If you find yourself wandering your bookstore stacks looking for something to read 
and find yourself in either the horror or gay literature sections and come across a book 
entitled Bound in Blood: The Erotic Journey of a Vampire… keep walking. You have better 
things to do with your time and money.

I was looking for something to take with me on a vacation this summer and the title and 
cover write up sounded interesting. So thinking 'what harm could it be?' I plunked down 
the $15 for this paperback. I can honestly say it was one of the biggest mistakes I have 
made in quite a while. Had my plane been hijacked, I could have incapacitated the 
terrorists by simply reading portions of the prose and rendered them defenseless out of 
shock and boredom.

The main character is far from one that a reader can identify, let alone sympathize with… 
be they gay, straight, human, vampire or kumquat. Jack, the hero, is a vampire who has 
all he needs, is bored with life, bored with un-death, bored with sex, and hates his 
mother. Basically he is a vampire with absolutely no purpose for being. He does not fuck, 
feed, or kill out of any passion. He is nothing more than a narcissistic, anti-social 
bore. Had he been human he still would have had no redeeming qualities.

As for plot, it is as pointless to the author as motivation. The story moves along with 
little rhyme or reason, spackled together with snippits of information gained from a news 
anchor who randomly becomes part of the story in a most cliche and annoying way. The 
vampire system in the book is fairly simple, but stupid. It seems the rules are hidden to 
try and induce some sort of interest. Jack should care that he needs to finish a ritual 
soon or suffer, but he's too busy being dull and annoying. Rather than study the library 
of books he has at his disposal and figure out how to be a proper vampire, he seems 
content to hide in theater and social activities.

There were too many characters in the story as well. The author gave lots of information 
on each one and then killed them off shortly thereafter. This gave the end effect of a 
very detailed shopping list. Actually, in the end my weekly shopping list is more 
thrilling and adventuresome than this book. I think the high body count and the detailed 
description was intended to impress the reader with the cost of Jack's existence, perhaps 
it was supposed to make us feel for the characters who were brutally killed. Instead, it 
taught us that each new introduction was going to be a few paragraphs of description that 
would be moot by the end of the chapter.

That, on top of the pathetic police narrative gives the reader insight into a world 
peopled by complex and interesting folks who are useless, pathetic, and incompetent. 
There is no character in this book that the book would have been worse without.

The ending was anti-climatic in EVERY sense of the phrase and left the reader wondering 
not "what happens next in this adventure" but "why did I just waste $15 and brain cells 
on this book?" Not only do I want my $15 back; I want the 3.5 months it took me to force 
my way through this atrocity claiming to be literature back as well.

If this was meant to be an erotic adventure, as the title implies, and thereby intended 
to titillate the reader, the author failed miserably. In fact the sheer mental images 
of "nappy buttocks", "tors on a flat mesa erupting in volcanoes of passion" and other 
phrases not worth repeating was not only excruciating to the reader it turned them off 
completely.

Bound in Blood was not only excruciating to read, but a complete turn off as well.

I read this book, I'm sorry I read it, and I made my best friend read it to just so 
someone would share my pain. 

If at some point in your life you are told you must either let yourself be hit by a Mack 
Truck going 150 mph or read Bound in Blood… go for the truck. It will hurt less.