“It was the mundanity that made him forget, at times, that he was a vampire. He was feared, even if his prey no longer believed in his existence. He was immortal. He was strong, fast, capable of wielding dark magic. And he had to do the laundry.”

Madness of the Elder Vampire by Darby Vernon is an adult, urban fantasy take on vampires that you might want to check out if you like vampire fiction but not vampire romantasy. The romantic relationships in this story are, honestly, pretty messed up, which I think is the point of the book: Vampires might be immortal, ultra-powerful predators but as human beings, they’re walking disasters.

Adrian is an angry younger vampire in a relationship with a 600-year-old elder named Garrick. Before Adrian was turned, he was homeless, and forty years later, he is still almost entirely dependent on his more powerful lover. For immortal beings, vampires live a very precarious existence, dependent on the whims of Elder Regents who control their vassals in mafia-like ways. Becoming an Elder happens to vampires at about 250 years old, giving them enormous magical power, but at a price: all Elders suffer from Madness. Which basically means all the Regents are cruel, paranoid psychopaths.

Adrian keeps trying to find ways to break free of this system—with devastating effects—and our story begins soon after he’s forced to flee his home city of Los Angeles with his lover and his lover’s other vassal, a young vampire named Val, to put themselves under the protection of the Regent of San Francisco. But strange things are happening in this Regent’s circle, and Adrian soon starts butting heads again.

I finished this book feeling very conflicted, so let’s start with what I liked. First of all, Darby Vernon is a very talented writer. The writing itself was excellent. The dialogue felt natural, point of view was handled well, especially in introspective moments, and the prose was more than solid. This is a debut, and I think Vernon is a writer to watch in the future.

My problems with the book fell into two main areas: Adrian as a protagonist and an over-reliance on action scenes at the expense of emotional development.

These two problems were intertwined for me. Adrian isn’t a passive protagonist, exactly; he does a lot, but he never really articulates a goal or a mission for himself. And though events around him change as the result of his actions, he doesn’t really change that much himself. This wants to be a character-driven book, I think, and in some respects it is. But it felt like, for the most part, external action was substituted for internal drive. Adrian doesn’t have a character arc so much as a horizontal line with a few bumps in it, although his situation changes drastically from the beginning to the end.

Standard writing advice is to begin the story in medias res (” in the middle of things”) with a strong hook, and I feel like this is (very often) interpreted as “Begin with an action scene.” But getting hit with emotion-laden action before we’ve met the characters can be disorienting, kind of like flipping through channels and catching an action movie 3/4 of the way through. There’s no emotional investment to show us why we should care. I’m not saying that action-focused prologues and early chapters don’t evoke empathy, but I feel like they hit so much harder after the characters turn into people we know and sympathize with.

This was probably my biggest frustration with Madness. There are some really nice character moments sprinkled throughout, especially in the latter half of the book. But I feel like we needed more of them a lot earlier. (My favorite was the scene where the young vampire Val tries to explain American health care privacy laws to 600 year old Garrick.) But every time I got settled into the story with the characters, a new fight broke out, or somebody did something awful, and I was pulled out of the narrative again.

The focus on action also inadvertently made the vampires sometimes feel like a college frat; the fighting, jockeying for position and gatekeeping at times made it feel like Adrian and Val were being hazed. This was very much in contrast to the depth of the scenes where Adrian reflects on his past as a homeless pool shark vs his current reality as an immensely powerful being still somehow totally dependent on an older benefactor, or Val’s POV scenes with Garrick, which peeled away character layers as they played on a dangerous tension.

Related to the emphasis on action scenes, there also seemed to be a push-pull against vampire tropes that wasn’t quite realized, so the rules of the world remained a little unclear to me. For immortal beings, the vampires were awfully afraid of dying. While this might have been an interesting angle to explore (maybe the kind of people who become vampires would be more obsessed with their own deaths), mostly it was confusing, as the characters healed rapidly from some situations but were afraid of being killed in most others. I was also happy when the story touched on the way vampires would have to cope with outgrowing their own human history (see Garrick’s experience with the HIPAA laws), but I don’t feel like this theme was ever allowed to mature.

In the interest of full transparency, I did request another set of eyes on this one, because I tend not to be able to fully turn off my writer brain and I wasn’t sure if the things that frustrated me would bother another reader. So while I did have some problems, overall, I thought Madness showed a lot of promise, and I hope the author keeps developing this series!