Discovery Decidedly Derivative
I am imagining a corporate brainstorming session. A guy in a suit says "Ok, chicks dig these genre vampire romance series, right? We put a pic of a sexy guy on the front, shovel on the sex, and BOOM you gotta hit. But we can make MORE money by hittin the brainy chicks who won't set foot in the Romance Section cuz they're too classy. So, let's make a high-brow vampire romance for the snooty chicks! Get some brainy girl to write it, keep Fabio OFF the cover, and shelve it in Literature! Cha ching!" I don't know if that's how "Discovery of Witches" came about, but it's a theory not without merit. The plot is a clever amalgam of every tried and true formula out there. Harkness chooses only the most lucrative franchises to pull from. Her first stop is Harry Potter. Nice, unassuming, every-woman heroine whose parents died under mysterious circumstances finds out (surprise) that she has amazing magical powers that she cannot understand or control. Action ensues when these powers are coveted by a coterie of creepy creatures. Thanks, J.K. Rowling! Next stop, Anne Rice's witch and vampire novels. Multigenerational, wacky witch families (Queen of the Damned)? Check! Tall, muscular, sexy vampires with more money than god who run multinational corporations (Interview with the Vampire)? Check! A haunted house whose every decoration is painstakingly described (The Witching Hour)? Check! Now, let's leave Anne Rice and move to the other queen of vampire angst, Stephanie Meyer, and her Twilight Saga. No, Harkness' vamipire doesn't sparkle, but his brooding, tortured silences, his astonishing prettiness, and his desperate need to protect his damsel in distress is perfectly copied in "Discovery"'s Matthew. And these are just the main targets of "Discovery"'s cut-and-paste plotting. There are any number of vampire romances crowding the shelves that share these same themes. All the pulp vampire series draw out the drama of the vampire's need to hide from normal humans. "Discover" covers no new ground here. Every one of the pulps spends time showing the reader the hero/ine's special powers. Harkness sheds no new light here, either. The author has gone to a lot of trouble to copy all of these themes and authors and somehow comes out with a pale, bland story. Someone evidently told her that in order to make her characters three-dimensional she must describe in detail every item of clothing they wear and every cup of tea they consume. We must also slog through a long description of the heroine's yoga class for no apparent reason. I fault not only the author, but her editor who might have spoken up and said, "Honey, cut down on the yoga and tea. Please." To give it credit, there is one way in which this novel deviates from the pattern. There's no sex. At all. Whatsoever. Zero. This is an interesting choice because if Harkness' target demographic is the vampire reader, they expect some sex. Maybe not the erotic free-for-all that Anne Rice's novels offer, but something. "Discover" is the sad result when a novel is conceived as a marketing ploy rather than storytelling. There is not one original idea here.
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