Online Book Club Review | It’s Hard To Be A Vampire by Viktoria Faust

General Information

This is my first published review for Online Book Club, a site that readers can use to read and review books with some structure involved! As you go along, Online Book Club also compensates its readers for some of their reviews; if you meet all their criteria!

I would be eternally grateful if you could hit the link below and read my review and maybe, possibly, leave a comment!

https://forums.onlinebookclub.org/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=212872

Of course, while I wasn’t a fan of this book, you can choose to read it for yourself (its free on Kindle Unlimited)

Review:

This is a collection of short stories which contrary to the title, don’t centre on being a vampire the way we traditionally understand what a vampire is. However, in each story, there is something that takes energy from humans or isn’t entirely human. There are 6 stories of varying length, but the book is a short one as a whole at 86 pages. The estimated Kindle reading time of around 2 hours is a fair one.

Viktoria Faust certainly has some interesting ideas in this book, from Sandra who would do anything to be a vampire, to an artist who uses the blood of people to create, to a two-headed monster who you feel a bit more sympathy for, and a never-ending city, surrounded by never-ending fog. I appreciate details that the author includes such as the reference to the “Slaughtered Ox” painting.

Even though the ideas in Its Hard to be Vampire are interesting, the whole attempt is amateur, and I would not recommend it to anyone. While there weren’t any grammar mistakes as such, there were things that could be watched out for that the author could have made it a better book to read. Viktoria Faust favour’s an old-fashioned, gothic if you will, style for her writing, but then throws in phrases like “mess with her head,” which take away from the experience.

I’ll focus on something from the titular story, “It’s hard to be a vampire,” which I feel can be used to illustrate several flaws in this book. There is a lot of fat-phobia in this story, to the extent that I wanted to put this down. I powered through this with the understanding that women all over the world are different and if the author chooses to depict one who wants to lose weight then that is their thing. Our main character in this story is never really developed; she’s okay with a person being murdered in front of her, she hates her family (but we never know why), and she thinks that you can claim to be on your period when you’re covered in dead man’s blood. This sort of unhinged behaviour continues in the other stories. Both the artist and the writer have a great deal of man pain that hurts people around them; they do things for no rhyme or reason; their relationships with others evolve for no reason and we don’t get a sense of who they may be on the inside except unhinged men. A short story isn’t an excuse to leave things unfinished. In addition, while an author can have a certain style of writing, all the characters sound the same in this book.

I think lovers of horror would perhaps be interested in this book, but I think the author has a long way to go. As a whole, I’m leaving this book one out of four stars. I would not recommend this to anyone, and although the author has interesting ideas, nothing was particularly memorable, and none of the stories were well executed.