as metaphor for social outsider!

"#1 Crush" by Garbage plays in the background. Then, suddenly, Eric walks up from the basement. Smart!Ginger takes a half-second glance in his direction, and the immense surge of lust erases half her brain cells, instantly turning her into the Ginger we all know and consider an unflattering stereotype of women. Apparently we can be brainy or express our sexuality, but not both at the same time. It's like that lame-ass "Blow Minds, Not Guys" virtual poster I sometimes see around social media.

In the finale, Eric finally offers to have sex with Ginger. She wants to straddle him while he sits on his throne. She does - for all of about two seconds, before the strength of her insta-orgasm literally knocks her to the floor.

I can't remember if Ginger was a character in the books or not. If she was, was she this lame in the novels, or it just TV Ginger that sucks? I wanted so much more for you, Ginger. I really did.

Alcide Herveaux

Season 6 ended with that terribly confusing flash-forward showing Sam as the mayor of Bon Temps and Sookie happily in a relationship with werewolf Alcide. That looked like fun, didn't it? And if I remember correctly from Dead Ever After, which I read a little over a year ago, book-Alcide had a pretty happy ending. I think he settled down with a female werewolf.

Alas, TV-Alcide and TV-Sookie were not meant to be, as he was killed off in Episode 3. Sad, sad, sad.

Creative Commons image by Sue Lukenbaugh

Sam Merlotte

One positive I'll mention out of Season 7 is that Sam Merlotte and his beloved, Nicole Wright (played by Jurnee Smollett-Bell), got the happy ending they deserved. Nicole, heavily pregnant with the couple's baby daughter, told Sam she wanted to leave the high weirdness of Bon Temps behind and raise her child in a safer environment. She asked him to move to Chicago with her so that they could be closer to her parents. Sam deliberated, but he made the right call. He resigned as mayor and chose to protect his de facto wife and unborn child. Which is as it should be.

Creative Commons image by Gage Skidmore

The next thing I see Sam Trammell in is likely to be The Fault in Our Stars. He plays the father of Hazel Grace Lancaster.

Jessica Hamby

Another one of my favorites who actually got a happy ending was Jessica Hamby, Bill's vampire progeny. However, like Nicole, she had to undergo some awful suffering first. (Nicole was among a group of humans abducted by the hepatitis V-infected vampires, ultimately rescued thanks another abductee, the witch Holly Cleary.) She was abducted by my least favorite character of this season, the awful Violet.

Violet (played by Karolina Wydra) first appeared in Season 6, in the vampire prison camp. I don't entirely remember that storyline - first she tried to eat Jason, then she forced him to become her boyfriend, or something. Either way, Violet always seemed to me like she hated other women. Then Jason upset her by having one last fling with Jessica at Sookie's party, and she retaliated by kidnapping and planning to kill Sheriff Andy Bellefleur's half-fairy daughter Adilyn, Adilyn's boyfriend/stepbrother-to-be Wade Cleary (Holly's son), and Jessica.

Jessica's former lover Hoyt Fortenberry disappeared several seasons ago, when Jessica wiped his memory clean of their relationship and he moved to Alaska. He returned to Bon Temps for his mother's funeral - Violet reached into Mrs. Fortenberry's chest and pulled her heart out. He brought a fiancee, but they were fighting over the issue of children, which she wanted but he didn't. Jason and Hoyt both showed up at Violet's creepy fortress to rescue Jessica and the kids. Violet had just finished explaining her evil plan to hideously torture Jessica when Hoyt's bullet turned Violet to the goo she so richly deserved to become.

In a very short time, Jessica fell back in love with Hoyt and won his love again. In the finale, they got married, with Bill giving her away. Deborah Ann Woll looked spectacularly gorgeous as bride!Jessica.

Creative Commons image by Gage Skidmore

That was my favorite part of the finale. Other parts impressed me much, much less.

Arlene Fowler Bellefleur

Let us state for the record that TV-Arlene is a million percent better than book-Arlene. Book-Arlene was a racist bitch. TV-Arlene was much more sympathetic, and I would like her even if the character wasn't played by Carrie Preston, who also plays Grace Hendricks on Person of Interest (and whose real-life husband is Michael Emerson).

Creative Commons image by watchwithkristin

TV-Arlene gets a happy ending, too. She almost died in the rescue attempt, but her life was saved by vampire blood from the newly-introduced Keith (No Last Name). As usual in True Blood land, because Keith's blood is in Arlene, Arlene dreams about Keith. Preston did an almost fully nude sex scene on a pool table with her co-star, the beautiful Riley Smith, for the dream sequence. In waking life, Keith and Arlene are attracted to one another, but because she's hep V positive, they take their relationship very slowly. In one lovely scene, they simply dance.

The finale implies they stayed together.

Tomorrow Next week we'll examine some of our other favorites, including Lafayette, Sookie, and Bill.

Currently Reading: 'Vampyres of Hollywood' by Adrienne Barbeau and Michael Scott #FridayReads

As I mentioned on a previous Book Club Friday, I'm reading Vampyres of Hollywood, a not-too-serious novel by movie actress Adrienne Barbeau and co-author Michael Scott (the Irish novelist, not the character from the U.S. The Office.) 

