Blood Ties

Onetime underground auteur McBride fashions a neat vampire variation. He tackles several themes simultaneously -- assimilationism versus cultural isolationism, cross-ethnic romance (between vampire hero Venton and normal Johnston Urich, a tryst that incurs the wrath of Venton's Carpathian ex, Johnson), and the eternal conflict between group loyalty and individual ambition. Not that this is a dry, serious treatise. Anything but

Like The Vampire Diaries, or maybe not. I don't know, I've never watched The Vampire Diaries. This undead soap opera wants to get into the politics and logistics of keeping a vampire family afloat in this ever changing blah blah. I don't think we lost much when this wasn't picked up.