Review - Castrato: A Vampire's Redemption: Book One by Cypher Andrews

Let’s start out with the blurb for this book, since it might be described as a little misleading:

You might think it’s a fairly obvious statement, but most vampires actually enjoy what they are. They revel in it.

Nathan Bane is a vampire who doesn’t want to be a vampire.

“You know, I just figured if it was my fate to become a monster, at least I could control what kind of monster I would become.”

Once referred to as “The Renegade” and “a law unto himself” Nathaniel is called out of retirement to help find a vampire who is killing and dis-member-ing gay and bisexual males in the Seattle area of Puget Sound.

Capitol Hill is virtually shutting down in the evenings and unless you’re a lesbian or have a death wish, you stay indoors after dark.

All Hallow’s Eve is fast approaching and the invisibility that the nocturnal society of Seattle hides behind is being threatened…one castration at a time.

Can Bloodbane, the monster locked within Nathan, keep hold of itself, when the emotional needs and life-threatening worries of both the humans and nocturnals in his life wears at the very sensitive edges of his own psychological cage?

The blurb seems to tell us quite a lot, and in fact it does indeed tell you things you would never know by reading the book, which is a rather curious thing for blurbs to do. Granted, this is the first in a series, so maybe all will be revealed in time. Unfortunately, therein lies the problem. There’s so much going on in the first volume, most of it going unresolved, that it’s hard to get any real feel for the main characters, or even be sure who is a main character and who is just an interesting bit player.

The vampire Nathan is certainly one of the central characters, but although he does get referred to as “Renegade” once or twice, there’s no explanation as to why, and there’s no reference at all to being “a law unto himself” or in retirement. Retirement from what?

Just as curious is what the the blurb leaves out. There’s no mention of Nathan’s long time human lover Joseph, who plays a significant role in this book. We gain very little insight into Joseph and Nathan’s relationship or how it came to be. This same lack of depth applies to some degree to every character introduced, and there are quite a few of them. You might assume that you’ll get to know more about them in future books of the series, but there’s so little given away in this first book that you probably won’t care enough about any of them to want to know more.

The hunt for a killer described in the blurb is just one of many sub-plots within this book, and the only one that appears to get resolved by the end. The multitude of plot lines adds to the complexity of the book, making it that much harder to really get into the story. As with the characters, we don’t know which plots are recurring themes and which ones are just diversions that won’t get picked up in later installments.

It’s too bad, really. At times, the writing in “Castrato” is truly evocative. It just doesn’t save a story that has too many threads to keep track of. The result is a story that just doesn’t grab the reader and make them want to follow the characters’ further adventures.

“Castrato: A Vampire’s Redemption” is available from Amazon.