Review: Red Grow the Roses by Janine Ashbless

Vampires. Everyone knows the rules. We all own at least one Buffy box set. (No? Just me then. And it’s four actually.) The coffins, pointy teeth, superhuman speed and strength, vulnerability to garlic, crosses, holy water. That whole ‘inviting them in’ thing. We know it all until some new author comes along and chucks half the rules away, picking and choosing what suits their vamp world. I hated the invulnerability of the undead in the Twilight series. I can’t have been the only one homing in on the moment Jane of the Volturi makes Edward suffer, the one and only time he appears to be less than smugly invincible. (What, that was just me being sadistic then?)

Janine Ashbless has taken the vampire myth and made it her own. Yes, they sleep in coffins. Sometimes. But she really gets you to smell the freshly dug earth, hear the worms burrowing beneath you. No, they don’t show up in mirrors. Except when they do. But Ashbless portrays one that inhabits mirrors, and other reflective surfaces, a being so old she is ephemeral and barely exists in the material world any more. Yes, sunlight kills them. Unless they’re young in vampire terms. They have an insatiable blood lust. The blood we all know about, the lust less so even if it’s there in thinly veiled manifestation in every portrayal of punctured flesh.

Well, for these vamps, the lust is as unquenchable as the thirst for blood. And for their lucky human blood donors, their bites engender similar feelings of uber horniness. Don’t act surprised – you read my review of Ashbless’s Named and Shamed didn’t you? You knew there’d be sex. Lots of sex. All kinds of sex. Not to mention violence, particularly in the kinky cage fighting scene. I’d recently re-watched Fight Club when I read Red Grow the Roses and it all chimed quite nicely in my psyche’s own personal erotic thriller. (Repeat after me, the first rule of Fight Club...)

I love the way Ashbless chucks in obscure bits of folklore and mythology; things you think you knew somewhere at the back of your mind in a Jungian collective unconscious kind of way but could never have put into words. Ashbless puts those things into words, beautifully shaped words that are delightfully evocative. But what I’d really like to know is how on earth she knows about the giant pike I used to be scared of when kayaking as a teenager?

She’s a damn fine writer with the sort of style that flows along easily, making you perhaps forget how much skill it takes to produce. Red Grow the Roses is often discomfiting. The vamps treat humans as playthings to be used and discarded. They bicker amongst themselves and the book culminates in all-out nastiness between London’s six undead. But it’s also a book that draws you in and consumes you with the need to keep reading. You’ve been warned.

I bought Red Grow the Roses at Amazon.co.uk, where, at the time of posting this, it was still at the ridiculous price of 20p. Yes, 20p.