Without giving away too much of the plot, I thought it would be fun to look at the real-life actors who appear as vampire characters in this book. The Old Hollywood vampyres, according to Barbeau and Scott, include:

Charles Brabin (1882-1957): English-born American film director who married Theda Bara in 1921. He was the original director of the 1925 version of Ben-Hur, but was replaced fairly early in the production.  

Newspaper ad for While New York Sleeps, directed by Charles Brabin. Public domain image within the U.S.

Douglas Fairbanks (1883-1939): Jewish American actor born in Denver, nicknamed "The First King of Hollywood." His film career spanned 1915-1934 and included The Mark of Zorro (1920), the role of D'Artagnan in The Three Musketeers (1921), and Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew (1929). He married Mary Pickford in 1920. 

Public domain within the U.S.

James Whale (1889-1957): English film director whose credits include Frankenstein (1931), The Invisible Man (1933), and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Sir Ian McKellen played him in the 1998 movie Gods and Monsters. He was one of the first gay men in Hollywood to be "out." 

Mary Pickford (1892-1979): Toronto-born Canadian-American actress and behind-the-scenes business woman considered "America's Sweetheart." She was one of the founders of the United Artists company, along with her husband Fairbanks. Starred opposite her husband in The Taming of the Shrew. America's Sweetheart was a serious party girl who developed a severe alcohol problem. 

Mary Pickford. Public domain image in the U.S.

Olive Thomas (1894-1920): American (Pittsburgh area) illustrators' model, Ziegfield Follies chorus girl, and silent film actress. Her 1920 film The Flapper helped popularize the "flapper" lifestyle, and she was as notorious for partying in life as she was in the movies. She married Mary Pickford's brother Jack in 1916. She died from drinking mercury bichloride liquid, which was used at the time as a topical treatment for syphilis, which her husband had. (Remember, antibiotics didn't come into common use until around the time of World War II.) Her death was ruled accidental and not suicide, but it was quite a scandal at the time - one of the earliest Hollywood scandals. 

Olive Thomas. Public domain image within the U.S. 

Orson Welles (1915-1985): Wisconsin-born actor, screenwriter, director, and producer famed for his 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast that many people believed was a real news report of an alien invasion, and for numerous films including Citizen Kane. He was married to Rita Hayworth for a period in the 1940s and the two had a daughter together, and he also had an affair with the gorgeous Mexican actress Dolores del Rio. He played Edward Fairfax Rochester in the 1943 version of Jane Eyre. 

Welles in The Lady From Shanghai trailer. Public domain within the U.S. 

Peter Lorre (1904-1964): Jewish American (naturalized 1941) actor born in what is now Slovakia, which at the time was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. After fighting in World War I, the young actor began working with the legendary playwright Bertolt Brecht. He was then cast as a serial killer in the film M by the German director Fritz Lang. He began making English-language films by learning his lines phonetically and is known for such movies as The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. Toward the end of this life he also made two low-budget horror films with Roger Corman. 

Lorre is caricatured in the Looney Tunes cartoon "Hollywood Steps Out." Public domain within the U.S. 

Pola Negri (1897-1987): Polish-born American silent film actress and ballerina. She made a number of silent films in Polish, then in German, and then she came to Hollywood and made English-language films. As the first European star in Hollywood, she's said to have paved the way for Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and their like. 

Pola Negri. The U.S. Library of Congress is not aware of any restrictions on the use of this image.

Theda Bara (1885-1955): Silent film actress, born Theodosia Goodman in Cincinnati. Her Hollywood name is an anagram of "Death Arab," because the studio thought it sounded exotic. They claimed she was the daughter of an Arab sheik and a French mother, born in the Sahara. (Close enough - her father was a Polish Jew, and her mother was of French-speaking Swiss descent, although Bara was, as I mentioned, born in Ohio.) She's remembered mainly for her risque costumes in the 1917 film Cleopatra. Most of her films are now lost (including a turn as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet), and only about 20 seconds of Cleopatra are currently extant. 

Bara in Cleopatra. Public domain within the U.S. 

Tod Browning (1880-1962): American film actor, writer, and director from Louisville, Kentucky, best known for the 1931 Dracula. He literally ran away and joined the circus when he was 16 years old. After that, he became a vaudeville performer. He was directing at a vaudeville theater when he met fellow Kentuckian D.W. Griffith, the notorious director, who set Browning to performing in nickelodeon reels. When Griffith moved his base of operations to Hollywood in 1913, Browning went with him. 

Lobby card for Browning's 1932 circus-themed movie Freaks. Public domain within the U.S.

    Rudolph Valentino (1895-1926): Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina d'Antonguolla was an Italian actor working in the United States, famous for his "Latin lover" image. He kind of stumbled into acting because he was poor and he took on a lot of odd jobs. The 1921 film The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse made him a star, but another film released that same year, The Sheik, cemented his image. (Surprisingly, Valentino used the publicity surrounding the role to speak out against stereotyping of Arab people, acknowledging the long tradition of arts, science, and culture in Arab history.) Adored by women, his sexuality was something of a puzzle, but he was possibly bisexual. He was supposedly dating Pola Negri when he developed appendicitis, which turned into the case of peritonitis that killed him. Another book that features Valentino as a fictional character is Loving the Undead: An Anthology of Romance (Sort Of), edited by Katherine Sanger. Valentino's ghost appears in "The Sheik and I" by Leslie Brown. 

