The Silver Kiss by Annette Curtis Klause

Zoe is wary when, in the dead of night, the beautiful but frightening Simon comes to her house. Simon seems to understand the pain of loneliness and death and Zoe's brooding thoughts about her dying mother.

Simon is one of the undead, a vampire, seeking revenge for the gruesome death of his mother three hundred years ago. Does Simon dare ask Zoe to help free him from this lifeless chase and its intolerable solitude?

I wanted to read The Silver Kiss because it's a vampire book (who doesn't love vampires nowadays?) and also because it was written in 1990, way before the current vampire craze. I was really curious how Annette Curtis Klause would fashion her vampires. This time, vampires can't walk out in sunlight, are repelled by crucifixes, and can't cross over water. To turn someone into a vampire they have to suck the blood of a vampire (reminiscent of The Vampire Diaries, which came out around this time). So now that we have a basis for a book, let's get into the actual storytelling.

This is the second book I've read by Klause (the first being Blood and Chocolate) and the writing in The Silver Kiss is definitely similar to that book. It's kind of shallow, without getting into to much detail in the setting or characters. You find out a lot about Zoe and Simon throughout the book, but since it's written in third-person, it's hard to get into their heads (the book switches point-of-view between Zoe and Simon). The relationship between Zoe and Simon is also pretty shallow, but my expectations were low so that helped. She sees him twice I think, and then is inviting him in her house, which is a little unrealistic. I really enjoyed the ending though because Simon is trying to avenge his mother's death and it gets a little action-packed at the end. A nice touch was having Zoe's mother dying of cancer. It was really sad, but that event coincided nicely with Simon's immortality and the overall theme of death. There was some good discussion on death near the end which makes The Silver Kiss a little more in-depth of a novel. Overall, not a masterpiece of vampire novels or fantasy, but an interesting read nonetheless.

6 out of 10.