Book review: I, Vampire, by Jody Scott
This is by far the craziest story I’ve read this year, from an author who could never be accused of formulaic composition. If I described it as a ‘cross between…’, I’d have to list some many subjects your eyes would flip over. The title is inspired by I, Claudius (Robert Graves, 1934), which also inspired I, Robot (Isaac Asimov, 1950). You’re about to say I, Know.
An unageing vampire’s beginnings, her encounters through the melting pot of history, then breaking the surface again into dance classes, door to door sales artists, time travel, lesbian crushes, identity theft (incl. Mr Spock from Star Trek), a slamming of consumer capitalism and then the plot veers into an extraterrestrial contact fantasy and questions what humans want their place to be in the wider galactic community. There’s an ‘it was all a dream’ red herring ending which is then overturned because that was implanted and it was not all a dream. What a riot. I think the author wrote this mainly to entertain herself, so if anyone else out there happens to bounce along with each kick of mayhem then that’s good too. Pulp, crass entertainment? Possibly, but Jody Scott must have had one of the most original minds in 20th century fiction. I guess it’s too late to call her up and shoot the breeze now.
Personally, I like this audacious style very much, as you’ve probably cottoned on to. This has a messy plot with a confused, feeble ending that doesn’t resolve much at all, hence no five star rating. I can picture the writer looking for a way to introduce the alien Benaroya character from her other book. Having said that, it’s also luminous fiction anarchy of the rawest kind, not taking itself too seriously in a pleasurable flinch of a book that harbours no interest in readers’ opinions. You need to catch up with it because this story is going places, not the other way around.
I would say there’s nothing like it (possibly Robert Sheckley’s Dimension of Miracles?) but I then had a heart-stopping shock. One of the sub-plots about collecting famous people’s DNA and running a business offering designer babies is an idea I thought was mine, original 2020, which I wrote up in the story ‘Genealogy Club’ both in print and on YouTube. I am now flabbergasted and dismayed to discover that this low-down, sneaky, conniving, cunning cow of an author not only completely stole my idea in the most underhand act of back alley plagiarism I have ever seen but was so calculating about it that she somehow managed to get it into print some 36 years earlier.