All of these people, Scott and Barbeau write, make pretty good vampyres, except the self-absorbed Valentino. Lorre is actually quite old, having had a hand in the French Revolution. Vampyres of Hollywood also mentions a vampyre named Charlie. I assume they mean Charlie Chaplin, but I'm not sure.

If you enjoy nonfiction about Old Hollywood, then you might enjoy The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood. You'll learn quite a bit about Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo in it, and a little about Valentino, too. You can also read about Mary Pickford and Theda Bara in The American Women's Almanac by Louise Berkinow.

#FridayReads: Books I'm Currently Reading Aug. 22, 2014

I'm having one of those "read 1,000 things at the same time" moments again, but what's new? I love books. I'm kind of obsessed with them, really.

My main book is Four: A Divergent Short Story Collection, which I picked up at the public library a few days ago. I loved the Divergent trilogy. Even though I already bought and read one of the e-book versions of "The Transfer," the first story in the collection, I haven't read all four stories yet.

I had intended to take a short hiatus from reading young adult books, but the opportunity to get this from the library weakened my resolve.

By the way, I said in my Divergent review that Tris and Caleb Prior are fraternal twins. Four makes it clear they're "Irish twins." In other words, they were born ten or eleven months apart. I missed that upon first reading.

I had been reading the final book in the All Souls Trilogy series, The Book of Life by Deborah Harkness. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to finish more than a third of it before it had to go back to the library.

It's too wonderful. I don't want to gulp it down. I need to savor. I think I'll have to buy the e-book and read it in my Nook.

The book I'm currently reading in my Nook is Fated (Vampire Destiny #1) by Alexandra Anthony. It's a paranormal romance, and a pretty quick, easy read.

The vampire, Stefan Lifsten, is tall, blond, and Nordic, heavily reminiscent of Eric Northman in Charlaine Harris's Southern Vampire Mysteries series. The heroine, Josephine, is a telepath who reads people's minds. She's very much like Harris's Sookie Stackhouse. It almost reads like True Blood fan fiction - and I'm not complaining. I'm liking it.

The last episode of True Blood is coming up this Sunday. I'm looking forward to it, and I'm dreading it at the same time.

The book I'm reading in my kitchen as I wait for coffee to brew and water to boil is Vampyres of Hollywood by Adrienne Barbeau and Michael Scott.

It's a paranormal murder mystery. Half the chapters are written from the point of view of a vampire/horror film actress who's sort of the sheriff of Hollywood the same way Eric is the sheriff of the Shreveport region. All of the victims (at least the first three) were her vampiric creations, her "children." The other half of the chapters are written from the POV of the mortal human detective who's investigating the crime. He doesn't know that vampires really exist.

I haven't read any of Michael Scott's other books, but he wrote the YA fantasy Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel series. And of course we all remember who Nicholas Flamel is...he created the Philosopher's Stone, the very thing that gave young Harry Potter so much trouble. Well, that's the folklore. He was an actual historical person, too.

Barbeau in a Creative Commons image by Leslie Gottlieb. 

Adrienne Barbeau, of course, is an actress as well as an author. Very beautiful lady.

The book I keep in my husband's van in case of reading time is HellFire by Kate Douglas. This is part of my PNR rotation. It's the second book in the DemonSlayers series. It's a silly-but-fun paranormal romance series with a hero from the lost continent of Lemuria. (That's an interesting subject we'll save for when I finish the book. I have a thing for discarded scientific theories.)

Okay, the cover model with the long blond hair looks exactly like Jason Isaacs as Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies. As I'm reading the book, though, I'm imagining the tall, white-blond hero as Lee Pace in the Hobbit movies. I'm imagining Rutina Wesley - True Blood's Tara Thornton - in the role of the heroine, Ginny. (That's Ginny as in Virginia, not like Harry Potter's Ginny. Mrs. Potter's nickname comes from Ginevra, the Italian equivalent of Jennifer or Guinevere.)

I love me some Kate Douglas. She had me hooked from the first time I picked up Wolf Tales.

Now, the serious book I'm reading is my latest Amazon Vine pick. It's called Religio Duplex: How the Enlightenment Reinvented Egyptian Religion by Jan Assmann, translated from German by Robert Savage. (I don't know what Assmann means in the German language, but it's unfortunately giggle-worthy in English. I can't help but think of the Seinfeld episode in which Kramer mistakenly receives the "ASS MAN" vanity license plates.) This scholarly work describes the history of a thought, from a Greek interpretation of the Egyptian religion during antiquity to the re-emergence of this interpretation during the European Enlightenment era of the 1600s and 1700s. Assmann is an Egyptologist, and he's also a scholar of European history, so this is right up his alley. I'll write a detailed review as soon as I finish this dense academic work. I'm about halfway through.

What are you reading?