Back of Book: 

Can an angel also be a monster?

Gregorie Babin has existed in a gently lulling darkness for so long he’s not even sure he’s human anymore. Surrounded by four walls, without light or space in which to move, he has become what he envisions as a mollusk inside a shell. Is he alive or dead, or perhaps in some kind of purgatory or Hell? The answer lies in a past he no longer remembers. It is only when random forces break him out of this perpetual darkness that he can begin to know the devastating truth—and what it means for his future. 

Book Number: One

Genre: Adult | Fantasy 

Review: 🌟🌟

A short book featuring a fledgling vampire who washes ashore with few memories of who he is or how he came to be there.

Gregorie Babin has been trapped in darkness for as long as he can remember. With no hope of escaping, Gregorie has given in to his fate. One day, a great force breaks him out of his prison and Gregorie finds himself afloat at sea. When he swims to shore, nothing looks familiar and he has no recollection of how he got there. Gregorie soon learns that many secrets lie just beneath the surface and that the reason he was trapped for so long is darker than he ever could have imagined.

Right away, I found this one to have a really funny premise. A newly formed vampire with partial memory loss has no idea that he is a vampire or how in the world he ended up in America. It was comical to see all the strange activities he did, such as dig holes to avoid sunlight and cram himself into strange boxes to rest during the day. I found Gregorie's exploits in the beginning to be humorous and enjoyable to read about.

However, nothing about Gregorie's predicament was all that surprising. About a fourth of the way in my boyfriend asked me what this book is about and I could pretty much rattle off everything one needed to know about Gregorie's past and how he got turned into a vampire without having read all that much of the book. I feel if this one would have been told in chronological order rather than set up as a half-done mystery, I could have found myself liking this one more. Nothing was surprising, so his lost memories didn't hold that much weight.

By the second half of this book, it really began to drag. Somehow, Gregorie is still in denial that he is a vampire even after drinking the blood from raw animals three times and he still hasn't figured out that he was sleeping for hundreds of years. I feel even an unintelligent character couldn't avoid those two fundamental truths for all that long. This book isn't lengthy by any standards, yet it was still a drag to get through the middle section.

The ending picked up a bit, but nothing shocking happened (well except for that one super random and disturbing detail that I'll talk about later). The other vampires that are introduced are highly stereotypical vampires, with the man being huge and deadly and the woman being demanding and beautiful. Also, it didn't shock me one bit that either of these characters appeared nor was I surprised with their relation to one another.

The one thing that did shock me about this one is that incest was brought into it. It is clear early on that one of the characters has a bad and abusive relationship with her family, but I wasn't expecting incest to be in the question. For rape between family members to come into this story and have little impact felt rather jarring to me and certainly took me out of the story for a bit. It turns out that some things happened between her brother and her, and I was shocked to see a thing like this appear out of the blue.

Long story short, there just wasn't anything all that special about this one. The characters are all lackluster, the plot barely plods along, and everything is super predictable. I fear this book may have suffered severely from book one syndrome, with the lore of the world being established and little else. Sadly though, the lore isn't all that unique or complicated, so this really shouldn't have been the case.

I'm so conflicted because I adore Catanzarite's newsletter and feel that her writing style is strong, but the structure of her novels and her characters just feel like they are extremely lacking something important. I will probably still read the next book in this series to see if it goes anywhere juicy, but it will sadden me if it is more mid than anything else.

Overall "Staked" is a pretty typical vampire tale that just happens to feature a very confused vampire in the first third or so. I found myself super engaged at the beginning, losing interest in the middle, and felt no surprise by anything that happened in the end. I seriously wish I could have liked this one more, but everything about it just screamed middle of the road. The characters weren't anything special, the plot hardly existed, and I found the split narrative to be rather ineffective. I'm definitely willing to give Catanzarite's work another chance, but I seriously need something to impress me in the next one if I'm going to commit to keep reading her books in the long run.