Books: That Which Bites

By Lisa Fary

Vampire stuff doesn’t really get my attention anymore. Oh, I’ll watch it. Sometimes, I’m even pleasantly surprised by a new perspective on the creatures and the genre, but it takes quite a bit to get me really intrigued.

Celis T. Rono managed to do that even before she introduced the vampire babies in her novel, That Which Bites.

I’m going to admit right now: I was initially put off by the cover. Yes, it’s superficial of me, but the cover serves a bigger purpose than simply binding the pages together. I really wish That Which Bites had better cover art because this doesn’t do justice to what’s inside.

I could not put this book down.

I tore through That Which Bites. I read it in between meetings. I read it until two in the morning even though I had to get up at six. Then, I read it on the train even though reading on wheels makes me motion sick.

That Which Bites takes place in a future LA in a world which has been decimated by something called the Grey Armageddon. With the world in chaos, vampires – which already existed – went public, became Earth’s dominant breed, and enslaved what remained of humanity as livestock.

From this comes the star, Julia Poe, a smart little girl who manages to survive the Grey Armageddon and is clever enough to avoid being grabbed by vampires.

Poe raises herself mostly in isolation from age ten or so, learning from movies she snagged from a video rental place and it shows in her character. By age twenty-two, when most of the book takes place, the girl has little in the way of social skills, prays to Bruce Lee and Xena, and filters nearly every experience through a movie or book she’s read while hidden away in her bunker. She has no other context.

Rono’s vampires are not the animals of 30 Days of Night, but are far from the sexy bloodsuckers of True Blood.  These vamps are also racist douchebags, feeding off only white folk and relegating anyone with the slightest bit of minority blood to latrine duty. Reading the vampire council deliberate and pontificate was kind of like reading a Townhall.com columnist’s crazed rants about Sonia Sotomayor.

That said, being the political junkie I am, I read quite a bit into the struggle for power portrayed in the book. There are numerous similarities between that and our real world generational/ ideological struggle. I don’t know if that was Rono’s intent, but that’s what I took from it.

That Which Bites is Rono’s first novel and it does show. The writing itself, for the most part, is only fair. There are places with awkward exposition, although they’re far apart and are all bookended by violent action. The point of view isn’t always rock steady. One wonders how, ten years after mass destruction, there are still so many canned goods, Pixies t-shirts, and new pairs of Dickies to be had.

However, there is a lot to like.

Rono takes her story at a breakneck pace – Poe rarely has time to recover from one fight to the next and neither does the reader.

I liked that Rono didn’t give everything away. By the end, the source of the Grey Armageddon remains a mystery, as does Poe’s supernaturally impeccable aim.

Then there’s Poe herself. Cutesy? No. Sexy? Not a chance if she can help it. She’s brutal, she fights dirty, and when she’s done, she has the scars to show for it. Girly girls beware: Poe is the Ellen Ripley of vampire huntresses.

And, of course, there are those vampire babies – googly bits of crawling, bitey death.

That Which Bites is on par with many other first novels – it has its problems, but holds promise. Rono demonstrates good story instincts, and as someone who clearly has a love for the genre, she knows enough to give it her own spin. I’m very curious to see how she grows as a writer.

That Which Bites is available at Amazon and other online booksellers. For more about Celis T. Rono, visit her website.

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Lisa Fary’s early exposure to classic Battlestar Galactica in 1979 is largely responsible for her lifelong interest in science fiction and her childhood ambition of being an intergalactic space cowgirl. She thinks diagramming sentences is a fun alternative to Sudoku.

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