I’ve been reviewing mostly... good, but underrated stories so far. Things that I think of as gems that need a little more tailoring before they’re perfect. Most of those stories suffer in the area of views, votes and comments, probably because of those flaws.
This review is a little different.
To start, I searched through the list of tales on Wattpad that have made their way into the Featured list, then I narrowed down my search to the first story with any sort of grammatical faux-pas in the title.
THE VAMPIRE UNDERGROUND was the first to hit that particular criteria, and so it is the subject of this review.
Written by mister Brian Rowe, THE VAMPIRE UNDERGROUND (damn that’s annoying. It feels like I’m screaming at you. Not that I usually care about screaming at you, but it feels wrong since it’s not some sort of insult aimed at your largess) is a simple tale about a girl who meets a boy. Oh, and there are vampires, if you hadn’t guessed from the name.
I delved into this one with a rather... lukewarm approach. After all, I’m no fan of the vampire genre, especially after the whole Twilight fiasco of a few years back and the sudden boom in sappy, teen romances with extra blood sucking.
All things considered, I have to say that this isn’t... half bad. Sure, it touches on quite a few of the typical cliches. Teens being teens, horror scenes ripped right out from a few movies that are now iconic, and maybe a few twists too many that are divulged right in the blurb. Still, all these things are forgivable.
This is what surprises me most, and, of course, there’s a lesson to be learnt here.
This story takes a common idea, one that is for all intensive purposes overused. It then uses those very same ideas well. Well enough that I don’t care that I’ve seen them before.
No, I’m not a big fan, even now. But, I can’t sit here and say that this story is bad. It has quite a few redeeming qualities that took me by surprise. How did it do this? And, perhaps more interestingly, how can you do it?
I can’t delve into all of the science of it, but, on the surface it’s a simple idea.
Despite being a little cheesy in his choice the themes and ideas, Mister Rowe here wrote with good prose and reinforced it with every other element at his disposal.
Where his ideas were perhaps lame, he hid them with intriguing characters. Where his series of events might have been predictable, he placed them in well-detailed settings, hiding the blemish like the pound of make-up your mother rolls on ever morning.
It’s an interesting way of working with a story, and one that I find myself endorsing. Perhaps if this became common, then the hatred of cliche we all harbour would lessen just a little?
Does this story suck? Yeah, but you wouldn’t notice it, so you might as well give it a go.
Keep warm, stay cool.
